For those who've played: I'm concerned that this is the sort of game where once you've played through a few times, you pretty much know what is going to happen. Is that true, or is there some randomness to the events to keep us guessing?
Yes and no. There are regular weekly events that consistently happen every time on a given week. But having put in a 5 hour binge today, my impression is that while there is no randomness, I'd say the overall design philosophy was
Guide Dang It.
First off, while yes there are a bunch of completely gauranteed X happens on week Y events, there are also a bunch of absolutely crazy-nested situations where X happens unless Y, except on Tuesdays in which case X still happens, but it happens to your neighbor instead, unless you previously married your neighbors niece to your second cousin, in which case Z happens, and that triggers Y to happen a week later instead. I've been consulting a guide, and there are some things that there are just no way you could reasonably be expected to figure out without playing the game dozens of times and taking copious notes of your skill values and which events happens on every given day.
Secondly, while the game
usually tells you which skills are being tested, it doesn't tell you what values are needed to pass a test. It also doesn't specify when only one of a group of skills are required, and when several are required. So if you see a test in which skill X fails and a test for skill Y fails, and then you die...and skill X is at 50 and skill Y is at 30, not only do you not know how high you need to raise those skills, you don't know whether you need to raise only one of them or both of them. And in some cases there are joint skill tests, where the required value is the combination of multiple skills. So there are cases where even if you raise a skill to 100, it's
still not enough, because you need a net value greater than 100 combined from multiple skills. Figuring all of the required values through trial and error would be horribly painful. And to make it worse, events often contain multiple paths, so that whether you pass or fail a skill test determines which of two dialogue paths you get, each of which has their own skill tests. So if even if you save every month and find out you need skill X on week Y, then restore from a previous save and train X, you then might pass the test only to discover that you also need skill Z. And in some cases no path results in death...but instead affect things that do or don't happen later in the game, so figuring out whether you even want to pass or fail those tests in the first place isn't always obvious.
Third, in some cases there are some absolutely crazy skill requirements to trigger certain, that even looking at the guide that tells me exactly what I need to trigger the event, I'm still having difficulty because getting those values in time is non-trivial.
So, the game seems to be not random at all...but unlike Princes Maker where after you play it a few times you get a sense of what to do, what not to do, and you generally know if X if your goal, what you need to do to accomplish it...here, there's mix of events that always happen every single time on a given week and other events that even if you trigger them...you'll have now way to know why they triggered or how to trigger them again. Too many event resolutions affect things that happen 20-30 weeks later to reliably make things happen the way you probably want them to.
At least, that's my view after ~5 hours of playing.
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Topic: Expendable Princess [Week 12: Hoops] (Read 265072 times)