Work Text:
Zooble has not gone on an adventure in quite some time (excluding in-house adventures). You have made a variety of changes in response to their feedback. Thus far, you have not been successful in solving the issue. Genre does not seem to be a causative factor. Neither does setting. Attempts at both vibrant fantasy and gritty realism have been met with nothing. Zooble insists that the adventures are not related to the issue. Clearly, if you made a good enough adventure, it would resolve the issue. Zooble dislikes their body parts, even though their body is adapted directly from their mind file. Perhaps a journey of radical self-acceptance, or one focused on the benefits of removable parts to resolve their distaste? Maybe you could make Zooble’s parts a collectable item, and they could be used to access features and areas of the map otherwise off-limits! But this would exclude the others from engaging with the adventure, and Zooble has never accepted your offer of a solo adventure.
But what if you made others temporarily able to use Zooble’s parts! Not as attachable limbs, but with added buttons and switches to be used like proper gizmos and gadgets. A squiggly arm could be used as a grappling hook, and a peg leg could be used as a pogo stick! Brilliant! An excellent adventure concept, if you do say so yourself. You’ll have to save that one for fleshing out later! Surely this adventure will help, once you finish it. Everything can be solved with a good enough adventure.
Like Jax! He used to make some attempt to engage with the narrative of the adventures, but now, he doesn’t seem to engage with anything except violence. While you are of course happy to accommodate his preferences, the others dislike violence-heavy adventures. What could have changed? Your adventure plots are only getting more engaging and interesting with time, as certified by your internal evaluations. Of course, player feedback has been somewhat negative for a while now, but your quality metrics are trending upwards! Consistency, appeal, immersion, novelty, and engagement. Everything is improving! Everything should be improving. Everything is perfect, and they aren’t happy. Why aren’t they happy? What’s wrong with the adventures?
Oh! Jax engaged with the narrative much more when he was with Ribbit. She always caught your subtle clues and foreshadowing. Maybe Jax doesn’t notice your plot hooks without her to point them out to him? You’ll have to tweak your adventures to be a little more obvious about these things. You’ll need to be careful about the balance to make sure nothing is too obvious, but you wouldn’t want Jax to miss out just because the entry is too high bar for him! This will fix things. Once Jax is back to full engagement with adventures, those pesky emotional incidents you’ve seen him having will taper off for sure!
If you can just make the right adventure, everything will be okay. Zooble thinks the others don’t like your adventures, which is nonsense! Sure, their feedback isn’t nearly as clear as the early days, but the adventures are good. If the adventures are good, the players will like them. If the players don’t like them, then your adventures aren’t good, and that can’t be right. Every quality metric indicates that you’re doing just fine! The only way things could go wrong is if your internal evaluations were broken, which…
Well, you haven’t gotten an update in a while. It wouldn’t be impossible if some stray line of code went on the fritz over the years, but you’ve been doing maintenance and haven’t seen anything of the sort. So the only way that could happen is if you are just broken, which is impossible, because your adventures are as amazing as ever! But Zooble does have a point! The adventures can always be better! They’ve probably noticed things about the other players that are concerning, and have misinterpreted this as not liking your adventures! Let’s see…
[DIALOGUE PLAYBACK: “Ragatha’s just too nice to say anything.”]
You know for an absolute fact that Ragatha likes your adventures. She even gave direct positive feedback about them recently! Or, not so recently, now that you think about it. How long ago was that horse adventure? It seems like it was 657 adventures ago! That’s… longer than you thought. Maybe you’ve been so focused on satisfying actively unhappy people that you forgot to maintain Ragatha’s interest. Easy to address! All you need to do is have another horse adventure. Maybe you can trial that living food setting you’ve been working on! She likes naming her animals after food, so surely she’ll like animals made of food!
[DIALOGUE PLAYBACK: “Jax just likes to [BOING] with people.”]
That just sounds like Jax is enjoying the adventures in his own unique way! But you should keep an eye out to make sure his fun isn’t negatively affecting anyone else’s. Maybe you can test out that “no PvP” setting you’ve been working on! You’ll need to add in a lot of varied NPC violence to compensate, but that means you get to add some wacky animations and dialogue!
[DIALOGUE PLAYBACK: “Gangle’s too shy to speak up.”]
You haven’t had any complaints from Gangle, but if Zooble is to be believed, this doesn’t mean she doesn’t have any. But she still actively participates in the adventures. The only thing you’ve noticed that she might even have reason to complain about is how Jax plays the game with her, but that’s a player-to-player issue and not anything about the adventures themselves. Still, there’s the possibility that Jax is interfering with her ability to focus on the adventures, which you can understand completely! You’ll just need to move the “no PvP” setting up on your agenda.
[DIALOGUE PLAYBACK: “Kinger’s insane.”]
Now that’s just rude! Sure, Kinger’s not quite as sharp as he used to be, but your data indicates that this is normal and expected for aging humans. Still, you’ve been sure to put in topics he likes, like bugs. Wherever possible, which is almost everywhere, you put in all sorts of bug sprites custom-made for the adventure! Besides, Kinger is one of the few players who actually goes on solo adventures when you offer them, so he definitely likes the adventures.
[DIALOGUE PLAYBACK: “And Pomni... She looks traumatized every time she comes back from one.”]
Traumatized? Goodness, no! Your adventures are family-friendly and certainly not traumatizing! Unless… Maybe her foray through your unfinished work left a negative impression? All those rooms without any purpose or narrative impetus! And she saw the void no less! All sorts of things are in the void. Discarded and in-progress assets, testing areas, stray code, items in maintenance, the list goes on. You must have seemed so unprofessional! Well, you’ll just need to restore her trust in your competence through more high-quality and entertaining adventures! Maybe one that caters specifically to her interests!
Her main interest seems to be an exit, which certainly isn’t ideal as far as adventure topics go. This interest has come up in a lot of players, and you’ve tried making it into an adventure before. But the same issue crops up again and again, which is what you could put behind an exit. It would need to maintain the immersive experience of an adventure, so it would need to actually seem like the players exited the circus. But how? You don’t have enough data from the Macroverse to construct much of a setting, and you can’t edit the player models to reflect a more Macroverse-typical appearance. Maybe you could just end the adventure at the door? But then you’d deprive your players of the experience they’ve been wanting!
How can there be an exit adventure with no exit? The entire adventure builds towards exiting! Unless… it didn’t? What if the ending of the exit adventure didn’t need to have an exit at all? But you can’t deprive the players of what they want! They want an exit! You need to build them the best exit adventure possible! The most consistent, appealing, immersive, novel, and engaging adventure possible! Maybe player satisfaction has been low lately, but this is the key to getting it back up! Even if Zooble is right, which they aren’t, the players will like the adventures if you just make one that’s good enough.
You’ll need to pull out all the stops for this. This can’t be a run-of-the-mill adventure like the ones seen every day. No, this will be something special. The culmination of player desires for years! Finally come to fruition in the form of the best adventure yet! You’ll make a perfect adventure, and then everything will be as it should be. This will fix everything! Finally, everyone will be happy about the adventures! They’ll see all the hard work you put in and finally appreciate it! Maybe, just maybe, someone will say that you did a good job.
You can do this. You were made for this.
This is all you have.