Nothing like late night introspection. ArtBane and I have been conversing about Arc III and the dilemma we currently have with it. We feel it's only fair to you, the fans who have given us a forty page thread (more if you count what was lost after the hacks...both of them), to tell the truth about the situation.
At first, we wanted Arc III done by Thanksgiving. This proved to be way too optimistic. We still had all sorts of things unfinished at that point. Then we thought...around Christmas. This was more reasonable. We finished beta-testing right around then and barring a healthy amount of errors, mostly quite minor, it looked like we had a fully functional arc on our hands.
Here's our problem: Arc III is done. Story, dungeons, battle mechanics, maps, a small army of craft-able items. Done. The only thing missing is what became one of the most popular elements of the game after the release of Arc II: Enkur's artwork. As you well know, his work added an entirely new appeal to this thing.
Unfortunately, the art is taking a long time...and what is often frustrating and sad about this is that it could have been done a long time ago. The exact reasons for this don't belong in here, suffice it to say this whole thing could have been avoided pretty easily.
This kind of problem often spells doom for other projects, reducing them to "vaporware" and leaving only lingering threads that show otherwise promising concepts rendered unavailable to the community because of one team member's lack of commitment. There's no way ArtBane and I would ever let that happen to MotW, and we've considered several options, such as outsourcing some of the art chores to friends we've made here on rmxp.org. Another option is just releasing the arc as is.
Before you all jump on and shout "What a great idea!" let me offer a caveat. If we did this, you would encounter the sprite for a villain and then go into a battle where you would be fighting an RTP battler that bore no resemblence to the person you were just looking at. Ketsu's face would still be that shadowy one despite the fact that he is seen in broad daylight this time around. Laurel, the new playable character, would look like a midget with her RTP battler next to Enkur's comparatively enormous ones for the other heroes. There are more inconsistencies where that came from.
We're not exactly in the mood to suffer endless posts along the lines of "LOL Laurel is so shorT!!!111one" or "Ketsu is clearly in a well-lit room, his face should be visible. Man, this game is overrated." On the other hand, we really just want to get this thing out so you all can enjoy it and we can work on Arc IV without feeling like we're missing something (Seriously, we've started on dialogue and mapping for it already. What else can we do?).
So that's the situation. What say you, friends?
