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My Thoughts


zaid

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My first post and I feel it will be a long one...

 

So I've been playing Academagia for like 10 days straight. When I happened upon a review of the game, I instantly knew I'd be hooked as it hit all my gaming kinks; rpg, an in-depth world, loads of reading, a life simulation sandbox and time management with skill points which just brings out the minmaxer in me.

 

First playthrough though was very very daunting. Just making a character and choosing classes can be a lengthy task since a new player would be trying to read every option available. And it is a pretty important part as it does dictate a large part of how the year is going to go.

 

Suggestion 1: Provide stock characters; maybe one for each house?

 

My first game consisted of me just spamming Work till you Drop and trying to max skills. Didn't help that there were a million and one skills and they all looked interesting. So trying for a roleplaying feel, I just trained up skills that appealed to a bookish character. Just kept clicking next day and watched the pretty numbers go up. All the while mostly failing the random events that pop up. Naturally, these failures made me avoid the adventure option till I felt I had a good enough character. Until I hit the Dance of Fools.

 

Suggestion 2: Either make the Dance adventure earlier? Or force the Mentor adventure? Something to help newbie immersion definitely.

 

The forced adventure opened my eyes. Adventure options were pretty easy! You gain skill points! You gain attribute points! Ah Academagia... how you tricked me... So now I'm doing adventures and raising skills that it needs. Until you reach that one point of course... I raised it to max! Which took like 8 steps! Why is the option still purple?!? (More on this later)

 

By now I've found the forum, realised there were DLCs and patches and a Mod Tool. And found out a xxx load of things! Explore! Cliques! And here I was thinking I'd reached the peak with Practice Math and Leith's Office.

 

Suggestion 3: While you may want players to scratch away the surface and explore the world themselves, some things really need to be spelt out. Like Cliques.

 

I opened the Mod Tool to see under the hood, and was confused as hell. Shoved that to one side and went to the wiki instead. And really, that page is only just, minutely, less clunky then the Mod Tool. [Not that the work is not appreciated. But you really need to know what you're looking for there.]

 

Now I have a clique. With shiny new abilities! only to find out that uping 3 substeps does not equal to a gain of 3 points. Back to the forum, where I read about how the attributes work in relation to skills, found out you need spells to carry on adventuring and discovered the incredibleness of libraries and sphinxes (sphinges?). Now that minmaxer in me reared its head.

 

Character number 4 or 5 now started with all the stats boosters and got the right friends and raised the right skills and was sitting pretty and yet still couldn't get past bloody friend adventures!!!

 

So I ventured in the dreaded Mod Tool, fumbled around and saw the man behind the curtain... Really?!? I need to roll 20s? What the xxx? Someone more eloquent has brought this up, where the need to do six impossible things before breakfast may require some boosting from spells; but just because it's step 6 should not mean I need a 21 roll on lie to close down the homework helper.

 

I've been bitching on for a while now, but really it's because I love the game. But you make it so hard. The UI is clunky as hell. Maybe its my slow laptop, but going to the inventory (!) lags me. It takes me forever to find a subskill if I forget where its under. Sometimes I save and it disappears. I lost character number 3 to that. But I could tough it out. I could work around the system and complete the game and get that perfect character for year 2 and mess around more later.

 

Then Patch 22 came out. And I started a new game and ideas started popping up because I was kind of going through the motions till I reached the same point as my previous character.

 

The social side need a lot of help. My first day I managed to befriend Emilia and Zoe. That's a straight +3 charm out of the box and no studying except for use notes. That is pretty gamebreaking for one action since the attribute affects the skills and steps required. So Cliques are kinda broken. In my opinion the Abilities should be earned. Someone mentioned having it unlock at different levels, say 3,5,7 giving different rewards. But that just means you have to spam befriend one weekend to get to 10, which feels like playing the Sims. The social relationships are just numbers; and not even pretty numbers like those on my Zoology skills.

 

Until Sima says "I mean, most of the kids here – they’ve got stuff they’re good at, right? There’s this one guy that makes rings, and Rikildis ruins people, and I hear your talent is surviving things that’d get other kids killed or expelled." It's the first time that I feel the main character actually has an identity in Academagia. Where you have actually affected the student body. I want more of that.

