shrike
Member
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AdventureFriends!! Yes!!! ... So that's the first thought that ran through my head when I saw this release, but I had a few more thoughts following that. I think it's really fun, but the design notes and the game itself agree that it was rushed. It feels like the devs were super passionate about making this and really excited, but they felt like they had to get it out for the weekly release and didn't have time to add everything they wanted to add. That's not to say the release was bad! But I think it suffers from time crunch, and it really cant reach its full potential of what the devs had envisioned. They could only push out Day 1 today, and this might go for 2-3 weeks total, so they don't even have the whole thing finished yet. I don't know how hard the devs are crunching this, but it's not easy to make a dating sim, and it sounds practically impossible to make even a small one in the span of just 3 weeks. I don't think the devs want to compromise on quality, and sure, I'd rather have some content than no content at all, but releasing this on time literally requires some sacrifices on quality. I think even if you loved the release, you probably agree with me when I say it's obvious the devs wanted to spend more time on dialogue and branches. It also honestly feels unfair to people who don't like AdventureFriends, which is a totally fine stance to have. There's no battles or conventional DragonFable style gameplay, so this entire month is basically just going to be an inn battle and a dating sim that you might not like. Normally, DF has 4 completely different releases that have a lot of variety, so even if you skip 1 release, there's 3 other weeks that might appeal to you. If you're not an endgame player, imagine this: the developers spend 3 weeks of a month designing an inn challenge. For people who love it, they're talking about how complex and well developed and unique it is, but if you just don't like the inn? That's a month you have to skip on releases, when usually DF serves up all different kinds of options. So yeah, even though I personally had fun, I can definitely sympathize with people who aren't interested in a dating sim, and it honestly feels unfair to shove that all aside for a minor holiday. I think in an ideal world, AdventureFriends would be a full spinoff, where the devs could make it on their own time and be able to add everything they wanted to instead of just developing it in week-long chunks. I can feel for the devs wanting to make this as a passion project, but I think it's fair to say that the release hasn't reached its full potential and it sucks for people who don't like the genre to miss a month of releases.
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