Tuesday, May 24, 2011

"Why all the revamps?"

It's official: every main tale (except for 6), has been coded and then revamped in some major way. In the next release, Tale 4 becomes an arrive mission. Tale 3 has seen extensive rewrites for Prasad's character, and Tale 2 has seen some revamps in difficulty and enemies. And those are just the small changes.

Tale 5 had some incredibly major changes done when the chapter had hit about 90% completion. The starting positions of Hector and Dawson were basically switched, and Hector, instead of storming onto the battlefield hastily, had stormed out of Ostia just as Dawson was about to launch his sneak attack to take Ostia. The starting party was even switched from Hector, Orun, and Matthew, to Hector, Oswin, and Serra. However, some ideas for improvement came a bit too late (literally when the chapter had completed). It required major event changes, and an essentially new script. So why go ahead with these changes?

With Tale 5, it was a question of this: do I put out a sub-par, uninspired Tale? Or do I take the extra three hours or so, and make a product I can be semi-proud of? For me, the answer was clear. The time revamping a tale is a small price compared to the pains of releasing a bad product.

Tale 1, along with Tale 5, saw the most extensive revamps, an entire change in the tenor of the plot. In the original release of Elibian Nights, Eleanora was still in the process of dying. This tale was similar to Tale 5, it was uninspired. The original Tales for Eliwood and Hector were forced; they were the main characters of FE7, I couldn't just not do a Tale for them. I don't have a particular fondness for the characters either, that certainly didn't help. It finally hit me that Tale 1 was truly lacking when Markyjoe, a hacking critic, had devoted time to pointing out the flaws of Tale 1.

It was then that I decided: I'm not going to just put out some work for a character because I have to, whatever I release will have to meet my standards of quality.  So, "why all the revamps?" Whatever I put out will be the best I can create, and I accept nothing less when it comes to quality.

1 comment:

  1. oh yeah. I've got a question: why Matthew as a Rogue, though? I've always preferred him as an assassin D: that was kind of disappointing.

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