The fact of the matter is, while I don't think Fen has weighed in on it, Savin and Gedan have both said on numerous occassions that Bess was a mistake. It stands as Jim's Tower of Babel: an impressive feat and a testament to his skills, but also an enormous act of hubris. There's really only room for one could-be-anything in this game, and it's the one who's worth that level of time investment because they're in almost every scene.
It was a mistake for us to have not headed it off earlier, and harder than we did. We
did tell Jim to calm down some on what he was doing, and all that really won us was in the end was "I'll split it into multiple documents and it'll be easier to implement!" It didn't really restrict the scope at all.
By the time we fully understood just how much of a pain making it actually work was going to be, it was already too late; far too many people were invested in Bess as something that was going to be in the game in the exact way that JimT has presented the character. It gave us two choices; drag our fucking feet about it and just never get around to doing it (which would have been fucking awful imo), or bite the bullet and just fucking get it done and then use Bess as the stick that we will beat people with in future if they want to do similar.
If I'd have done it in stages, it would have never happened; the time it would take to acclimatize to the way things had already been coded so that the next block could be brought in would have made it take even longer, and it would have just been pushed back down the list over and over because of that. That's why I powered through it, and it fucking destroyed my desire to work on the game wholesale for months because of it.
