OWA Direction Poll 5: City Planning (Patreon)

Here I go again with another poll. As most of you know, the city of Attis plays a significant part of the story's setting in the game. Players get to explore the streets and find new and interesting things about the city as they go along as they interact with the people and places that exist within (or get jeered at and/or fucked).

My question goes out to the players of how you'd like to see the city of Attis evolve in the way it helps with telling the story. At current, it serves as a hub for a lot of the weirdness within the game, but I'm generally looking toward what people would like more of.

To explain the choices:

Original Attis Design: Back in the day, when the game was still very much in its infancy, all locations were available at once. There was no travel screen or fear of getting lost, everything was very much to the point with no frills aside from milling around outside of the building you were going to. The advantage of this was that it was expedient and cut right to the chase. The con was that there was no romance in it and it wasn't conductive to creative incidents.

Current Attis Design: The current product. This is where a player can go to a District, walk toward a location they knew about, and sometimes encounter an event depending on their luck. If they spent enough time going through the District, they would be able to unlock further locations in the city. The advantage of this is that it rewards diligence and enables players to get a full bodied experience when roaming the city. The con is that the unlocking of new locations isn't immediately understandable and can be a bit clunky at times.

Proposed Attis Design: The idea I propose would be that the player gets to traverse the streets of Attis, beat by beat, in a free roaming map of the city. Every street corner and strip of land would be accessible from the start, with only the players' curiosity limiting their engagement. Streetwise would be useful in marking key locations important to the player so that they could fast travel to them from a special menu. The advantage is that it would allow players to free roam the city and give them a greater deal of control over what they get to see in the content while possessing a degree of control over fast travel to places of interest and limiting the cumbersomeness of the mapping. The con is that it would be a greater undertaking to complete and that some players might get lost in the city (actually, that's part of the intention, especially if you're playing Bimbo Phaera).

Nuclear Option: This would simply be to say "screw any interaction with the city at all." Cutting it all out in favor of just having the game's setting be the city, but no actual interactions therein. On the one hand, this would drastically decrease the amount of work done on the cities and enable more story content, but on the other hand, a lot of the charm of the city would generally disappear as the game at that point is put on rails and runs the risk of becoming very samey for every player.