Artix

I suppose this means it's time for our closing remark as well. For starters, I want to emphasize just how angry you people made us with breaking Jack's event. By the time we decided to just scrap the whole thing, people were still making it work via a stupid chain of events that goes something like: - Have Nick start as far right as possible, use Rescue staff to grab Kate - Have Kate unlock the door - Have Paula run over and trade for the Rescue staff, rescue Judith (who has a chest key) - Judith should be just close enough that she can reach the chest before Jack spawns And rather than see all that and say "Hmm, maybe I'm not intended to get this chest/meet up with Jack this chapter?", people kept pushing it further and further until we finally took our ball and went home. Anyway, first and foremost I do want to thank you for doing this LP because this is the first time anyone has actually had substantial feedback about the plot. You've brought up a bunch of stuff that showed us just how much we either didn't mention at all, or mentioned far too late for when it would be relevant and a lot of that feedback is going into our "list of shit we really need to fix for the Act 1 rewrite." At some point when we get off our asses and finish writing Act 2, that's the first thing on the agenda after that. Let's see, aside from that I want to briefly explain what exactly we were going for with the plot. Ignoring the mess that it ended up being for bureaucratic reasons, one of the things we tried to do was make Cassandra not...evil, I guess? Paranoid and unlikable, sure, but she's not actively a villain. She had no idea what Cedric was doing behind her back, and as far as she knew, it basically went "Emperor poisoned, Richter leaves; Funeral happens, Richter is conveniently not there; Richter marches on Cedric's estate; Cedric dies by Richter's hands." Unless they were really close (and they weren't, which is another thing we might have failed to get across), it would take a lot of smooth talk for Richter to get out of that, especially when his defense is "no seriously Cedric killed himself with the same poison that Theodor was killed with." I don't want to bog this down with a bunch of "no seriously here's all the plot that only exists in the documents that only we know about," but I'll leave it by saying there are some things which are kinda look like plot holes, but I promise we explain them later on. Or maybe we won't! God knows that these projects are a mess at the best of times. So yeah! Thanks again, and I hope everyone enjoyed it. We were going to shoot for a new demo at FEE3 but I think the window where that's feasible has long since passed.

So Chapter 7 is an odd one because this is the point where we took over writing full-time, but still had some bits and pieces to work around. The Judith line about killing Cassandra was actually ours, we were trying to inject a little humor into the situation. Sort of like "Well fuck, now what?" "Well we could just kill her and make all our problems go away? :v " Everything you see from here on out is our handiwork, for better or worse. Anyway! - Vera is intended to be invincible just in case Malorie somehow makes her way over there. She is not recruitable, and there was a conversation planned but we never wrote it? I dunno, it's in the events but commented out. - And speaking of Malorie, the Zephyr Lance was originally a Killer one. Also she had two more speed, but we dropped it because she was too dangerous with both, and then we ended up taking away both. If you're feeling particularly bold and fed Kate a few levels, it's quite possible to steal her Delphi Shield too. - So Fia causes some problems because she's your only mage and you have to recruit her with Rose. Fortunately, we're not mean and we did actually did put in an event after the chapter ends that automatically recruits her! ...If she's already an ally? Who the hell coded this up? *facepalm*

So, not to be that guy but you were worried about the Elixir and you had Kate...attack him? Dude only has 9 speed, we figured that was a giant neon "STEAL ME" sign. Anyway, so yeah, the plot. You might have noticed a few things are kinda...off. Like Judith swearing and stuff like that. The reason is that basically everything you've seen up until now (and I think parts of Chapter 7) has been a salvage project. To make a long story short, we had a lot of plot issues very early on where we weren't really sure what we wanted to do with the story. We had, at one point, two entirely different outlines, a pair of writers that were working completely separate from the rest of us, we were constantly missing writing deadlines, and when we did get chapters done, it was really obvious that neither party was going to be happy with it. It didn't help that the stuff that they wrote was way more Game of Thrones-y than our stuff and they refused to do any editing until they finished all of Act 1 (which at the rate they were going, was going to be months out) and that...well, suffice to say it didn't exactly help their case. Anyway, tension had been building for a while and when the Chapter 7 script came in, that was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back and we ultimately parted ways with them. Of course, that still left us with ~6 chapters of script that needed to be...not outright "scrubbed", but we had to do a lot of rewriting to make things fit the mood we were going for. Parts of the script had to be totally thrown out, and the stuff we did keep got a lot of trimming and rewrites. Unfortunately, there was only so much that can be done without going full nuclear so a lot of residual stuff slipped through the cracks. Believe me, you don't want to know what it was like before we redid it. We had shit like Judith kicking Cedric's corpse and Vera motherfucking Smuggington.

On top of what Novel has already said, you chose the one chapter where things start picking up and putting things in motion for the end of the act. :v I'm not saying it will impress, but if it's going to, it will start here. Once Moniker finishes Chapter 9 there's a lot I'd like to say about why we wrote some things the way we did and what we were going for, but I can at least explain a bit about what happened with the original script after 6.

