First and foremost: I don't mean to be rude with what I'm going to say, but I've been trying to figure out how to word this complaint for a good bit and it's difficult to put the words together without at least some of this coming out a little bit rough. Sorry.
I can echo the sentiment of many that I don't really like the fact that the corrupt hornet hive got the axe. I get it, though. It wasn't a popular route, and it completely stopped you from getting access to pretty significant chunks of content. Like a whole companion. That has knock-on effects for the rest of the game. But at the same time I still can't help but feel that with the removal of this content, something more has been lost. It's a weird and nebulous thing. I'll try and define it.
With CoC2 there are two kinds of content: The content that exists, and the content that could exist. I know that arguing a point like this is going to be akin to madness but it's the only way that I can think of to define things. Until this patch, while the corrupt hive was a completely dead-end route that wasn't popular, it existing within the game provided a platform for content to be built off of in the event that someone came around to write for it. But now with the removal of the existing content two things have happened: Firstly, anyone who did like the content has been deprived of it. Secondly, any potential future expansions to that content, be it with new scenes, new characters, new iterations, or more, now cannot exist, even if someone wanted to come along and write for it.
Taking a step back, a decision like that feels like it's going to have a long-lasting echo for the rest of the game. Now if something isn't popular enough it can just get cut, and that doesn't quite sit right with me. It took forever for the corrupt centaur village route to have Corrupt Ahmri appear, is it now under threat of being cut too, since it's not popular? I know that's a little extreme of an example, but it is something that crosses my mind.
The fact that an entire companion gets locked off by doing the corrupt route is probably one of the biggest reasons why the pure route is so popular. That's gameplay being taken away, after all. Same thing with having to sit down and churn through the orb content in order to get maximum tails Kiyoko as a companion. It's telling a story along with it, but that doesn't really stop the fact that the rest of the game gets put on hold while you cycle through the content if you want the best version of Kiyoko. It's honestly not fun, but you've gotta do it if you want to get the best outcome.
The solution to this unfortuantely lies in having more companions than you can recruit in the game. Something where there's around 15 people that you can recruit as a companion, but you can only ever have nine companions since that's the maximum number of room's at Garth's inn, or something. This lets people with a favorite NPC bring them along, even if some of those NPC's are shallower than others. This then loops back into content that exists vs content that could exist. If a less popular NPC got turned into a companion, like say Eryka (who honestly felt almost spoon fed to us that she was going to be a companion, and then that never happened), then they could suddenly have a whole lot of people willing to step up and provide scenes and expansions now that they know that this character isn't going to be forgotten in a tile that nobody's got a reason to enter more than once. (Which isn't entirely true in the case of Eryka since the church is a fast way to cleanse corruption but the point still largely stands.)
To try and put a finisher on this incoherent post: I get it. Sometimes needs must for the greater good, but it doesn't make me happy, and I'll bet that it's going to be a sore spot for quite some time.
I can echo the sentiment of many that I don't really like the fact that the corrupt hornet hive got the axe. I get it, though. It wasn't a popular route, and it completely stopped you from getting access to pretty significant chunks of content. Like a whole companion. That has knock-on effects for the rest of the game. But at the same time I still can't help but feel that with the removal of this content, something more has been lost. It's a weird and nebulous thing. I'll try and define it.
With CoC2 there are two kinds of content: The content that exists, and the content that could exist. I know that arguing a point like this is going to be akin to madness but it's the only way that I can think of to define things. Until this patch, while the corrupt hive was a completely dead-end route that wasn't popular, it existing within the game provided a platform for content to be built off of in the event that someone came around to write for it. But now with the removal of the existing content two things have happened: Firstly, anyone who did like the content has been deprived of it. Secondly, any potential future expansions to that content, be it with new scenes, new characters, new iterations, or more, now cannot exist, even if someone wanted to come along and write for it.
Taking a step back, a decision like that feels like it's going to have a long-lasting echo for the rest of the game. Now if something isn't popular enough it can just get cut, and that doesn't quite sit right with me. It took forever for the corrupt centaur village route to have Corrupt Ahmri appear, is it now under threat of being cut too, since it's not popular? I know that's a little extreme of an example, but it is something that crosses my mind.
The fact that an entire companion gets locked off by doing the corrupt route is probably one of the biggest reasons why the pure route is so popular. That's gameplay being taken away, after all. Same thing with having to sit down and churn through the orb content in order to get maximum tails Kiyoko as a companion. It's telling a story along with it, but that doesn't really stop the fact that the rest of the game gets put on hold while you cycle through the content if you want the best version of Kiyoko. It's honestly not fun, but you've gotta do it if you want to get the best outcome.
The solution to this unfortuantely lies in having more companions than you can recruit in the game. Something where there's around 15 people that you can recruit as a companion, but you can only ever have nine companions since that's the maximum number of room's at Garth's inn, or something. This lets people with a favorite NPC bring them along, even if some of those NPC's are shallower than others. This then loops back into content that exists vs content that could exist. If a less popular NPC got turned into a companion, like say Eryka (who honestly felt almost spoon fed to us that she was going to be a companion, and then that never happened), then they could suddenly have a whole lot of people willing to step up and provide scenes and expansions now that they know that this character isn't going to be forgotten in a tile that nobody's got a reason to enter more than once. (Which isn't entirely true in the case of Eryka since the church is a fast way to cleanse corruption but the point still largely stands.)
To try and put a finisher on this incoherent post: I get it. Sometimes needs must for the greater good, but it doesn't make me happy, and I'll bet that it's going to be a sore spot for quite some time.
