Post by onehalfsaint in Cycle of the First Dawn comments

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And pitch perfect for that town in particular.

I have to tell you that revisiting Willowbrook gutted me. I wondered why we were reincarnating at 91. Although, the protagonist has never before been particularly invested in their family--if they were ever mentioned even? I suppose living and dying of natural causes is different than dying horribly to a Qi Beast but even so, that seemed a little out of left field for me. I wonder if you would consider adding something about the protagonist's family (poor but proud, something about a favored pot or item etc.) to very early Act I when you get a chance?

Let me say once again that the love that goes into every corner of this game is delightful. I'm working my way through the mono element towns rn just to see how everything's changed before pushing on Threshold, the inner road, etc. I'm not surprised exactly that you remembered the mono element towns, but so many developers would have or just gated them off rather than writing bespoke dialogue for each. It's clear you understand that attention is love. One hopes our protagonist does as well.

DoorWatchers23 days ago(+1)

Willowbrook is supposed to leave a sense of loss. A big part of what it represents is the cost of always looking forward and assuming there will be time to come back to the things that matter now. The protagonist spent most of their life chasing the next step, and Willowbrook is one of the places where the game finally makes them confront the fact that “later” is not something you are always guaranteed to get.

So I don’t really want to turn their family into a much larger early subplot, because the distance from those parts of their life is part of the point. I may still add a few small details in Act I where they fit, but I want the loss to come from realizing what was allowed to quietly pass by rather than from retroactively making the protagonist deeply family-focused.

I’m also really glad you noticed the work that went into the other returning areas. I spent a lot of time making sure they didn’t just feel like the old Act I locations reopened with a few lines changed. Each one needed to feel like a place that had continued existing on its own, with its own changes, problems and people, so it means a lot that that came through.

onehalfsaint23 days ago(+1)

I understand the subtext of Willowbrook as you put it here, but from the player's point of view, the story has given us no reason to care about the protagonist's family. The protagonist might care, but most readers need some involvement to understand and contextualize the loss for the characters. I think I'm more sensitive than most, and I was like 'oh, word?' rather than aggrieved. The farm being overgrown had the same force as losing family--to me that seems like a narrativity problem. But that's the last I'll say of it.

Loving Act III so far! Got to the Outer Imperial City before bed and cleaned up that questline, seems like a good way of exploring the changing districts in a cohesive and coherent way. A stark contrast to how much of the Act I districts mostly functioned as villages within the city. Are you familiar with layer-cake vs. marble-cake federalism? Seems like that's what the Imperium is going through, in a sense, or something like it.

DoorWatchers23 days ago(+2)

I think that distinction is fair. I still don’t want to turn the family into a substantial Act I subplot, because that would pull the protagonist toward being much more family-focused than I intend, but “the protagonist has a reason to care” and “the player has been given enough to contextualize why they care” are two different things.

So I think the answer is probably a handful of very small details rather than a new storyline. Enough that the family and home have a little texture in the player’s memory, so when Willowbrook is empty later the farm and the people who lived there don’t carry essentially the same narrative weight. That’s useful feedback.

And yes, I’m familiar with layer-cake vs. marble-cake federalism. I hadn’t consciously been using that terminology when designing the Imperium, but that’s actually a pretty good lens for what has happened. Act I’s districts were much more compartmentalized, almost little administrative worlds of their own despite technically belonging to the same city. By Act III, the institutions, Houses, city administration and Imperial authority have become much more interpenetrating, so problems and authority bleed across those old boundaries instead of politely stopping at the district line.

It isn’t a perfect federalism analogy because the Imperium isn’t really a federation in the modern constitutional sense, but structurally, yes, there’s definitely a layer-cake-to-marble-cake movement happening there.

I’m also really glad you’re enjoying the new content. I always appreciate the feedback, especially when it points out places where the intent is there but the player-facing setup could be doing more work.

onehalfsaint23 days ago(+2)

Totally, it sounds like you have a strong vision, and that's a good thing. I think you've triangulated a good solution.

What's interesting is that generally, marble-cake federalism is associated with a strengthening central state, not a weakening one--but I suppose we don't have a meaningful analogue to a 40k year God-Emperor style dictatorship either, so it's easy to see how it could happen this way under those conditions (e,g. the layer-cake analogy would be a very heavy-handed top layer and a narrow bottom layer).

Usually when a dictatorship ends, the various factions in the middle enter a dangerous power vacuum (more Lower Realm oriented?, but again, I can see the argument that 40k years of culturally mandated coexistence & cooperation might be hard to shake in less than a century. I suppose in that way, the Xianxia genre lends itself well to a typical millennia long Chinese history epic, so that works in your favor? Parts of Act III remind me a bit of parts of Heaven Official's Blessing and seeing the world through old / changed cultivator eyes. If you haven't seen it yet, you might enjoy it, or at least get something out of it.

Either way, I'm totally into it. Just barely cracking the inner city content--partner is here for the weekend and we're making our way through Maneater, so I may not have much more to add for a little bit. But keep up the good work!

DoorWatchers23 days ago(+2)

I think the 40,000-year timescale is doing a lot of the work there. I picked 40,000 years partly because the golden tyrant and his blue administrative assistant made me do it, but in all seriousness, that number is also a little misleading in-universe.

Forty thousand years is roughly the stretch for which there are surviving records, and even those are incomplete. It isn’t the full timescale of what happened. The Emperor, the Tea Master, and the systems that grew around them predate the reliable historical record, so by the time Act I begins, nobody is living under something that still feels like a comparatively recent dictatorship. They’re living inside institutions that have had an absurd amount of time to become culture, tradition, habit and eventually just “how the world works.”

That’s why I don’t think removing the Emperor naturally produces the kind of clean power vacuum you might expect after a much shorter-lived dictatorship. The factions underneath him aren’t preserved older orders waiting to re-emerge. They’ve spent countless generations adapting to, depending on and operating within the same administrative structure.

It’s also part of why the Act I-to-Act III shift can become more marble-cake-like without simply meaning the central state got stronger. Act I’s districts were much more compartmentalized and vertically organized through the Imperial system. Once that center changes, the connective tissue doesn’t vanish, but it starts being used differently and much more laterally, so institutions that once operated in fairly separate lanes begin bleeding into one another.

So yes, I think the ridiculous cultivation timescale gives me some room to make the political aftermath behave differently from a conventional post-dictatorship transition. Forty thousand recorded years is already political geology, and the actual history underneath it is older still.

I haven’t seen/read Heaven Official’s Blessing, but I’ve heard enough about it that I probably should eventually. And enjoy Maneater; no rush on comments. I’m glad you’re enjoying the new content.

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