Easy there killer, nobody said you were sexist. All I said that was that it always seems strange to me that the immediate reaction to a female unit having the male aid formula is "They're actually male/were initially male" instead of "The female aid formula is dumb and arbitrary anyway." And you'll have to forgive me for taking you seriously because I have seen that argument in an unironic form more than a few times.

More or less. It's basically a build that you (the player) are never supposed to see. It might be because we haven't fully implemented something, or we might have done something that caused something else to break and we haven't fixed it yet. In this case, one of the things that it does is switch Martin and June, so right now Martin joins totally fine on Chapter 2 but then June's portrait pops up and still says her lines. It's just a bunch of stuff like that.

Chapter 3 - So this chapter is a mess. To this day, we have conversations about "Is Chapter 3 still too hard?" which is usually met with "This is the fourth time you've asked that and we've toned it down every time, IT'S FINE NOW." In all honesty though, with a tweak that's in the current dev build (switching when June and Martin join) I think we finally got the balance right. And while I doubt you'll ever play this on hard mode, I have actually made changes, and this is the one chapter I'm actually super proud of even if it's not THAT much harder. - ...well shit, you're not supposed to know these guys are under Cedric's command yet. We'll have to fix that. - Stupid dev jokes: the knight that takes Jack away has a Rex Hasta. You'll never see him and he'll never fight with it, but he totally has it. - Rescue going to down to D is something was inspire in part by Awakening. Even before we classed him up to bishop, we gave you Nick as a high-level staff user. What's the point in that if we don't give you a couple cool toys to play around with? - Nothing happens if you leave Tristan alive, he just runs off when Richter arrives with reinforcements. Chapter 4 - The Flight Lance is one of the new items, and you're not wrong; it is almost literally an Iron Lance but it doesn't weigh pegs down. And...that's entirely the point, really. There's a whole line of Flight Lances, and their purpose is to make Pegs be able to pack somewhat of a punch without also running around with literally 0 AS. Consider the pegs in FE7 that use Steel Lances and basically serve no purpose other than to hit you once, die, and let another one come in because a Steel Lance has fucking 13 Wt for a 4-5 Con peg. - Okay, the male aid formula. I don't know why this throws off so many people because a lot of people see it and seem to think "Okay, they must have originally been male characters or something." When in reality, it's just...no, the female aid formula is really fucking dumb. They have 5 less Aid than an equivalent male unit because...? Seriously, can ANYONE fill in that blank without "because IntSys said so and we're sticking with it"? Like, you can check this for yourself. Go into Nightmare, and one of the character flags you can give someone is "female". Do you know what it changes? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, except knocking five off of their aid score if they're mounted. - Frank can also be recruited with Ferris, and I'm pretty sure Angus has a unique recruitment with Frank. Don't quote me on the latter. - I don't even know why we made Vera a general anymore. She's actually an assassin, we drew up a new sprite and everything for her last night. - Something that I don't know if we ever really made clear is that Richter is actually a bastard child, which is why he isn't really the prince. Cassandra (the pink haired lady) is the emperor's niece, so she was the next legitimate heir for the throne. Chapter 5 - OH BOY more politics that we evidently didn't fully explain. So as Judith mentions, Cedric originally ruled the lands that included her village but he was kind of a corrupt asshole about things. Eventually things got bad enough that the emperor had to step in, so he was stripped of his titles and basically shipped off to a small, ugly part of the empire that no one really likes. Sort of the equivalent of "well we can't fire you, but we can change your office and your job responsibilities until you decide you've had enough and you quit on your own." Also if you want to get larger screenshots, you can use a program called Irfanview to upsize them, it's super easy to use. PM if you have any questions about it.

So despite our best efforts, this hack is not dead. I know, I know, hard to believe. Anyway, this is a general announcement that we are still working on things (I listed out our progress here a few weeks ago) and we are planning to be at FEE3 with a demo covering Chapters 10-15x. E: Also we have an internal dev build that may or may not get released soon, I'm not gonna make any promises.

