I've seen a few comments recently mentioning the corruption path, or lack thereof. And I'd actually been thinking on that a bit recently on my own too: why the dark/corruption options don't really go anywhere at least as of yet. While I certainly can't deduce the factual reasons, I think my past experiences writing my own works may help put into perspective why these things fizzle out or are left in limbo for extreme periods of time.
The first factor seems to be the mission statement that the champion is never going to be evil aside from possibly epilogue text depending on your actions leading to it. The design document states this outright, and you can see it reflected in the content put out thus far. Your character never really goes all in on the dark side. Now this is not criticism of any kind, merely an observation. That alone seems a heavily limiting factor on what can or can't be done with the aftermath of what should be major corruption choices.
For the second factor, and this is where my writing experience comes into play, it can be very difficult to write long-form, darker things consistently. Even more so when you factor in how this dark stuff might impact the not-dark stuff that surrounds it or even comes later on. To put things into perspective a bit, I'll unfold a hypothetical scenario here...
Say kicking Azy and Liaden into the honey leads to absolute corruption of the hive--the state of the hive changes in such a way that the champion becomes, like...king of it, or whatever, to further the player's corruption power fantasy in a meaningful way. In a bubble, especially early on in development, that's fantastic!
But now you've gone further into the game, bested the winter city, and inherited the wayfort, something which was not possible when the hornet nest was originally corruptible. You get your maid quest and, well...the hornets can be maids, right? So you bring your hornets into the mix, only now they're corrupt, and they spread that corruption. Suddenly your wayfort changes into a den of corruption and lust. Again, sounds awesome on paper, right? But in practice, it suffers myriad issues I'll try to diagnose right now.
Firstly it creates an insane amount of work! For each corrupt character, potentially multiple scenes must be written to accomodate for variation. If Daliza becomes corrupted, how vastly does that alter her scenes? Considering how her repression plays into her scenes, it would probably matter a lot. And what of our dragon girlfriend? Would she even stop in at the wayfort if it were corrupt, or remain there if it were corrupted after she started staying in the tower? And what of the corruption of the forest itself, for that matter? Would it require a total overhaul to account for the full corruption of the hornets? Just that one choice and consequence would be astronomical due to it not being a choice inside a bubble anymore.
And that last bit is perhaps the most significant part that may be limiting the implementation of corruption paths at this juncture. If you don't have every single detail penned from the beginning, nor every single area, side quest, or interactable individual along the way, it's far more difficult to gauge how these potentially massive corruption choices may play out when entering future content, to say nothing of how much more work each newly introduced piece of content would need to accommodate the potentially enormous variance of previous choices. Let's say each update has the same amount of work put into still: that would mean each update would be 50% pure, 50% corruption from then on, even in an ideal situation. In effect, this would make people who commit to one path over the other have to wait twice as long to get the minor advancements each individual update brings currently. The neutral/hero path that seems to be the default direction is also far and away easier to handle in that respect because it doesn't bring potentially massive infamy with it, and it doesn't have such a huge impact on the world in terms of reshaping it. Many instances of the heroic acts your character accomplishes only return the world to the state it was in before Kas mucked it up, rather than altering it even further for your own amusement.
Now onto my official second point, and once again referring to my experiences writing in the past--it can be hard as hell to maintain a darker tone for an extended period of time, such as the years it would have to be maintained on this project. Not all writers suffer the same issues, of course, but from my own experience, what I write and how I write it largely depends on my inspiration in the moment as well as my mood over an extended period of time. If I'm not in the mood to write happy things, then forcing myself to do it greatly hampers the quality of the result. In my experience, it takes a very specific kind of person to write edgy or dark things 24-7 just in regards to normal writing. To write dark and brooding sexual content focused on the themes related to corruption in this game on loop for years at a time--I can't even imagine how daunting that would be, or what kind of eccentric person would be able to do it.
And also, you have to factor in the strengths and weaknesses of the writer themselves. For example, I'm quite strong when it comes to writing energetic, fun-loving characters (I'd be great at writing bimbos!) and the hard-assed ones, too. But I definitely know that darker, demanding sex would be well outside my wheelhouse. It might be that it's outside of the current writing staffs' wheelhouses too, or at least close enough to the outside that they're just not focused on it.
Now let me wrap up with one final bit really bringing my long rambling post together in a much shorter, edible form...
We may not currently have a worthwhile corruption path, but it seems to be--due to the nature of how corruption will work--something that will be easier to implement at the late stages of development when you have an end result to work backwards from. As this game seems to want to avoid having scenarios entirely in bubbles, it makes even more sense to do it that way. Say the end result requires the player to bring an army to battle, and the hero path unites the elves, cats, dogs, and orcs to be that army. Now that you know an army is required, you can create a corruption path that makes your army corrupt hornets, plants, centaurs, etc. instead of the aforementioned ones. Not only that, but the writing of it may prove very daunting on an emotional level if the writers aren't more attuned to that type of thing naturally.
Ultimately, if their vision remains even remotely the same as it was originally, I'd say the corruption will come eventually. But as in the very definition of the word, something must first exist uncorrupted before it can then be...corrupted.
