So, I've noticed that whenever I decide "I'm gonna try a corrupt run this time" and get researching, I'm always met with "corrupt path is not there yet" on the Wiki, and this doesn't seem to change much over time. I always thought "well, makes sense that they're gonna take care of the pure path first" but I've been following this game for a long time and it seems like proper corrupt paths are never actually developed beyond their basic implementation. Now, I'm not complaining about this, but I wonder how much of that "not there yet" is actually real and how much of it should read "never gonna happen", since I know that, for example, the Corrupt Hive is not really a path, just a weird choice you can do to cut a piece of your game away for no reward, due to the writer's choice to not support that path despite, somewhat confusingly, providing the choice in the first place.
So, why is that "choice" there at all? What is the purpose of it, design wise and how does it fit into the overarching narrative of the game?
No shade on the writer who clearly has every right to not want to support a whole new alternate location with unwholesome developments they might not be comfortable with, but I do find it weird how that choice is still presented to you. I wasn't expecting anything as involved as the corrupted farm from CoC1, but at least some sort of tempting, material reward that could make that actually a choice someone would consider, where the punishment for being evil comes not through deceptively implying alternate content but by promising some sort of quick, easy to write but alluring reward. Even just some sort of passive income generation, to throw in the simplest, lowest effort idea. Same with enslaving the centaur village, you just gained all this "power" and servants but actually what you did is "killed" a whole zone for nothing. I can't think of a single occasion where going corrupt unlocks more content than going pure, and I would love for someone to disprove this fact to me since I admit it's been some months since I played the game thoroughly and might have missed some new content.
But this is just an example I chose to illustrate my point, since the Corrupt Hive thing is probably the most apparent one and the only one I know for sure is not about dev time, but by design.
What I'm saying is that the corruption stat does way more than the corrupted choices in terms of content, to the point where I don't really see a reason to offer corrupted branching in quests at all since they don't even provide a significant amount of corruption, much less than just sucking demon dick, which comes at no cost content-wise. Right now it seems like the "evil" button is actually the "are you tired of this location and would rather remove it from your game?" button.
Is this actually going to change in the future?
I could once, perhaps naively, see in the distant future some sort of story mechanic where a corrupt player has the number of settlements corrupted count for something akin to the size of their fiefdom, in a way that contributes to some big confrontation down the line, or something of that sort. Some sort of "lightweight territorial conquest" that could serve as a backdrop to the final act and that could tie up the local narratives together, like a classic "gather your allies before the final battle" RPG trope. This of course would be valid for pure characters and purified settlements too. But I know realize that this isn't going to happen if some of those settlements are the domain of writers who are not on board with the idea of corruption and don't feel comfortable contributing to a corrupted overarching narrative, otherwise the end result will feel like a patchwork product thrown together hapazardly and that, of course, can't be the vision for what this game will end up as in 1.0.
I guess a possible solution, and here I'm just throwing some shit around under the assumption that the head writers are actually planning to bring the local narratives together further down the line, would be to simply make it so corrupting those villages gives you some artifact, or maybe lethicite since that's a thing we have in this world, and a way to use it to empower the PC, so that a pure character will face the ending in a weaker state but supported by allies, while a corrupt player will have zero outside support but some sort of new power (I am talking grand, out of combat, purely narrative powers, nothing that would strain the combat system). That could be a good compromise, allowing the single writers to avoid having to write a different game state, only requiring of them to write a proper "village: drained for cum rocks" scene.
Would this be outside of the scope, or the vision, of the game? Is presenting a proper corrupted path outside of that very same vision? Is the main quest ever going to take the dumb and evil shit we do into account when the plot draws to a close? I am very curious to hear answers to these questions if anyone is in a position to answer.
Make no mistake, I don't see this as a priority right now. Honestly I really just would give anything to see the Kasyrra story progress on a regular basis and would gladly see all this flavor stuff put on hold until that's done. What I am asking is if we, as players, should put our minds at rest and stop expecting a "corrupted path" of some weight, seeing the corrupt choices instead as flavour, "non canon" things we can do when we feel like it, not to be taken seriously, in such a way that, when that option is selected, we can expect the settlement to be taken out of the overarching narrative. I would honestly be fine with either.
