JUNE ANNOUNCEMENTS

[thewatchers]

JUNE ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Hello, everyone! We have a few pieces of news for you.

Activity Check for May
We understand that life has been extremely busy in a number of ways, and in addition to the half-AC requirement (only five comments), we won’t be conducting sweeps for this round of activity. There’s a lot to deal with, and the last thing people need to worry about is an activity check, so fuck it.

Event Extension
Into the Depths, our fairytale event, is receiving an extension that will allow threads on it to be used for June's AC in order to give people who missed out for various reasons a chance to engage with the event.

Game Lifespan
It’s come to our attention that several people have brought up the worry of our two-year time limit, especially due to circumstances widely out of ours, or anyone’s, control, limiting time and energy to play and plot. We’ve brought this into consideration in our discussions, and we would like to hear player input on the following things in this post:

• Whether the game’s life should be extended


• What kind of form that should take

At present, we have three umbrella options:

• Extend Nightfall to become a series of missions over several months, rather than one event


• A post-plot epilogue that allows characters to re-evaluate their place in the setting and play with what they’ll be doing with themselves afterwards in a post-Nightfall world


• Extending the timeline of the game and pushing back Nightfall until later next year

We want to note that these aren’t the only options - these are just the options we’ve come up with. We’d gladly appreciate any player input on these options or on new ones that our players might think of, as well as input on whether we should extend the game or let it play out as it was planned.

code bases by tricklet

Comments

[imitationsoul]

HM. I am personally not at all opposed to extending the game's lifespan. I will stick with Daybreak until the end and I'm excited to see how things will go. Extending the playtime by around half a year to account for the time we are losing because the world is straight up wack right now would makes sense.

That said, I would absolutely not want Nightfall to take place over more than two months. Missions have a tendency to get dragged out and dropped and I would rather not see a plot element that is as monumental as Nightfall fall victim to this kind of excitement drop-off. I predict that if Nightfall loses it's Huge One-off Event nature, it will simply not wind up being properly played at all.

I'm personally in favor of simply pushing Nightfall back instead. The idea of an epilogue is also lovely, but also feels like it runs risk of dropping off. That seems more like an extra month to the game as a send-off than a longer viable option.

[subconmodo]

I agree with this. Missions can be hit and miss at times so I don't know about using them to extend things, and while an epilogue sounds nice, I don't know if that wouldn't just be better for people t do as they please on their own.

Looking at it, I think an extension might be best, especially since it can be easily explained in plot by the missions' efforts working in the Academy's favor.

[stavros]

I'm fine with the original projected date, but second choice would be to extend the play time. Like was mentioned earlier, missions tend to peter out over time until you're staring at your inbox begging someone to tag something, and in my experience with other games, "turned into a happily-ever-after sandbox after the ending" means "immediately dropped like a hot potato by 90% of the game while the remaining 10% tags for a few months before giving up."

[hatesdeerstalkers]

Yeah, I'd definitely agree with pushing back nightfall instead personally - echoing avery's thoughts, an extension could be pretty easily justified in the plot of the game.

[escardos]

I definitely agree with everything Luna has brought up! Extending the play time sounds like a good way to create more cr between characters and also maintain the hype of the incoming Nightfall.

[buddinghopes]

I agree that the extension sounds like it'd be for the best. Between more CR opportunities (which would be great!) and the possibility of Nightfall being dragged out and potentially dropped off if it goes on for too long (it'd be a shame if that happened tbh)... yeah.

[heromedal]

In my experience not only do epilogues tend to live short lives, dramatic finales often flop if they're not done snappily when their time comes. That said, we've lost so much time I think the most sensible option is pushing things back.

[shockingblue]

I'm late to the party on commenting here (I thought I already did, but obviously not).

The short version is with COVID absolutely demolishing the tag momentum of most of our player base, I'm all for extending the length of the game overall. I think there's more most of us want to do in the setting, and it's hard to do that when we're stuck with some real malaise due to real world problems.

Beyond that, I'd prefer Nightfall to be *one big event* as a true climax to the game. It might end up huge, but we need that one burst of momentum and interest to carry it quickly because it'll probably fall off if we spread it out. Hit big at the end, and then work toward the denouement of the main story, and clean it up with resolution for the end of the game.

[hattersgonnahat]

In some way, I'm kinda glad my lack of motivation allowed me to procrastinate for almost a month, because it did give me more to think about.

I do think Nightfall should be pushed back though, in combination of many things. Originally I was much more optimistic that Daybreak could be the one game with a decent postgame/epilogue/sandbox conclusion since the game has always been inundated with player plots that kept building up the world, that after a world ending event there could be so many new stories from that. But now I'm not so sure about that either.

My biggest concern right now is even if current world events do finally settle down (whenever that is going to be), it's already going to be too late and interest has waned down too much. Even if Daybreak hypothetically does something like shut down for a month or so everyone can refresh, there's still a risk of how many people will actually come back.

I don't want Daybreak to rush but I don't want it to die either, both options really depress me a lot.