Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's public update.

Progress in Chapter six is good, mapmaking and coding is proceeding on schedule and rendering will start soon.

Last week, I asked you to participate in the public consultation for the first round of the combat overhaul. As is traditional with these kinds of larger surveys, we'll go through it section by section. I haven't weeded out votes by people that selected "I play narrative mode" if there are any, but most of the responses are fairly unambiguous anyway, so there doesn't seem to be much to be gained there. So let's get into it.

The headline here is that nearly 3/4 of players do not play combat at all, which helps inform me on how much priority to give to this particular project. I would like to get combat working properly, creating something that simulates girly scraps and feels different to classic stand-in-a-line turn-based combat, but with so many players ignoring it altogether, it's not as high a priority as it could be. For those of you that don't play combat, I have a follow-up question for you at the end of today's piece.

On the question of RNG, the majority think I'm going in the wrong direction. Interesting, to say the least, though nearly as many believe that it's better or still not far enough the other way. This is an impossible circle to square, so I'm going to have to think about how I respond to this one.

Here, however, all respondents expressing any opinion are in complete agreement. A change intended to rebalance grapple actually made it too powerful. The sample size is small, but the unanimity of it makes me think that perhaps the grapple changes should be reversed in the next stage and something else tried instead.

On a more positive note, half of respondents did think that the changes created a greater diversity of strategies, while the other half think grapple/guard spam is still the best. It could be that those second half didn't find the same things as the first half, or it could just be a matter of opinion. It's possible for both to be right, of course, but there's still clearly work to be done.

Balance-wise, most players are agreed that combat is fine. This is the result I'd expect here, as it's likely that players who found combat boringly easy or frustratingly hard would have just turned on Narrative mode instead, so I'm not reading too much into this one.

And the same is true to a lesser extent here. I would expect players bored of slogging through overly long combats would stop playing them. So for this reason, players who have turned on Narrative mode, I have a follow-up question: Did you do that because you just don't want to play combat at all and prefer a more narrative experience, or did something about combat put you off and you'd turn it off again if that was fixed? This again is all for my own research and to help me gauge how much of my valuable development time should go into this particular area.

Thank you all for reading!

Trinian