Have you played it since the May 9 update?
Yes, I did. After getting fired for no good reasons, near execution, actually bolster my enemy against my intention, my character because public enemy and unfairly dumped by my lover. I play games for entertainment, not for frustration.
To answer your question, I got three achievements
What happened, exactly?
My MC 's lover refused to help MC with their research nor find a lawyer when they were prosecuted. Then they had the nerve to accuse my MC (who did their best at their government position but nothing worked) of not using magic to do enough for the society and ceased contact with them.
Which lover was it?
The mystical philosopher
The other day, I went to the COG app and discovered that this game has the lowest ratings of any choice game. As someone who helped beta test this and was looking forward to a successful release, what happened? There’s not a lot of criticism to go off of in this thread.
As a tester for Sins of the Sires, which is only a little higher in the ratings, I feel your pain.
Do you mind if I ask what your experience as a beta tester was like? How many playthroughs did you do? Did you make any suggestions for things you thought should be improved?
I had something like 30-40 play throughs, though I didn’t give feedback for every single one. My feedback and suggestions mainly rested on fixing bugs and making the game make as much narrative sense as possible (e.g. there was one ending where the POV character ends up as an Austrian POW and then the narrative oddly switches to events in France and to their relationship with the RO).
The game felt relatively scattershot to begin with, but I felt like it had tightened up a lot during beta testing, and I thought that the end product could have been something in the same structural vein as Tally Ho: a lot of various paths that all weave together and make sense. Evidently, the people who played the game didn’t view it as such.
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It’s such a complex game under the hood that it’s not surprising some narrative errors slipped through - I had the same issue at one point, leaving the country but still getting involved in local French affairs, and you can see that’s something they worked on in the May 9 patch.
How did you feel about the romances? Which ROs were your favorites? What were your favorite scenes with them?
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I feel like the romances were definitely a weak point of the game. They were by no means the worst romances I’ve ever played, and the characters themselves were fairly interesting and romanceable, but there was a definite feeling of “there’s more important things to do right now.” Case in point, I don’t know that there’s a romance scene that immediately jumps out to me other than some of your interactions with the commanding officer RO in the military path.
It’s been addressed earlier in this thread, but making some of the ROs virtually impossible to meet and making their gender variable was not a good move.
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Did you have any favorite ROs? I assume you were a fan of the commanding officer (Dacier?), what about the others?
Dacier left the greatest impression on me by a long shot. I did like Yvon and Gaudry, though I wasn’t a fan of Thibauld or any of the political ROs (though that was more due to mechanics making it difficult to actually be romantic with them).
What were your favorite story routes?
Yeah, the main high-level overview of the feedback and criticism I’ve gotten seems to boil down to “it’s too broad and not deep enough on any given path through the story.” Especially the romances.
I am working on a big content update expansion right now to address that, focusing mainly on the romances, including the randomized genders.
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The military story route where you’re just a ranking soldier was done very well.
The trial story route is a highlight of the game.
Any route that leads to you summoning one of the big 3 demons is good; I enjoyed the challenge of trying to rope them in.
I liked being able to lead conquering armies as well, although the end felt a little abrupt.
Again, I really do like what this game shoots for overall, which is why I was actually surprised to see its ratings so low.
The first time I played it, my takeaway was that it was the skeleton of a great game, but needed a lot in the way of fleshing out.
I’ve enjoyed the military routes I’ve played, but found the trial pretty lackluster.
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One of the biggest problems is the one I was bouncing around with Chris upthread. A lot of players are going to be going the politics route, because this is a game about the French Revolution. They’re going to be scheming bastards like myself because that’s what you do in a politics game. And the politics section - especially the constitution - is absolute corner case chaos. It’s amazing what Chris has done, but it’s still buggier than an anthill if you try to do something creative with it.
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I’m looking forward to that promised update - I believe with some tightening and fleshing out in the right places, there’s an amazing game here.
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I’m honestly impressed you’re able to read those subroutines and assemble any kind of coherent understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing. I sometimes have to reacquaint myself with my own code, and that whole set is particularly hairy.
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