It is not meant to become as tedious as real life is, of course. What I am trying to do is to get to the heart of "ROLE playing".
While I know that RPG generally means "developing your character with stats in interfaces", I think that completely bypasses the true power of an RPG.
What I would hope for is that players can step into another world and play the life of a person who never existed.
But that can never truly work when the world doesn't seem real or at least believable in the first place.
That being said, I know fully well that there are many different ways of playing a game and I'm not trying to exclude one in favour of the other.
This is the reason why I AM fully willing to add an "Arcade" option for this.
If only I knew HOW to make that Arcade option in such a way that it serves the purpose for the players who want it.
Normally I work on features that I would like*. Because I can think of how I'd like them, so while working on them, I know what end result I am after.
And if I can, I try to think of how other people would like them too and, if necessary, tweak things to accommodate as many wishes as possible.
Ideally without toggles, because I don't believe in those. If a way of playing the game can be made to work through ingame choices, that would be my preferred option.
That is hard, doesn't always work and sometimes I have to eat my wishes and add toggles/extra choices anyway.
But in this case, what I already did so far IS what I like. Not as advanced as it ideally should be, but for me a steady base to work from at some point in the future.
I personally wouldn't ever want to play a more simplified mode and am having a hard time imagining what such a "simplified mode" should be like to be enjoyed by those who do want it.
So that is why I need you guys to tell me. Ideally as clearly as possible.
* = That is not technically true. Easily more than 75% of my modding efforts end up being spent on troubleshooting, fixing problems and finishing other people's work.
With 10% spent on combining the work from other modders and making the installers. That leaves at best 15% (probably much, much less) on actual stuff of my own.
Indeed in their current state, they don't break the game. So NOT adding them would not actually do any harm.I would dispute that these are "noticably missing" - in that they do not cause the game to play badly or be unplayable. Therefore I do not think they need to be messed around with in Beta 5.
In fact, adding them obviously will require some sort of "evolutionary process" in that the first attempt will not be good enough.
Any development always goes through several iterations before it is good enough.
So I agree they don't need to be done. But I want them done anyway! And I am willing to do the majority of the work myself.
I have by now quite a good idea for myself on how to handle them; it is just a matter of actually doing what I've got in mind.
They should be not too huge projects, but COULD have a worthwhile impact on the game and I am very curious to find out!
There is functionality already in the game that basically suggests to me that these features should really also exist.
But they don't. Not yet. Which makes them in my book a missed opportunity that I would want to rectify.
You and me both! For all intents and purposes, I almost had Beta 3.5 ready to go around the Autumn holidays.But if their implementation causes anything like the problems encountered with Beta 3.5/Beta 4 I am going to be very depressed- because the situation could heave been so easily avoided.
It wasn't as advanced as what we have now, but it was one helluva lot better than Beta 3.4 was!
But that is when major issues with brand new complicated features started dragging out the development pretty much until now.
If you think that was annoying for you and the other players, I can absolutely guarantee you that it was easily just as annoying (and probably more-so!) for myself.
I have been wanting to actually PLAY the game for YEARS now. But I can't when the game isn't quite playable enough.
I feel like I've been fixing and finishing other people's work for 10 years straight.
And now that I have a different job, I do exactly that both during my paid working hours AND during my spare time.
Which is rather a bit much.
Not only has this delay prevented me from playing the game for another 5 months,
I cannot in good conscience start work on these new features I actually WANT to do until the game actually IS in a proper steady state again.
Which means that I have been deliberately holding off on doing what I want to and instead have been continuing with the old "fixing and finishing" routine.
This is demoralizing in the extreme, I can assure you. Especially when mostly all I hear on the forums are comments on what isn't right yet.
And sometimes amazingly complex ideas on how to make things better. But while they're good ideas for sure, all I read between the lines is "Great, yet more work for me!"
I do believe that my efforts are making the game better and that they're mostly appreciated.
But it can get quite tough when all I actually see are comments along the lines of "this is not good enough".
So there you have it. Once Beta 4 is finally at long last bloody released, it will be a huge relief for me.
Because it means I WON'T have the responsibility to get the game in a functioning state again for a while.
And I AM going to be doing some stuff I actually want to do then. Because I can't keep doing "have to" jobs until every bug is fixed.
This is meant to be fun, after all.
