I'd appreciate it if you could channel some of the energy you've yoinked into posts in this thread that could go on the front page, X. Just about every post of yours in here could be its own article
I definitely intend on doing it. I always like to start out sort of binge-info-dumping my brain onto the forums first to channel a ton of focus to sorting through the raw data in my head, and just slowly compiling and picking over it, because that alone takes ages. Then with responses and whatnot, it helps sort out which points are the most solid, which need help, and which are just extraneous or gratuitous detail. From there, I've been sorting out how exactly I'd want to approach speaking about something like that in a more formal presentation.
At this point, I'm still not sure the best angle to take when talking about the development of the game, but I do really want to write up an article on it first. I think that there's a lot of value in cracking open a look at what development is like, and helping people understand and be more forgiving about things, especially when they're a work in progress. It's really tough to walk the fine line of,
"They told you that they're selling you the version of the game that they wanted to make, but it's still definitely not the version of the game that they wanted to make" while also being clear that no one is getting ripped off here, and it's just the way the world works, and doing that is its own task, but that doesn't mean it's that way forever.
There're plenty of people who just complained about the XV DLC expansions with the,
"Well then why didn't they just finish the game, instead of giving us an unfinished product" which is the sort of thing where I know I need to get into making that clear with context, but it's hard to know how much to lean in on the various important points to cover, and how many of them need to be presented as a group because of how they feed into each other. At the moment, they're loosely broken down in my head into:
- "Why this happened"
- "Why not to be mad"
- "How I can tell"
- "What they were going for"
- "What they managed to deliver"
- "What to expect in the future"
Especially as someone who works doing QA, I want to find a way to touch on the topic that's got enough background around the time, effort, and polish that the game has where it's clearly been completed, and talk about the regions where they haven't been and show why I think they're still going to be and what they're likely to become. It's tough to know how much to touch on the PS5 optimizations, and complexities around the release window compression, or the difficulty of Red XIII as a non-human playable character, or the party customization and friendship options, or the details around boss progression gameplay workflow designs for the bosses where the issues exist, or where to place those things so that they make sense, and so that none of them takes up too much of the content.
As an article/articles, I don't want it to be TOO tl;dr where things get lost in the weeds, but also not too much of an overview that it all feels like just projecting because I didn't enjoy something to the average reader. That's also why I've been wrestling with what sort of things I could start reviving the "The Potential Of" series with, since I do want to revisit a lot of those topics and talk about what we got as a way to go into the fun detail, and start more speculation, and if it would make sense to make a sort of introductory article about the topic as a whole, and split it into a few different follow-ups, or maybe a different article series of some kind.
If you or anybody else has thoughts on that front, I'd be very up for hearing opinions.
X
