Hello everyone!
First of all, thank you to everyone who has picked up Mask of the Rose. We had a bit of a rough start, with a lot of feedback about the difficulty of adequately completing goals in the time available in particular, but we’re hopeful that we can make some changes that will improve the play experience significantly for you straight away, and follow those up with some that will require a bit more time to get right.
We really appreciate the show of faith in your comments and reviews, and hope with a little time we can bring Mask of the Rose to a delightful state for your enjoyment.
What’s new?
Extended Seasons
In the Constance update, the seasons of Confessions and Yule are both twice as long: fourteen days instead of seven. This is in response to hearing that you felt that you couldn’t get your teeth into enough of the stories in the game. We’ve now let you loose, as it were, and look forward to hearing about everything you get up to with your newfound freedom!
Hand in hand with this, there are pacing changes to the opening of the game which will help new players focus on the elements that it’s essential to take on board before proceeding with the second act: census taking and storycrafting.
Lastly, as you now have more time, you will no longer be invited to dismiss what you might call ‘economy quests’ at the end of the season of Confessions (for example, closing yourself off to census taking, which is one of the income sources that you might want to keep hold of).
We don't expect the update to cause any mischief with your save games, but you might want to consider starting a fresh run to best enjoy the longer play time.
Detective Signposting
We have also had much heart-rending feedback around being unable to save Archie, so we’re making some tweaks to Investigation:
- Talking to characters about murder theories which include unknown elements is useful for progressing your investigation, but we’ve heard people were finding it counterintuitive. Now, during the storycrafting tutorial, Archie will ask you to demonstrate using unknowns in your stories in order to highlight that it’s the right thing to try.
- After Archie’s arrest, it is now much clearer that there are multiple ways to save him, and that some are more challenging to achieve than others.
- All characters will now be up for helping you with the investigation as a matter of course, but with slightly different dialogue about why.
- You can also now take your murder theories to Harjit as a free action, and he’ll remind you to try using unknowns if relevant.
Full patch notes are also available, though there isn’t too much more to add; by necessity most of this week has been focused on the above and less on bug fixes.
Forthcoming Patch Possibilities
We’d like to see how you get to grips with the longer playtime before making more adjustments, but these are some of the things that we’ve heard this week which we’re thinking about.
We’re hearing that initial flirtations are happening too early, and you’re being asked to form an impression about someone romantically before you know them well enough. We’d like to address this in tandem with potential changes to how much you can change your wardrobe/presentation to give the impression you want in a scene. Now there’s less time pressure on going shopping for outfit items, you might be able to put yourself across in more precise ways from the get go, and we want to see how all of that interacts before we decide whether to make changes to any of it.
The last piece of significant feedback we’ve had has been around saving. At the moment the game autosaves whenever you return to your attic activities.
- People feel the first autosave is too late in the game; we’ll look into this!
- There are some points in the game where it goes some while without an autosave; we will investigate where we can add a natural break to include additional saves.
However, we aren't likely to introduce manual saving at this juncture. This is because we need to maintain some amount of predictability of save files to ensure that the updates we release are compatible with playthroughs in progress. Perhaps in the future, when other substantive changes that would risk save compatibility are complete, we may be able to consider this.
A note on fast forwarding and replays
Some players have asked if there could be a "skip scene" option, or if the fast forward mode could automatically stop when you get to text you have read before in another playthrough. Unfortunately, this isn't really possible for Mask of the Rose. The way Mask generates text is a bit too complex for this to work; rather than set speeches, it uses a combination of pre-written lines and lines that are generated programmatically from written components. Many lines will appear in different orders, or only trigger if your current character has a certain background, costume, personality type, knowledge in the game, relationship with NPCs and so-on. Aside from the technical complexity of achieving this, it wouldn't be a great play experience; imagine the fast forward stopping every couple of lines because you'd never encountered a particular aside or reflection in that conversation before.
We’re cognisant that, once your pacing concerns are addressed, other new reflections will bubble up as you experience the game in a new light! So all of the roadmap plans above are subject to influence from incoming feedback.
You’ve been fantastically honest and supportive thus far and I hope that you’ll continue to send in your thoughts and bug reports.
Stay tuned for news of further updates, which we’ll of course announce here and on Discord, twitter, etc.
This Friday at 8pm BST (UTC +1) we’ll be live streaming the new update! Perhaps to coincide with something else very exciting that’s also happening on Friday, who knows. I hope to see you there!