It's not something I like to scream from the rooftops or anything, but yes. Appreciate the compliment. Anyway, I guess starting from the top: Prologue - I really like that you found our R-text, we tried to give everyone their own little flavor. Only so much you can do with a generic bandit boss so why not spice it up and say he just wanted a turtleneck? - Nick was originally a L15 priest instead of a bishop, but Chapter 3 was enough of a difficulty spike that we had to class him up. The original plan was to toss out a Guiding Ring in like, Chapter 6 and you could make the call on whether you wanted to promote him yourself. Chapter 1 - Rain was changed to be cosmetic so that we could use it for atmospheric purposes. Snow does still slow you down, but we don't have any of that until Act 2. - Bandit University is one of our awful in-jokes. At some point you were going to go there during a gaiden chapter but it got cut. - Willow. Where do I even start with Willow? So, before we even started work on the hack proper, we put together a proof of concept map. Had a bunch of different terrain, doors, chests, reinforcements; basically a bunch of shit to prove we could make something from scratch and not have it horribly crash the game. Anyway, we gave you a few units and one of them was Wil. I don't know how or why we managed this, but we somehow made Wil spawn as a female archer, which ultimately stuck when we couldn't come up with anything better for an archer after thinking about it for ~30 seconds. - And speaking of archers, we didn't give any explicit buffs to archers because it kinda felt forced. I mean, why should archers be the only class to have ridiculous bases and growths? Instead we tried to make their specialized use easier to do. So she starts with a Longbow and we cut its weight so that it doesn't horribly weigh her down, and we also made them more accessible throughout the game. - Paula is a wonderful character that we have way too much fun writing. Of course I say that, but I like most of our characters. Willow, somewhat ironically, is one of the few that are actually really difficult to write for because we just don't have a good voice for her. (incidentally, you can also have Nick go to the village and talk to Paula for a unique conversation) Chapter 2 - Not a whole lot to say here, I guess. Rose used to be hilariously overpowered, but we nerfed her speed. You can still see it if she procs her speed growth once or twice early, she pretty much becomes unstoppable because of the low res on enemies. I'll get the rest of it later/tomorrow. E: Also you should really update to the newest patch if you haven't, I know 1.1 was posted in the thread.

Wait...shit, hang on...gotta blow the dust off... Okay, is this my password? No, but I can reset it and... Okay, so hi! Someone pointed out the LP to us and while I have to strain my old eyes with these tiny screenshots, you're doing an okay job! There's a bunch of stuff we wanted to comment on but there's like three pages of quotes that I have to pull from to get it all together so watch this space. I promise I'll have some dev commentary at some point today.

I would agree if Thracia was primarily one-off stuff. Like, the hostile green units are fucking hilarious once you get over the shock of it, but that's something you can see once, go "Okay, that was funny", then complete the map on your second try. Compare that to...say, 24x. Fog of War? Check. All kinds of status staves being thrown around? Check. Unmarked teleport tiles that requires you to burn a Rescue staff? Check and check. Oh, and don't hit too many of the invisible tiles, because you can have at most 9 Rescue charges. And don't forget that because of the way escape maps work, anyone that you don't rescue is dead. 100% gone forever, with all of their equipment. You could argue that it's "fair" in as much as Thracia is ever "fair", doubly so since it is the penultimate chapter of the game. But that's the exact kind of stuff that could (and should!) be smoothed over. You don't need to gut Thracia's difficulty to make it more accessible, you just need to gut it's bullshit.

Version 1.10 is released here! Most of the changes are listed in the readme but here's a basic rundown of what's different. -We rebalanced Prologue - Chapter 9 to level players slightly slower, so they don't go into Chapters 10 and onwards too powerful. -Chapters 10 and 11 are playable, but don't have any opening events, ending events or text. They are just gameplay previews. You'll loop back to Chapter 10 after finishing 11. They might feel too easy coming in with characters from Act 1 but that's because they've been balanced around starting a new game directly from Act 2. -If you use a full save to play Hard Mode I think Artix has made up to Chapter 3 or 4. I haven't tried it yet but from what I keep hearing it'll be interesting, to say the least.

Frankly, even if he did have 20 chapters of scripts, conversations, and supports written I still wouldn't want to touch it. Just speaking from personal experience, we've totally rewritten the first and second Act of AE's plot, structure, and pacing twice now, because after coding it all up and seeing how it looked, we didn't like how it flowed. Or because the writers had a great idea but it's not actually possible to pull it off in the game itself. Or just in general wanted to tweak a few things here and there. How much of those 20+ chapters would have to be totally rewritten if I didn't like the way you handled Plot Twist X? Or I like the overall story, but the tone is too heavy or light-hearted? What if I don't like one of your characters? What if (god forbid) it's the main character or the main villain? A totally finished script is great until you realize that it only takes one minor change or complaint to bring the entire thing crashing down, and if I'm rewriting extensive amounts of your script, is it really even your script anymore? Hell, that's not even getting into that your plot should (at least in some small way) exist symbiotically with the gameplay. Even if I love every word of your plot, what happens if the gameplay that would be called for to achieve that flow and feel isn't actually fun? If there's an arc where you're constantly on the run and being hounded by a stronger enemy, how do you pull that off without going full Thracia? If the plot says that you should be part of a group that is broken and beaten, how do you achieve that in a gameplay structure that more or less requires that you constantly fight and keep winning? And this is all totally ignoring that this is literally I'm what you call an Ideas Guy™.txt

In my defense, that wasn't dropped frames or anything on the stream. That was legitimately VBA freaking the fuck out and I have no idea why. *shrug*

Writing is fun.