Final Question Unclear "You aren't going to harm the king, are you?"

[locusofthought]

"You aren't going to harm the king, are you?" ["Yes" or "No"].
How about "Yes (don't kill king)" and "no (don't kill the king)"? (Yes, you can stop reading here if you wish.)

It's really annoying to complete the game without killing a single guard, on a singe run, on my first playthrough, looting every(?) chest, crafting one of everything, using naught but knife and whip, only to be foiled at the last moment when I want to say "Yes, I won't kill the king", and the game decides to be tricky. (Yes, I have already re-done it with the chapter checkpoints and not killed the king.)

It's a simple rule: use "Yes" and "No" for interrogatories that are clearly written and have no ambiguity, The interactable dialog is already quite different from the voice/text lines of the characters in that Shadwen say "I will", not "Yes". Changing the text of the answers to that interactable dialog should be simple. Frankly, I'm surprised that so long after the game is released, it is still written so unclearly. Any solution to make clear that "yes" means "kill" would be welcome.

I've not flipped through the 357 discussion threads to see if anyone else raised this issue, nor do I plan to check, at least not until after I eat, since I skipped lunch to finish this off.

Apologies if this offends anyone.

[JLarja]

Originally posted by locusofthought:

Changing the text of the answers to that interactable dialog should be simple.

I'm not disagreeing with your point, but please note that the game is released for five languages. Changing anything localized is not simple, and will cost money.

Originally posted by locusofthought:

Frankly, I'm surprised that so long after the game is released, it is still written so unclearly.

Once a game is released, there's a small window of time during which patches are relatively easy to make. It gets harder as time passes, so you really shouldn't be surprised. If it wasn't fixed during the first six months, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.

Most of the people involved with Shadwen development haven't worked at Frozenbyte for a good while, and the code was likely last compiled with Visual Studio 2015. The build system used to package the game hasn't been in use for years, and the server doing Shadwen builds was retired even longer ago.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[Shaelle]

Yes, I was about to wrote about exact same issue: from this "Yes" and "No" options I choosed option "Yes, I will not harm the King". But instead assasination sequence started — after which I had to force quit the game, and play final part all over again to get the correct ending. Questions with negation like this one is ambiguous (both answers "yes, I will hurt the King" and "yes, I will not hurt the King" are valid) — while important game choices must be unambiguous, direct and literal.

I see few options how can this can be fixed. You can remove negation from the question (make it something like "Will you harm the King?") — but I do not think this is the best option: this one will not match with Lily's personality very well, in my opinion. Better way to do it, is to expand context of Shadwen's responses. I see three options here: First, you can expand her answers: "Yes, I've gonna harm this bastard!", "No, of course I will not harm the King". Second, you can add descriptions of actual actions in the square brackets: "Yes [kill the king]", "No [spare the king]". And, finally, you can add some icons after the answers: for example, skull / hand with bloodstained dagger and heart / dove.

[Shaelle]

Originally posted by JLarja:

Once a game is released, there's a small window of time during which patches are relatively easy to make. It gets harder as time passes, so you really shouldn't be surprised. If it wasn't fixed during the first six months, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.

Most of the people involved with Shadwen development haven't worked at Frozenbyte for a good while, and the code was likely last compiled with Visual Studio 2015. The build system used to package the game hasn't been in use for years, and the server doing Shadwen builds was retired even longer ago.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

Fair enough, but do you really need to do full build to fix such issue? You mentioned localization to a few languages, and good desing practice is to put things like this into external resources — so, perhaps, you only need to change small part of you external recources?

[JLarja]

Originally posted by Shaelle:

Fair enough, but do you really need to do full build to fix such issue?

No, but the full build is the easy option. It's precisely that once the ability to do full builds is lost, patching gets complicated. To take this example, changing localization is just about editing a text file, committing it to version control and waiting for new build to get submitted to Steam backend. There it can be tested and released to public with a single click of a button.

Without the build system, you need someone to do manual patch, test it manually, upload it to Steam backend manually, carefully test it there (because there's a significant change that you messed up something with all that manual work) and then finally release it to public. Needless to say, not many people know how to do those steps (one reason why we have a build system), so it's also a learning experience. It's not something you can hand out to some intern to handle on their own.

So yeah, you don't need full build to fix any issue, or even to create the game in the first place. It's just the easiest way to handle things.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[Emilynx143]

Possibly, is your first language not English? This yes, no/no, yes thing seems to be more common with people whose native language is not English.

[JLarja]

We are a Finnish game studio, so most of us are native Finnish speakers. That goes for the writer of Shadwen too. We do have some non-Finns employed too, but most of them aren't native English speakers either.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[W[w[w[w]

Same here... Didn't get a calm and quiet achievement because of this