It really has become clear to me that I’ve been too ambitious with art content. The game sprawls across too many environments, too many locations, it’s simply too much of a strain on my resources. If I had to start again I’d set everything in a single city location.
For that reason, I’ve been doing something lately that is a bit painful, but necessary. I’ve taken the pruning sheers to SoW. What that entails is attempting to cut planned locations/environment types and shifting quests/plot to other locations (places where I already have much of the environment artwork needed). For example, the starting city location was supposed to be Korrinport, from there you’d be able to travel to Tyver, the capital city of Athar, or visit the town of Sarenbosch, home of Torvaire University. Now, those three locations have been folded into each other, the combination city being named Korrinport and housing Torvaire University within it. That location is where you start the game, it’s also the primary game hub, and you will return to it many times throughout the game.
This change means reworking the main storyline, which was supposed to span locations in a number of nations (with different environment styles), to use the art I have. In certain cases this means dramatic changes to the plot and backstory to make that work. Some locations you were supposed to visit you may just hear about now, others have had to be nuked from the plot completely. Some of the information I’ve already shown you will be changing, I’m sorry about that. And I’m dropping multiple race selections, you can now only play as an Atharan, a fairly standard human type, in order to reduce the player avatar art burden.
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