Neat. Will definitely keep an eye on this, even if the first few hours of my playtime would just be going through every single worker/fed bio and seeing the lore updates. Then I'll inevitably try either a ZEN run, (old faithful) or some sort of 'Rookies Only' run, or some sort of 'fuck you I'm adding Fox McCloud as a worker because I am god' run.
I have good ideas, see.
The creative/booking meeting already sounds like a neat addition. A half dozen 'trusted aides' butting heads sounds like absolute chaos. If there's one thing I hope gets reworked, it's the developmental/child companies being tweaked to feel like actual developmental runs rather than just... A slightly smaller company tied to another. Felt like a real missed opportunity. I want specific developmental goals, like. I don't know. Something along the lines of specific callup conditions. Like, for example:
- 'In three months we're calling up the worker with a high charisma stat.' You can either start having your most charismatic guy put people over, or try to convince the main roster to accept another worker in lieu of this since ditching your top charisma guy right now might kill your best storyline. Whether this requests fails or not depends on your relationship with the main roster and how they feel about you and your booking. Or...
- 'We need a monster heel for the summer, who can you suggest.' And you can choose which of your guys you're going to sacrifice to the main roster den and never see again. Or...
- 'We're doing nothing with this lowcard guy, have him for six months and get his ass to improve a bit will ya.' And now you have to look after, fuckin', Justin Sensitive who is kinda whew but he's got that main roster popularity and he's not leaving until you can get his basics/psychology to at least a 65.
Even call up conditions like 'Main Roster will only call up workers with a 60 or more in psychology' or 'Main Roster will only call up a maximum of four workers every year, only in December, based on most popular' or even just 'Call ups are completely random' for the chaos factor. Goals like 'Call ups will favor star quality/popularity/best workers/win-loss record to determine who gets called up' or 'MR is high on this guy, book him strong.' Just these small lil' tweaks and additions to make it feel like you're running a developmental company, with it's own goals, needing to work with the requests of the parent company, to feel like an actual developmental fed.
But that aside 2020 was great and I'll be happily looking forward to this one too.