Season Soul Feedback

[King V]

Give your feedback for Season Soul here.

[Yuni Shingyouji]

Overall, I had quite a lot of fun with the season. It brought forth a lot of new elements, the story and setting was very exciting, the map was a lot more engaging then I even realized during play, and the cast was pretty entertaining.

I also noticed that MMG have quite evolved from when I was last active, and with it you yourself have also grown quite a lot.
I also see a lot of new mechanics, such as directives, implemented that really help. However, every season can use improvements, so I'm here to help with my opinion regarding that!


First of all, game difficulty.
Games being difficult, especially by you, is nothing new. However, I will say that this particular season, felt extremely difficult.
However, looking at the endings more clear, I feel that it's not the objective that was difficult at all. The difficulty was in the chaos (heh, what a thing for me to be negative about). The problem I personally found was just how much chaos was going on in every direction you went, that seemed to really cloud the original objective to just escape.

Looking at the escape paths, they honestly just aren't that bad. Like at all.
I've seen several of those myself, the radio, the map to escaping, the past of Steins daughter.. But with the werewolves raging war, soul device, armies and necromancers; it just felt a bit hard to even think for a few seconds to be able to succeed.

And that's where the only complaint comes in, which I'm sure you're well aware about.
The season went from a good pace, to a rushed pace. And I understand fully the reason as well, with school and such.

I understand you say that me and Sova personally shouldn't have had more then 2 days a boss, which is fine, and I'm not even looking at this at our impossible objective light (which I would have been confident enough to do), but in the fact that there was no breathing room even with that. 2 days a boss, jumping from one to the next to the final, honestly is just far too fast paced for any murder mystery game.

But not just that, we went from days in the mansion with little chaos, days in a vamp fortress where we all started to move the story forward, to bam wars and chaos and the world finally opening up for us, but it was overwhelming.

For this, I just want to emphasis that the pacing simply made the difficulty far too exhausting. I was an extremely active player, and I got very overwhelmed very fast. I can only imagine the less active players. And even with high activity, so much was going on that it honestly felt like I wasn't doing anything to prevent a thing, spending all my time and effort to stop what's in front of me that I never got to move a foot forward. And the game ended with me feeling like I hadn't moved a single step since the game got this weird pacing, it's a bit more of a personal issue, but it was simply extremely difficult to deal with.

So yeah, tl;dr: the games extremely fast pacing made the difficulty spike to absurd levels, and made the game very difficult to play, albeit still enjoyable.


Anyway.

Next I want to talk about directives.
Directives were a really cool feature, it's where the Mastermind helps point you in the right direction with information you learn, since some people won't see plot the right way sometimes. It helps slower players catch up easily, and I think it was a great addition.
What I don't like, however, is that players are more compelled to do directives simply because they don't know what else to do.
For this reason, I feel there should be brancing directives. For example, "Kill Stein, Frame Stein for a murder, convince Stein to become your ally", something like that. I feel there should have been multiple options at parts, to allow us to purse our own path.

Speaking of that.
I do feel like ghost route should have been more self explanatory.
I knew what I was going through, and I get that you warn the player that the difficulty is hard. But having one exact direct route can really kill motivation really fast.

Difficult objective or not, if I'm having fun, I'll do it. And killing bosses did sort of line up with my goals, so I just went with it. Sadly fast pacing disallowed me to actually play my character at all for the second half of the game, but I ranted enough about that.

The issue though is, even if I don't mind a challenge, any more passive character would have wandered in there and probably not played anymore due to basically getting a You Lose screen.
I simply feel you should tone down on the impossible objectives, I understand they're a common thing with you and I had a lot of fun, but this one in particular had a lot of consequence to probably half the cast.


Map was very exciting, plot was very well explained and there was huge improvement to presentation to make the player understand it better, and the NPCs felt more fair and balanced. Fights were very excited, and the game encouraged quite a lot of cooperation (for better or for worse)

I'd say one of the better seasons by far

[Chatt]

Super fun season from what I played of it.

Map: Due to my own actions I only got to see the mansion but if the rest of the map was that level of detail + plot then it's 10/10 as usual. It's the bar for other maps.

Plot: Interesting, not my cup of tea with vampires and what-not but still cool. Only issue I had was that the things we were working toward could be 100% shat on by someone else in one swoop, but that's the nature of the game, I suppose.

Trials and Murders: Ah, here's my main issues. I only could participate in 1 trial and investigation and for the first time, I try-harded the hell out of it. And I got quite far. I figured out most of what happened in the murder included the entire murder process. However, for some reason, people hoarded information. And before I could ask people or accuse anyone, plot completely interfered in the trial. This, imo, is completely wrong. It trivialized the murder. It was at least brought back up later, but then punishment for murder was simply non-existant. Punishment for arson was worse than murder lol.

But yea, that's my trial*****fest comment bunch. As always, your season was a joy to play when I did have the time.