Resolving Stalkers Season 5

[Neo Emolga]

I accidently picked option 1. I meant option 2. Sadge.

No worries, thanks for the heads up about that.

I appreciate all the effort you've put in is monumental!
But yes, this hulking beast has so many add-ons and cool features that it's become unwieldy to play! I'm glad you've addressed it.

That said, I hate to leave things undone- I'd rather see everyone die in an accelerated fireball of a bad end than just leave the thread to languish forever. "Fast forward to the end" doesnt have to be a full win.

Yeah, in trying to make this the grand finale, it ended up being way too demanding and unwieldly. I really wanted to make the combat and inventory system work because it seemed so nice on paper, but it’s an absolute doozy to put the time and energy into and I have found myself plugging multiple hours into individual posts because of it. Before in previous seasons, it was maybe 30-45 minutes, which wasn’t so bad. It was also easier when there was only one item or thing to find in each location. When you plop in like 3-4 like I did for this one, add a combat instance, and have to roll things like loot drops, that bumps it up significantly. Individually those things don’t seem too bad. When you pile all those little things up together, it becomes a flood.

In hindsight, the issues were:

• The combat system is cool, but it’s too much of an extra to tack on. Even if it works and is fully functional (have to credit Suicune’s Fire for managing to come up with a great working system), it’s just a lot of extra time required and I also made too much use of it with adding random encounters. Not to mention Huskpuppet’s route had a whopping 9 combat encounters intended, so even though you had done 2 of them, there were 7 more to go. 4 would have made more sense.
• Stalker routes (the path that the players need to take to find the Phylactery and discover who the Stalker is) were too darn long again. I get this crazy fix of great ideas to use for them, they pile up, and then when they get put together, it’s a mess for me to manage and I see the players having a tough time with them. I’m also looking back at some of the Sin Purge ritual stuff and I did the same thing with those as well.
• Some of the puzzles for Stalker routes were too difficult and I saw two of them go abandoned (The Corrupted Children’s Book and the Deranged Codec).
• Player inventories were probably too big as well. Utopian Aspect was a nifty idea, but not really needed. If I dropped combat, then weapons weren’t needed either. I think armor and jewelry would have been fine as shields and bonuses to stats to deal with the traps and stuff that were around. But even so, a lot of people didn’t really even bother with the equipment stuff (they had heaps of items to choose from, but didn’t really bother picking anything out to equip). That pretty much tells me it wasn’t needed and people weren’t really too attached to it, so I think it could be completely stripped out. Season 3 didn’t have them and it worked fine.
• Map size was huge. I really wanted to try and make a city setting work for once (especially because it was to be the site of the ultimate end) and boom, it just doesn’t. Small towns and villages are really the only thing that work for this. 40 or fewer searchable locations and a suspect list of 30 or less just make more sense.

But yeah, like you said, too many add-ons and features made this a time-devouring beast. I found it hard to set aside the time to do narration posts for Stalkers simply because it required huge chunks of it (also requires me to have like 9 tabs open for all the stuff involved!) and splitting them up into multiple sittings does make it tricky to pick it back up again as I would need to remember what I updated and what I didn’t. That’s very prone to mistakes…

Where Stalkers had its appeal before is just reading about your character doing stuff and finding out what dark things they run into. Looking back, that should have been more of the focus.

In the end, I would way prefer to resolve it some fashion rather than let it hang indefinitely. To me, closure in some way, even if the idea didn’t quite work out as intended, has to happen eventually. Leaving people hanging isn’t fun and nobody likes that…

I think we should go for the stripped down ending. Sure, it may be less satisfying as all this work would be done for us, it would also be a perfect run as if everyone banded together even if they weren't here.

But with the way Neo describes this 'Ultimate Ending' it's actually rather enticing to me, even though I've already voted. Regardless, it'll never be the true end of the Stalkers. As Neo said, spinoffs and other things anecdotally possible! So whatever you do is perfectly fine by me.

You would get the good ending either way. Option 1 just has the final Stalker battles, chopping out all the long narration stuff I did for the other posts. When it comes to the battles themselves, there would only be a max of four players involved, though. Having everyone in the same battle would be massive and hard for me to manage.

Spinoffs are possible. There was a parody version of Stalkers called “Squawkers” released on an April Fools Day that essentially took the same game engine but made everything silly, goofy, and cartoonish. And it actually worked, although that didn’t finish either because another major PXR event was coming up and I couldn’t manage both. But it proved you could reskin the game to different themes and such. Doesn’t need to be horror every time and exploring other possibilities could be fun.

While I don’t want to make any promises (been so busy lately), I may revisit the game engine for something else, building something akin to it with a different theme and genre. And yeah, I would try my darnest not to go overboard with it again.

I think a “rebranded” version of Stalkers that has really only the needed essentials to make it fun, less of the heavy unneeded baggage, and prepared in a way that keeps it short and sweet would be what I would do moving forward.