User blog:Ziscor/CPR's Continuity

Disclaimer:

'''This is just a personal post for me to write my thoughts into (whenever I find the time for it), so don't mind if it sounds like I'm expecting things from the game. That's not my intention, nor my expectation. Let's get into it.'''

[EDIT: Well, things just turned a little too depressing now, didn't they? This post sounds a bit more vicious now, and perhaps ominous of what ended up happening, and when. No idea if it's even relevant anymore, since I didn't uphold my own promise to update this little speculation page. I hope it's at least a good way to reminisce over what was the high point of CPR and what-not. And for what it's worth, I'm a little sorry it had to turn out this way.]

Where Is The Game Going?
Club Penguin Rewritten started in February, but there are few traces of a deeper continuity in the game yet. Considering this is one of the fastest growing CPPS alive today, I think this would be a good time to look at where the game might be going with things and how it can grow into it's own identity.

 For the 6 months it's been around, CPR has seen mix-matched concepts from Club Penguin's initial Disney-era, but where the line is drawn is up to anyone. To explain my point, consider the Water Party from 2008 which has made a feature, yet on the other hand, we're getting the EPF (not to mention Herbert is out of his containment, so a lot of events related to that loom in the horizon; perhaps even Operation:Blackout?) as well as the PSA. The best of both worlds. This easily explains the oddly fun ideology currently driving CPR forward: it's the best of CP all taken from various time periods, mish-mashed into one weird alternate version of the game. What is defined as 'best' is up for debate, obviously.

Let's look at how to explain this weird existence of things, which seemingly doesn't make sense. The Several Islands Proposition The first idea one can propose to explain this strange existence, both from an in-game perspective, and for the larger CPPS scene as a whole is what I'd also call the 'Discount-Multiverse Proposition'. The basics for this idea are as follows: While this idea doesn't explain a lot (specially the strange recurrences of events already having taken place on the original 'Club Penguin' island, like Herbert escaping containment) but it does give us some ground to start from.
 * The planet consists of several identical snowy islands (among non identical ones)
 * Around 2005, one of these islands was populated by penguins. Said penguins proceeded to call their island 'Club Penguin'
 * All the way up to the existence of the first CPPS, no penguins left the island except for specific events.
 * The first CPPS was a few penguins leaving the island to look for new ones to make their own. More and more penguins spread out to more and more islands to populate them with what they felt was the best 'island'
 * By the February of 2017, upon hearing that the first original island would be shutting down it's doors, a few of these penguins moved to yet another of these seemingly infinite number of islands, and called it 'Club Penguin Rewritten'

The Current Roadmap
To come back to the original question, where really is the game going? From what we have to go on since it's start in the month of February, it seems Club Penguin Rewritten will reuse old Club Penguin assets until it runs out of unique enough party rooms, music, clothing items and igloo items. The next obvious question pursuing this tangent would be, how far ahead is that point? Quite frankly, most likely very very far ahead: so far, in fact, that I doubt the game will even be around for then, but I'll get more into this later. We haven't treaded farther than 2012, from my understanding, and if that is where one were to draw the line, we've got assets from October of 2005, all the way up to the December of 2012 to work with. This estimate might be off from reality, though, due to the mix-matching elements discussed earlier, which might exhaust the amount of assets down by a year at best or several years at worst.

The current development team seems unlikely to be up to the task of exhausting the entire possible library of assets they can work with, and at a safe estimate, I would give Club Penguin Rewritten, with it's current list of staff members, a full year before the team steps down, passes the mantle to someone else or retires the game entirely.

In all this, is there a possibility for CPR to come up with it's own 'unique' parties? There's not much to indicate this yet, out of the occasional landmark achievement parties, namely the 2,000 Players Celebration Event, 10,000 Players Celebration Event and the 100K Penguin Celebration, which frankly don't add much to the game in the grander scheme.

So is the game even aiming for unique parties? A mere look at the current idea driving the game forward gives me an answer in the negative. I have little to back up my answer beyond things like the bit of text under the game window saying "Club Penguin Rewritten is an education instance" and the evident mixture of the "fond" things we remember about Club Penguin. Things like the 'Improvement Project' have come back, to give a taste of what it must have possibly felt when the original Club Penguin had it; the PSA has been brought with the EPF in a weird mix to bring the best of both, the Dojo has been dug out to give a taste of how the inception of the concept of ninjas, Card Jitsu and everything since came into being on the original Club Penguin; and this is probably not where things are going to end.

The Problem
"But penguins get to experience the birth of the Dojo once more! The Improvement Project is a thing again! The PSA and the EPF coexist (well, they did for a bit in CP, but you surely get my point) together! Isn't CPR the best CPPS out there? It's got so much iconic stuff from CP and that feeds my nostalgia really well! What could possibly be the problem?"

If I may be frank, here's the thing: CPR running out on fuel too soon. There's only once that you get to recreate the birth of the Dojo; there's only once you can create an 'Improvement Project' (unless we get CPR:IP 2 or something, and so on); there's only once you'll be able to do Herbert taking over the island and making Club Herbert Rewritten. These are ideas that were years apart on the original CP. When you got to these moments, they felt truly special. They felt like landmark events.

When CPR is aimed at the nostalgia-driven late-teens that are depressed the game they barely touched leading up to it's eventual shut down, these moments are what the audience is dying for. Naturally, it makes sense to deliver on these expectations, however this leaves the game dead in the water in almost a year at worst, and maybe another year after that at best. There's simply not enough good significant moments in CP's history that can be recreated to keep CPR alive for long. Once all the good ideas have been exhausted, I expect the majority of the audience to lose interest.

In reading this, one might question if this truly is a problem. What if the game isn't meant to go on for long? What if CPR only intends to go on for a year or two, and then disband? I find this very likely, as I highly doubt the staff hasn't noticed this problem I've pointed out. Things become even more likely when one considers that the current list of staff members will most likely move on to pursue higher education, or work daily jobs. At that point, working on the game might not be feasible, and quite possibly to deal with this, our dear creators of CPR may have already decided on how long their little project is to go.

I felt the above possibility needed to be considered, but to get back to the problem, where the game expects to go on for longer than year or two, what needs to be done?

The Possible Solution (?)
So now that I've explained what I find as the fundamental problem, how do we fix it? One of the more obvious solutions seems to be to start "padding" the distance between the significant events CPR aims to recreate, with more light-hearted events: milder parties as well as longer durations between parties when the island simply looks "vanilla".

In itself, this would be enough to extend the game's life by a year, but to be even more hopeful, let's consider something more exciting: original content. Though against my assumed idea of the game's supposed nostalgia-driven philosophy, this would extend the life of the game extraordinarily. Currently, it is my impression that the staff simply isn't equipped well enough to go through with an ambitious plan like this, so this idea might not seem possibly currently.

Regardless, if the team were to devote some time, I wager at least one unique and original party could be executed in a year, which would go to great lengths in lending CPR it's own identity.

That will be it for my current additions to this blog post. As a personal note to myself:  I expect to add more to this blog.