Stalkers Season 3 Post-Game Discussion and Feedback

[Neo Emolga]

I CAN'T BELIEVE YANDIL WAS ACTUALLY A STALKER! I had like this idea that maybe he was working against the Stalkers all along and that's why he was so busy and stressed and why the other Stalkers were trying to implicate him with notes saying he was untrustworthy and stuff. XD

Neo this was so fun!!! I loved it!

Ooh, that's actually a good theory and I didn't think of that possibility! But yeah, as I told Tazz, this was an interesting experiment I wanted to try and boy did it give me very interesting results!

I'm glad you really enjoyed it! I had a blast running it and even though there's a few itty bitty tweaks that could be done, I think everything worked out pretty well.

I actually thought Mission Disclosure was really cool. It added an extra puzzle where you could figure out who you spoke to and who was likely to be a Stalker. It definitely tipped me off about Kanja. We didn't get that close to disclosure and it didn't put me off interviewing at all. Random idea but what if instead of mission disclosure straight away from interviewing you got something like "the stalkers seem excited about something tonight" and then you have the next day round to do an action to stop the disclosure from happening? It could be a new skill maybe to track down and kill a mini stalker messenger on its way to report to the enthrallers (new use for Assassinate??) and cost 1 health/1 sanity to perform. If you don't perform it then its +10% or whatever. If someone goes berserk/faints then you wouldn't have a chance to stop the disclosure though. This would only be necessary if disclosure was more common like from talking to a stalker OR from someone close to the stalker who might mention it to them (ie. a close friend or family member).

Yeah, that was exactly my intention for that unexpected increase in Mission Disclosure, though I'm thinking of making it possible to have ways to bring that down. Your idea also sounds like an interesting idea for a new thing to try. I might work on that a bit more in future releases.

I also really liked that even thought Tashy did the ritual at the end, we did most of it ourselves and actually identified all the stalkers except Yandil. In season 1, I didn't like that we could do the sin purge ritual at the end with NO IDEA who the stalkers were still. It was like bypassing all the great stuff you had planned and set out and skipping to the end! This time it didn't feel like that (though I guess it could have if we performed the ritual earlier if Tashy just happened to identify all the stalker samples quickly).

Yeah, this is very true. In Season 1, the Sin Purge Ritual was kind of a bit too influential in the sense that it disregarded everything else that happened in the entire game. I wanted it to be an alternate way to win the game, but in there, it was a bit too black and white. I think the methods need to be blended, such as items needed for Sin Purge could be found alongside the things needed for the Stalkers and there could be some items where there are multiple kinds of uses for it and the players need to decide which one they want to go with, kind of like deciding how you want to evolve your Eevee.

I think this different take on the Sin Purge Ritual was worth a try, but I think there's probably better things to do next time.

I can understand how having Tashy there seemed a little bit like we didn't have to do as much anymore but really we had to do a lot more than in season 1 to get the ritual performed, and Protecting her every night also used up our resources a lot. I think it was well balanced and didn't feel like she was too overpowered or anything. We could have finished things off without her without any trouble, it just would have been a gamble on Yandil.

Yeah, it's tough to balance these things and I'm glad she didn't feel too overpowered, though I can see why some people feel she stole a bit of the glory at the end. Totally didn't think of that, but it's something I'll keep in mind for next time.

We didn't do a lot of interviewing this time (not sure if that's cos people were worried about mission disclosure, I personally wasn't but didn't interview much as I didn't have a good matchup with almost everyone XD). Maybe one way to make interviewing more relevant and required would be to allow some of the characters to have more items. Like the Clefable this time had one of the items we needed but I remember in season 2 a lot more Pokemon seemed to have items or passwords or something to give us. That makes interviewing necessary rather than being able to search everywhere and find everything. Just a thought though.

I think everything you put in the first post sounds really good.

This is very true, and I only realized it at the end when all the Stalker Routes were made. Way more items need to be in the possession of way more civilians. It should really be at least close to an even split and I understand where Tazz feels it's a bit too much of a treasure hunt. This is definitely something I'll keep in mind as well. :3