sorry i kinda ruined her with my shading :/ i never know when to quit

anyway! here's a lisa i made as a warm up<3 her being a burnt-out college kid is so dear to me. she's back to jorvik stables on a mental health break when she meets the other soul riders. in my universe/au they're older than in the og games mostly because i grew up with them and now i'm all grown up so so must they be

So. Um. Sixth hammer mention by Abigail today. I am clawing at the walls

For the uninitiated: the sixth hammer has been mentioned before once, in the legend awakens. Theyre the group that sentenced Rosalinda.

a botanical survey of marchenghast + the dens of nicchus & mahr, because i think it's super neat that they designed unique dens for them and then scattered them through the forest. super fun detail.

this one was tricky because there's so much in marchenghast... so this is by no means exhaustive. it's really no wonder my game is so laggy there. it was actually marchenghast that first got me thinking about this, because as i was riding around i was noticing different recognizable species (eg. oaks, something like a huge hart's tongue fern, brambles with blackberries growing on them, etc).

ahahahah... how abt 𝘯 𝘰 ? 😀

i feel like it was not th@ difficult but i also did it years ago so i could b wrong 😐

still tho. don't.

my first post on this came off as an extremely strong opinion but i actually barely remember anything

If you look at the old SSO ridethrough website you can see that there are quests that make zero sense to include as part of the pre-requisites, namely the random german tourists. This hasn’t changed at all, I can confirm as I did a complete playthrough of the main quest and all side quests in 2020-2021 that were available at the time for recording and research. I genuinely tested a bunch of things trying to see if it was true on what let me unlock Epona and for some stupid reason those tourists are required as well as Dino Valley which you don’t actually need to enter normally or interact with Nic at all for Epona or the main quest until the newest Fripp quest. It’s because of those portals.

I love that Epona at the time it was released pushed the boundaries of the game but as a hobby dev myself, I have huge problems with the fact that it’s not only incomplete and continues to be so but also was horrendously set up. Normally when developers add new content they teach the player the game mechanics and make it ramp up as you learn it then test you on your skills. Epona doesn’t work this way, it throws tons of new mechanics, riddles, ect at you that are used once or twice then discarded. Some of these are surprisingly difficult for children (the originally intended audience and arguably the still main target demographic of this game) and it makes me question who decided to implement these things.

It’s not bad gameplay in and of itself, but rather the whole setup, unlocking the quest to access Epona, the actual method of getting there and playing it needs a severe overhaul. I can’t say I expect the team to have time or permission to give it the rehaul it deserves but if they can at least remove some of the weird quest requirements and maybe make the process at least make sense then I’ll be very happy with the changes. 

There was a severe lack of communication to the player to the point that people constantly have to access outside sources on how to continue the game. That’s not okay in any game including SSO. Harder or tougher is not always better, it’s when a game is properly put together, teaches the player, lets them build upon what they learn and then challenges them, that’s good game development. We have tutorials in games for a reason, you shouldn’t have to look everything up to understand how to play it or complete it.

If you’re interested in some great videos about complexity in games and building upon previous mechanics here’s some I found were fascinating:

GMTK’s Level Design in Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze

Extra Credits’ Tutorials That Don’t Talk Down To You

Extra Credits’ Easy Games - What Happened to Hardcore Games?

Hi,

As a sso lore sucker I've found it incredibly hard to find some of the original sources, even the instagram comics. I mean, they're all published and still available but you need to scroll soooo far back, especially for the older ones. And since they continue to post, you'll just have to scroll further with time.

Therefore I've set my sights on creating a library of all the sso instagram comics, and you can find links below the cut!

Not all the comics have actual names, not as far as I can tell at least, and in those cases I've just for this library/masterpost's sake created my own. Feel free to reach out if I've missed any official name.

Find all the comics below the cut!

(I will update this post as I upload more comics)