Also, I apologize if these answers have already been given, I tried searching the forums but couldn't really find any statement that suggested a collective, fundamental stance on these issues.
So, why is that "choice" there at all? What is the purpose of it, design wise and how does it fit into the overarching narrative of the game?
No shade on the writer who clearly has every right to not want to support a whole new alternate location with unwholesome developments they might not be comfortable with, but I do find it weird how that choice is still presented to you. I wasn't expecting anything as involved as the corrupted farm from CoC1, but at least some sort of tempting, material reward that could make that actually a choice someone would consider, where the punishment for being evil comes not through deceptively implying alternate content but by promising some sort of quick, easy to write but alluring reward. Even just some sort of passive income generation, to throw in the simplest, lowest effort idea. Same with enslaving the centaur village, you just gained all this "power" and servants but actually what you did is "killed" a whole zone for nothing. I can't think of a single occasion where going corrupt unlocks more content than going pure, and I would love for someone to disprove this fact to me since I admit it's been some months since I played the game thoroughly and might have missed some new content.
But this is just an example I chose to illustrate my point, since the Corrupt Hive thing is probably the most apparent one and the only one I know for sure is not about dev time, but by design.
What I'm saying is that the corruption stat does way more than the corrupted choices in terms of content, to the point where I don't really see a reason to offer corrupted branching in quests at all since they don't even provide a significant amount of corruption, much less than just sucking demon dick, which comes at no cost content-wise. Right now it seems like the "evil" button is actually the "are you tired of this location and would rather remove it from your game?" button.
Is this actually going to change in the future?
I could once, perhaps naively, see in the distant future some sort of story mechanic where a corrupt player has the number of settlements corrupted count for something akin to the size of their fiefdom, in a way that contributes to some big confrontation down the line, or something of that sort. Some sort of "lightweight territorial conquest" that could serve as a backdrop to the final act and that could tie up the local narratives together, like a classic "gather your allies before the final battle" RPG trope. This of course would be valid for pure characters and purified settlements too. But I know realize that this isn't going to happen if some of those settlements are the domain of writers who are not on board with the idea of corruption and don't feel comfortable contributing to a corrupted overarching narrative, otherwise the end result will feel like a patchwork product thrown together hapazardly and that, of course, can't be the vision for what this game will end up as in 1.0.
I guess a possible solution, and here I'm just throwing some shit around under the assumption that the head writers are actually planning to bring the local narratives together further down the line, would be to simply make it so corrupting those villages gives you some artifact, or maybe lethicite since that's a thing we have in this world, and a way to use it to empower the PC, so that a pure character will face the ending in a weaker state but supported by allies, while a corrupt player will have zero outside support but some sort of new power (I am talking grand, out of combat, purely narrative powers, nothing that would strain the combat system). That could be a good compromise, allowing the single writers to avoid having to write a different game state, only requiring of them to write a proper "village: drained for cum rocks" scene.
Would this be outside of the scope, or the vision, of the game? Is presenting a proper corrupted path outside of that very same vision? Is the main quest ever going to take the dumb and evil shit we do into account when the plot draws to a close? I am very curious to hear answers to these questions if anyone is in a position to answer.
Make no mistake, I don't see this as a priority right now. Honestly I really just would give anything to see the Kasyrra story progress on a regular basis and would gladly see all this flavor stuff put on hold until that's done. What I am asking is if we, as players, should put our minds at rest and stop expecting a "corrupted path" of some weight, seeing the corrupt choices instead as flavour, "non canon" things we can do when we feel like it, not to be taken seriously, in such a way that, when that option is selected, we can expect the settlement to be taken out of the overarching narrative. I would honestly be fine with either.
Also, I apologize if these answers have already been given, I tried searching the forums but couldn't really find any statement that suggested a collective, fundamental stance on these issues.
