I'm a firm believer in the philosophy that you CANNOT please everyone who plays your game, but... if someone seems to enjoy your game but points a finger at an area of a game (or even an entire portion) and says "this sucks" then steps should be taken to make that part of the game as fun as the portions that do seem enjoyable.

So here is my situation. The first several hours of Blackmoon Prophecy are clearly less enjoyable than the latter portions of the game. While I've taken a few steps to make some parts better (reducing the number of maps in some of the early caves, making dialogue more coherent, etc.), there is only so much that I can do without feedback because Blackmoon Prophecy is MY baby, so I'm going to love it regardless of any issues and will obviously overlook imperfections that you guys pick out pretty easily just because I won't see them as easily.

What I want to do is improve some areas of the game to make the story flow better and to prevent players from getting bored or frustrated. Here are my current ideas that I might implement in addition to anything that you guys may pitch.

1. Make the Hillsdale quest (killing monsters in the desert and then using the underground passage) completely OPTIONAL. This would result in a new path being cleared in the mountains southwest of town for the player to pass straight through. The whole Hillsdale chain of events would instead end in some pretty useful treasures and perhaps a cutscene or something. Maybe interactions between Elina and Nobumasa to flesh out their stories a little more.

2. Teleport the player back to the start of the majority of dungeons after completing them (except for those that are pretty short).

3. Remake some of the early caves. The newer caves that I've been adding lately, such as Bafsk Subterrane and Mt. Figaro, have been significantly more interesting than the early caves of Blackmoon Prophecy. I may remap some of the older caves to give them added personality and make them more enjoyable to pass through. The Cave of Surt and Trei Catacombs are probably massive borefests for a lot of people. That needs to be fixed for sure and I intend on doing just that. Having multiple cave dungeons is fine, they just can't all look identical and have no interesting features. That's the problem with the early caves of Blackmoon Prophecy.

4. Give Vahn a little bit more to do. I think I want to give him an attack called Armor Breaker or something, and an increase of about 10 to his max MP at the start wouldn't hurt either.

5. More cutscenes. When there's nothing AT ALL to break up the endless roaming from point A to point B to point C I can understand how some players may lose focus a bit. I may add a few cutscenes here and there to remind players of what is happening in the story, where they're going next, or how the characters are feeling. These events increase in frequency as the game progresses, but the early portions rely too much on the player drawing their conclusions about what's happening and how the characters are feeling.


Those are a few of my ideas. I want to know what issues you guys have with Branch and early/middle Lenadia portions of the game so that I can work on them and make them more enjoyable.

Now, I'm not looking to do anything REALLY major like completely change the dialogue or personality of any of the characters and I don't want to scrap any parts of the game because this beast is finished, I don't want to go back to the drawing board and feel like the game isn't done. This is all about improving parts of the game and making them better.

So please, fire away. I'd love to hear all suggestions that you guys may have.