As Parisa's writer and original concepter, I wanted to explain a little about how I ended up handling her character and the associated "Cure" plotline with this update, so I wrote up the bulleted list that was featured. The list was meant to give a sort of "behind the scenes" look not only about what we wanted from that plotline, but why we decided not to pursue it. It was by no means meant to be a list of excuses or reasons to make us give up, but a view inside our development approach. Yes, there were things we had to triage simply because we didn't have the funding (because money = time and staff), but I'd honestly like to stress that the key reason we decided not to pursue the "cure" was not chiefly because of that. Honestly speaking, as someone who came up with it - and did fight for it for quite a while - as the game progressed, it seemed less and less like it fit with our feel for the project. When it got to the point where I found I was more worried about what to do with Parisa's character than what the "cure" would mean for the game and the world it was in, I honestly reevaluated the mechanic and found it was something I didn't feel fit anymore either.
To those of you who really feel contrary to that - that the "cure" needed to be in and we robbed you of a potentially positive storyline - I'm sorry you feel that way, and I'm sorry if you feel like we shorted you somehow. That was obviously in no way our intention. And if you wanna blame someone about it not being in the game, guys, this one's on me, because in the end I looked at what it gave to the game as a whole and I felt like it did more undermining than building, and I let it go, and it felt more honest to do that than keep it in. Trust me, I fight like hell for my features, and as the driving force behind this one the only thing that made me stop was ME. The bulleted list was my own want to talk to everyone about it.
If in the end you really want to believe there's a cure out there, and your team makes it happen - I'd never dream of stopping you. As an actual mechanic in Dead State, I'm afraid a cure doesn't and won't ever exist - and that's a call we're making thematically, not just mechanically. It was never a point that the game had been building to. And while it might seem pretty damn bleak that there's no fix or answer, we'd prefer to think that it's just a harder question of how people will get by - and like to think they'll make it work.
...
What I really wanted to pull out of Parisa's character was that she's obsessive - but not, say, on the level where she's beyond all hope. She reaches a point where she has to break it to herself that things aren't possible - and I wanted to give the player a choice to let her keep studying things, or to find a new path for her life. Mechanically speaking I aimed to also offer this to players who wanted to get some more people who were potentially useful in the field, versus those who wanted to keep her as Science-focused... and thematically, what people were willing to do with someone who essentially let them down.
On a personal note - I know several scientists (among them a neurochemist and a microbiologist), and I've known people with terminal or lifelong illnesses. The more I thought about Parisa ACTUALLY curing the disease, versus real-world efforts on diseases that have so much research and information on them and the fact that THOSE aren't cured... it felt less real and more hokey to me. Like, it's entirely reasonable for Parisa to be obsessed enough to actually think she could do it, but what's more honest and exciting as a writer and a designer is to see what people do when she fails.
MECHANICALLY speaking, though, if it's still pretty unclear that she'll ever find it - I tried to imply that she'd be studying the illness but knows she can't really find a cure ("...when I have time... I'll keep going with my research. Maybe just knowing a bit more about our viral enemy will make it easier to deal with.") - but if the general feel from folks is that things are too vague, that's my bad as a writer and I'll try to tweak it to make things a little more apparent.
Get off your high horse. Maybe he hasn't intended it, but I'm not talking about a ~muh happy ending~, I'm talking about existing pointers in those lore bits and such. They suggest more intricate conspiracy that we actually got in the game. Also ending was rather abrupt and it really seemed that their money run out and they were forced to end the game somehow, cutting corners and content with it.