 

One idea is having steps for friendships. While a weekend with a friend can get you to maybe a 5, a 10 relationship should be hard work. That is BFF territory where you really connect. Total Extreme Wresting [another text sim] had a system where every new game assigned a rng to a character and that in turn controlled the chemistry between two wrestlers in the ring. My idea is making your everyday choices and skillset affect how everyone else thinks of you, and thus how open they are to adding you to their facebook. So if you have 1 strength, Phillipe is more likely to give you an Indian Burn then to shake your hand. It would still be possible to grovel enough to worm into his good graces but it might take a long time. However, if you've been bullying your way through school events [Chaotic Evil], like attracts like and it should be easier to up relationship points sharing wedgie stories. Another method might be the skills themselves, giving you something to relate to, like practical jokes or rock band: greenday. This could work the other way too. If you're scoring too high in the midterms, Milena might just give you the evil eye. [What does she have against Zoe?] And sometimes, even after all that time and effort, Catherine still won't give you the time of day.[unless you're well off too] All I'm saying is that I hope the numbers the game spits out might impact the world and that these fellow students in Academagia aren't just cardboard cutouts.

 

Oh and parties... or picnics.. gatherings to sustain clique unity.

 

The next topic I'll bring up in this never-ending post are Merit points. The latest patch cocked this up, but somehow it made me like it. Not the insane 12 roll with compete. But the relative difficulty in getting Merit points. With previous characters, at one point Vernin was like 150 points ahead of second best and basically got all the prizes. Which doesn't work now by the way. But award merit points in a more sensible way. I mean I got 10 points for standing up to a dragon! So 10 points should really mean alot. So points for extra credit work, either connecting it to the skill or study level. Points for brown nosing the professors. And maybe just random points every study day for variance's sake.

 

Familiars I've barely touched as I'm still trying to get a third Zoology skill. So the next point I have is maybe I can ask Zoe what she's been studying in that Zoology course she's been taking. No she doesn't have to raise my sub skills. Just tell me what they are. I can go read up about them myself. So I don't have to wait for an event which involves salmon. This would go for all subjects offered. Maybe you need to have a couple of relationship points to bother your friend with your annoying questions.

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Zaid;

 

Thanks for this- it's always good to read feedback, and we're glad you are enjoying the game. To touch on a few points you raised:

 

We mostly agree with the Befriend spam, and you'll see a change to the early mechanics of Friendship in Year 2- but this is probably beyond the scope of a Patch on Year 1. We also really like the idea of a great social feedback network, which I think we've solved somewhat neatly in Year 2. You'll have to let us know, when the time comes. :)

 

For Merit, DLC 5 will return it to the old method, but it was interesting (if accidental) experiment. On the one hand, it does now make Merit feel much more important, but on the other, it distances you from the overall contributions that everyone else is making. We may try a hybrid in DLC 6, where the automatic increase is removed from Compete, but the Roll is much lower- 4 or 5, perhaps.

 

Thanks again!

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I think most of these gaming confusions could be avoided if we have a better explained manual or tutorial that provide enough information that won't leaves the players handing online to dig for guides.

 

Maybe add a in game help/FAQ button that covers these commonly asked question like "How do I get through later stages of adventure?" and you link the question to the answer like a skill.

 

Or something more advance like Ask For Advice button that calculate your character stats and match reference on current month of calendar to give advice like "You should get Enchant to rank 8" so he can learn the important phame or spell, then near mid term test, it will suggest class skill rank that will be enough to pass at 50%.

 

#1 Could also be avoided if somewhere there is an adventure explanation that it is impossible to pass the later stages without using spells or change the UI to include a VS Roll number somewhere next to the skill so we know how much we are rolling against.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I wrote this about 2 months ago its short.

 

Memory

 

Climbing up the stairs and having the steps ahead vanish,

Turning around and seeing those ones gone as well,

Leaving the step youre on completely useless.

Forgot how you got there,

Forgot where youre going.

Memory is.....

 

 

Beckoning

 

The dreams pull at me.

My eyes burn in my sight.

Thoughts feverish at night.

Spine numbing.

Back breaking.

Falling falling falling.

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