Post by Brackenfish in Cycle of the First Dawn comments

Viewing post in Cycle of the First Dawn comments

I know AI use is sort of a touchy subject, so I'm not here to call it out. I think I read that you do the actual writing but AI "expands" it or something; I'm not sure of the distinction with just using AI at that point.

Sometimes the writing is jarringly unnatural, like the "Survivable access"/"Not an invitation" in the Paragon arms, and once you see blips like that you start to see them everywhere. At this point I don't really engage with the prose, which is a shame because I know you've put a lot of time into the setting.

This is a great game and I appreciate you making it available for free. If you have time in your dev cycle to go back and scrub or tweak the writing, I think it would be well-spent.

DoorWatchers16 days ago(+3)

That’s fair, and the specific examples are genuinely helpful. For some context, the game has only been in public beta for about seven weeks, and the current build has roughly 1,770 explicit lines of spoken/character dialogue, before counting environmental prose, descriptions, events, tooltips, and everything else around them.

I do go back through the entire game and do dedicated dialogue passes. The latest Act II pass alone added over 600 new spoken lines. But development has been moving extremely quickly, and when I’m adding that much dialogue at once I can sometimes write dozens of lines in the same sitting that end up sharing the same sentence structure or rhythm without it being obvious to me at the time. Once one of those patterns is pointed out, I can suddenly see it repeating elsewhere too.

AI does get used heavily during implementation and will often put placeholder or expanded text in place from my notes, but I do the setting/lore and go back through that material myself to rewrite and replace it. That said, from the player’s side the distinction doesn’t really matter if something like “Survivable access” / “Not an invitation” still makes it into the release. If it reads unnaturally, it reads unnaturally.

So I’m not dismissing the criticism. Those concrete examples are exactly the sort of thing that helps, and I’ll keep doing focused passes as the game develops. Thanks for taking the time to explain what was pulling you out of the writing rather than just saying the writing felt off. That gives me something I can actually track down and fix.

Lillibilli16 days ago

I think I mentioned it already in one of the reports, but one big repeating pattern I keep noticing is "X, not Y", which is kinda everywhere.

DoorWatchers16 days ago

I have spent almost my entire day auditing every player facing line in the game. I'm not finished yet, however it's been a ton of work and I hope it fixes this problem.

Arcanestomper16 days ago (2 edits)

I saw the same sort of oddities as have already been mentioned. But my complaint is more the repetition. A lot of the towns and wildnerness stuff has the same structure with slightly different names.

For instance one I remember is that in a fire wildneress the imprint had you chasing an small beast and then nearly died when it suddenly changed the element it used. And then in a wood wilderness the exact same thing happened with a different animal.

Which for one thing makes no sense because I haven't been threatened by anything in the wilderness since around the third time I visited one. And second well it just repeated itself. And a lot of the imprints are like that.

I just saw a message in locksteel that said something like "Your reincarnations repat the decision points that you did before. You are not seeing the effects of time only repetition." Which was both incredibly generic and also a throughline I've seen in several other towns.

I can understand that making events for 45 separate things is difficult, but if they aren't going to be meaningfully different then you might as well just have it pop up once explaining the overall broad strokes, and not try to make a slightly different variation for each combination.

Just went to Blackwater Reach and saw another variation of the same event. This time I thought to copy it. The first line was different, but this part was exactly the same. Which means its really not necessary. Just have the first line, and make this part its own event that pops up when you revist a town.

"The returning self remembers which intervention produced this branch and repeats it whenever an incarnation reaches the same decision point. The town is not decades older than it was in the life that taught you the choice.

What persists across lives is your knowledge of the decision and its consequence, not additional years added to the town’s calendar."

Some repetition is understandable and okay. I've found other events that have the last line be the same. This is better than having most of it be the same.

itch.io

Viewing post in Cycle of the First Dawn comments