the majority of the brunt of the work on actually finishing the game at this point, is writing on the main story and the bigger side content quests? ... My impression of the situation around the lack of main story content, has been that there weren't enough people working on the writing on the main story, at least based on a post you made quite a while back that implied that there were only one person at the time working on the writing.
Sort of correct. And that workload is basically all on me. :/
Desperately wish we had more staff writers.
but isn't the main thing that has halted the main story since the engine switch been the writing itself?
Well, the next segment of the MSQ has been done writing-wise since November and has been held up in code, so in this case, no. That's an unusual case, though, usually when anything important gets written it gets chunked out into code pretty darn quick.
since I assumed he used to primarily work on writing the main story in the same way you do for CoC2, which made it a logical conclusion that the main story development has slowed to a crawl as a result of him stepping back from writing.
In terms of the MSQ, Fen wrote:
-The game's intro
-The Cuz encounter on Mhen'ga
-The Cuz encounter on Tarkus, after Stellar Tether, plus Kaska (I did the rest of that quest)
-Cuz's bits and the Nyrena Princess for MyrellionQuest (I did the rest of that quest)
-Cuz's bits for Zheng Shi (Will and I wrote the Shock Hopper and stuff). ZS was a great project, lots of cooperation.
-Feruze's encounter on the skyway on Dhaal. I wrote the party quest and the dungeon (with a lot of help from outside writers)
The upcoming MSQ on Phaedra is all me from the narrative side, with a lot of help from Will and other community writers to backfill the sex scenes.
So... no, not really. I took over writing for Cuz on Dhaal, but I've lead all the MSQ dungeons since Tarkus except for Zheng Shi which I'd credit to the whole team more or less equally.
I suppose the good news of putting it off for so long is the rewards are likely to be relevant in the late/end game.
Probably not, honestly. While I don't touch any mechanical stuff for TiTS anymore (year like 10 of asking Fen to provide documentation on the combat systems for writers, ree) there's nothing actually gating the quest after
Fools Rush In other than it just.... existing. It'd be weird if a level... 6?... quest lead directly into a level 12 quest lol. So I imagine it'll be aimed at like level 7-8 maybe. Whatever's FRI's level + 1.
Is repairing the Broken Psi-Amp is still planned, (a small expansion)?
It'd be cool if it was but it probably won't be written by me. Anybody's welcome to pick it up.