Concubine Update! Mission 1 almost finished!

Thanks for your great review, and your support of course. - Healing is super difficult to balance, I might buff it slightly over time but I do not want it to become too powerful like in many rpgs, either. - Andrade being targeted is normal (tanks characters have that trigger) --- Also, I hope I didn't get too predictable with the plot, but expect to have your wishes granted...

Logan Scodini

Thanks for the feedback, and your support. Yeah, it's not easy to balance how much is too much, and complex boss fight require, well, a lot of triggers programming. However, you can't easily make all the fights bosses, for players need to 'learn' to use their new abilities otherwise the bosses might feel unfair. --- Still, I hope that the 'skip fights' options will help you in that regard.

Logan Scodini

Tried posting some feedback earlier but I don’t think it went through. Here’s a second try: Overall, I really enjoyed the last couple of updates. The one note I have on the combat mechanics is I did feel like the healing spells were unbalanced and a little too weak. Captain Andrade got targeted the most, so he tended to lose defense/health fastest, and after a while it felt like all I was doing was blocking with and healing him. In the end it was more effective to not even try to heal and to just keep using him offensively until he was KOed. I actually enjoyed having the combat to break up the written scenes. I can see why other people might not, it’s not something you typically see in a story based game and it’s difficult to get fighting and writing to flow together seamlessly, but I didn’t mind that. I don’t know, something about having the characters fight together made their personal relationships feel more rounded to me. Plotwise, I liked how the whole ambush scene made it feel like there’s a bigger story going on in the world and it was nice to see Claudia outside of the Temple. And the last couple updates I thought really helped with the budding emotional attachment with Andrade and the main character. Personally, I felt like the captain’s confession of developing feelings and the emotional intimacy came on a bit too fast at the start. But the removal of the dampening bracelets was a nice show-don’t-tell moment when it came to growing that relationship and trust. (Granted, I’ve been playing a pretty surly character who is not down with the slave thing at all, so it actually felt more effective to me than the captain/main character sex scenes.) Anyway, I hope something I said might be helpful for you. Looking forward to seeing the Inquisition!

I think the combat's fine, but I felt there was waaay too much of it. You're bombarded with combat encounter after combat encounter, and it gets a bit repetitive. I feel like it would be better to have *less* combat encounters and to focus on a small handful of meaningful fights rather than fighting through waves of nameless bandits.

Hnnah

Thanks for the feedback. Don't worry, I already programmed a 'Skip Combat' feature, which will be available starting next patch. Also, thanks for your support!

Logan Scodini

Having played through the smaller update the other day and now this one I thought I'd give my 2 cents in relation to the combat system. First of all I'd like to stress that I thought the combat system was cleverly done. The timers for each character made an interesting change to your generic turn based combat system and I liked how you could vary each character's role in the group with their equipment. The healing effects however felt rather ineffective unless you got a critical heal and you were generally better off being offensive whenever you had special ability points, particularly as you were often outnumbered. However I also feel that the combat system doesn't really add anything in my opinion. It slows down the narrative, even on the easier fights setting and as a result it feels quite jarring and out of place compared to the rest of the game as it is almost a case of "grind through these namelss obstacles" to progress the plot. Obviously some people will like the addition of the combat system, some people will not. Personally I am on the fence but I do think it would be worth to add a "Visual Novel Mode" that I know other games have included when adding combat to what was a previously story-based game. Under this system (if you had it selected in the options) there would simply be a text option that would bypass the fight(s) or multiple text options if there is situation in which you can win or lose a fight and still continue. That way those people who came purely for the narrative/story/plot ;) can play the game how they want, and those who want the full experience can proceed as normal.

Hollea