Letter from the Producer - The road to simultaneous release begins!

OpenStars, 11 months ago

I got the 500 CS today and was a bit confused - like, "what is this production letter that I was supposed to have read?", so thank you for sharing this.

I wonder how they will implement this - maybe it'll simply delay the release of the product in time for the translation team to catch up, or perhaps it's even more foundational than that and they'll have the translation happen simultaneously along with the coding implementation. We'll probably never know but we'll see the outcome soon enough!:-)

Zingarinha, 11 months ago

Yeah, they'll probably just need to be more organised with all the scripts and pass them on to the localisers as soon as they're ready, rather than waiting until after the JP release is out.

Which means those lucky localiser teams now get an advance sneak peek into Aldo's wacky adventures!

OpenStars, 11 months ago

Exactly, like instead of JP story -> implementation -> EN story they could do JP story -> EN story and implementation at the same time. At this point in time, I doubt there is much question about what can be implemented or not, at least as far as stories, though character skills that involve entirely new dynamics such as pierce barrier could be tricky (which is why they get bugged every now & again:-).

beithioch, 11 months ago

This is what I'd guess as well. They'll send it out for translation and not release until the resource files are ready. It's standard practice in localized development, so it's a solved problem in that sense.

For me, this represents a particularly important development: You don't change processes for no reason, so the company or team must feel that Global is important for the longevity and health of the project. I'd guess the financial balance is shifting to more even or maybe even more coming from Global users.

Another possibility is to align with practices of unnamed partners. Basically, this change may not be entirely at WFS' behest.

OpenStars, 11 months ago

The former (two) thoughts are what I was wondering as well - but I had not considered the third. Yes, your comment does make me wonder now... It might also be that WFS is looking to branch out to develop additional games, using the same teams or at least the same working strictures underneath the same managerial oversight, so it may not even be "external" in the sense of WFS, even if it is wrt AE itself.

niantre, 11 months ago

hooray, free stones! the sprite rendition of the producer was a nice touch.

I'm so used to hearing bad news that when he said "and now for some personal news", i was thinking "oh no.." then he said, it's my one year anniversary! whew.

thanks for the news update! it'll be interesting to get content at the same time as JP. on the flip side, it's a little harder to plan ahead when you're budgeting stones for banners :)

Zingarinha, 11 months ago

The overall graphic design of the producer letters is so cute. I do enjoy that they make that effort. It would be nice to get them a little more often, but they're still a nice surprise when they do come.

I guess there will be more eyes on the dataminers than previously, since looking for new names in there will be the first indication of anything new coming, but ultimately it's not going to change my pull patterns, since I already save my stones for characters who are new to me - which aside from Aoife Yipha is now only brand new characters.

OpenStars, 11 months ago

Congrats for having caught up! Unfortunately I still lack several but most notably Anabel - she gates both a unique questline (in Two Knights) and an Unigan play that just cannot be done without her. I have 15k so perhaps I should pull on a limited banner for her but... there are also some good ones coming up too, so I'm still holding out hope to get her off-banner.

Most of the characters I pulled for a loooong time were either that way or I sidegraded them myself - it's only been in the last few months that my luck totally turned around and I started getting a string of the best characters in the game:-). So I'm not even sure how to think about that, like it's good but now I have a ton of reading to do in order to find out how they work!:-P

How long have you played the game for, to get that wide a roster? Maybe make it into a post here to share your story!?:-P

Zingarinha, 11 months ago

Oh no, that's a rough one to be missing indeed. I've never pulled her NS 5* (and wouldn't spend the chants on it at this stage just for the sake of it), but checking her light, she's at 24, so I think one of those was an AS from a drop or something, and the rest was probably all 4*. Hopefully she arrives to save you some time soon!

My most notable missing character for a while was Felmina, especially since I kept having her treatise drop - almost 30 of them on hand by the time I actually got her iirc. However, she and Thillelille both turned up for the first time in the process of Iphi bleeding me dry, which was about the only thing that made that set of pulls bearable. I definitely would have given up much sooner if not for those surprises along the way!

I date back to launch, or thereabouts. And tend to be pretty disciplined about pulls, so my stones all go towards banners with someone new. Not that this always works out, thinking back to Radias' release and the large amount of Shion light I got off that banner... And sure, I'll think about doing that once I get out of this busy spell at work.

OpenStars, 11 months ago

I believe that Anabel is literally unique in that way - I can't think offhand of any quest at all that is like that, even if e.g. Pizzica's CQ supposedly makes the Ocean Palace 3000 story make more sense, but it's not like a "separate quest" that Anabel's offers. Though the royal theater does have several others that are flat-out MANDATORY to have in order to do them - fortunately it's just a tiny amount of CS so not a big deal.

Except from a completionist standpoint, I've played for ~2.5 years now, and cannot finish the Royal Theater with any amount of effort, it seems, only pure RNG gacha luck. Worse, every new character added dilutes the pool further (unless that is coming from the 3-star chars pool?), like if there were only X 4-star characters 4 years ago while today there are X*Y such characters (Y=2-fold, 3-fold, or whatever it is), then getting a guaranteed 4-star is Y-fold less likely than it once was, back then. And the situation is even worse for those guaranteed 5-star campaigns.

So for Anabel to exist back then, when there were like 5 5-stars (or something, I dunno, I wasn't there and even the copium table on the wiki only helps so much to easily reconstruct that history, e.g. the date someone is "added" is not necessarily the same as when they gained a 5-star form), made her very much easier to pull than today (I... think?). Don't get me wrong: the game is very much better as a whole now than then - there is SO much more content, and like there's actually a reason to need to have 5-stars, as opposed to when the toughest enemy was something like Red Dawn:-P - but this particular aspect of it looks to be falling behind, where she is mandatory for that quest but gets less & less likely all the time to pull from the gacha.:-(

Yeah no worries - work should take priority ofc:-), and there's a USA holiday at least coming up, and whatever else you got going on at any time. I was just offering that as a thought if you were ever interested:-).