To anyone who read this, thanks! It's basically pointless ramblings from a nobody, but I appreciate it anyway! lol
The first factor seems to be the mission statement that the champion is never going to be evil aside from possibly epilogue text depending on your actions leading to it. The design document states this outright, and you can see it reflected in the content put out thus far. Your character never really goes all in on the dark side. Now this is not criticism of any kind, merely an observation. That alone seems a heavily limiting factor on what can or can't be done with the aftermath of what should be major corruption choices.
For the second factor, and this is where my writing experience comes into play, it can be very difficult to write long-form, darker things consistently. Even more so when you factor in how this dark stuff might impact the not-dark stuff that surrounds it or even comes later on. To put things into perspective a bit, I'll unfold a hypothetical scenario here...
Say kicking Azy and Liaden into the honey leads to absolute corruption of the hive--the state of the hive changes in such a way that the champion becomes, like...king of it, or whatever, to further the player's corruption power fantasy in a meaningful way. In a bubble, especially early on in development, that's fantastic!
But now you've gone further into the game, bested the winter city, and inherited the wayfort, something which was not possible when the hornet nest was originally corruptible. You get your maid quest and, well...the hornets can be maids, right? So you bring your hornets into the mix, only now they're corrupt, and they spread that corruption. Suddenly your wayfort changes into a den of corruption and lust. Again, sounds awesome on paper, right? But in practice, it suffers myriad issues I'll try to diagnose right now.
Firstly it creates an insane amount of work! For each corrupt character, potentially multiple scenes must be written to accomodate for variation. If Daliza becomes corrupted, how vastly does that alter her scenes? Considering how her repression plays into her scenes, it would probably matter a lot. And what of our dragon girlfriend? Would she even stop in at the wayfort if it were corrupt, or remain there if it were corrupted after she started staying in the tower? And what of the corruption of the forest itself, for that matter? Would it require a total overhaul to account for the full corruption of the hornets? Just that one choice and consequence would be astronomical due to it not being a choice inside a bubble anymore.
And that last bit is perhaps the most significant part that may be limiting the implementation of corruption paths at this juncture. If you don't have every single detail penned from the beginning, nor every single area, side quest, or interactable individual along the way, it's far more difficult to gauge how these potentially massive corruption choices may play out when entering future content, to say nothing of how much more work each newly introduced piece of content would need to accommodate the potentially enormous variance of previous choices. Let's say each update has the same amount of work put into still: that would mean each update would be 50% pure, 50% corruption from then on, even in an ideal situation. In effect, this would make people who commit to one path over the other have to wait twice as long to get the minor advancements each individual update brings currently. The neutral/hero path that seems to be the default direction is also far and away easier to handle in that respect because it doesn't bring potentially massive infamy with it, and it doesn't have such a huge impact on the world in terms of reshaping it. Many instances of the heroic acts your character accomplishes only return the world to the state it was in before Kas mucked it up, rather than altering it even further for your own amusement.
Now onto my official second point, and once again referring to my experiences writing in the past--it can be hard as hell to maintain a darker tone for an extended period of time, such as the years it would have to be maintained on this project. Not all writers suffer the same issues, of course, but from my own experience, what I write and how I write it largely depends on my inspiration in the moment as well as my mood over an extended period of time. If I'm not in the mood to write happy things, then forcing myself to do it greatly hampers the quality of the result. In my experience, it takes a very specific kind of person to write edgy or dark things 24-7 just in regards to normal writing. To write dark and brooding sexual content focused on the themes related to corruption in this game on loop for years at a time--I can't even imagine how daunting that would be, or what kind of eccentric person would be able to do it.
And also, you have to factor in the strengths and weaknesses of the writer themselves. For example, I'm quite strong when it comes to writing energetic, fun-loving characters (I'd be great at writing bimbos!) and the hard-assed ones, too. But I definitely know that darker, demanding sex would be well outside my wheelhouse. It might be that it's outside of the current writing staffs' wheelhouses too, or at least close enough to the outside that they're just not focused on it.
Now let me wrap up with one final bit really bringing my long rambling post together in a much shorter, edible form...
We may not currently have a worthwhile corruption path, but it seems to be--due to the nature of how corruption will work--something that will be easier to implement at the late stages of development when you have an end result to work backwards from. As this game seems to want to avoid having scenarios entirely in bubbles, it makes even more sense to do it that way. Say the end result requires the player to bring an army to battle, and the hero path unites the elves, cats, dogs, and orcs to be that army. Now that you know an army is required, you can create a corruption path that makes your army corrupt hornets, plants, centaurs, etc. instead of the aforementioned ones. Not only that, but the writing of it may prove very daunting on an emotional level if the writers aren't more attuned to that type of thing naturally.
Ultimately, if their vision remains even remotely the same as it was originally, I'd say the corruption will come eventually. But as in the very definition of the word, something must first exist uncorrupted before it can then be...corrupted.
To anyone who read this, thanks! It's basically pointless ramblings from a nobody, but I appreciate it anyway! lol
