- Aug 31, 2021
- 81
- 267
I think you make some reasonable points about avoiding frustration and tedium for the player, but overall I have issues with this analysis. The biggest problem imo is your suggestions effectively amount to changing the genre of the game. The death-then-restart loop is core to what a roguelike game is. Alleviating this in favour of no true death-state, just never-ending progression with minor setbacks for failure fundamentally changes the whole nature of the game. At that point you might as well just be saying, "I don't like this genre, it should be this other genre instead."
For example, I haven't played these games you're suggesting here (but thanks for the recs! I might check them out), so please correct me if I'm wrong, but these don't actually sound like roguelikes to me. They sound more like at best faintly rogue-lite, taking the ideas of procedural battles/levels, but discarding permadeath entirely.
That is one way to get rid of any tedium induced by permadeath mechanics, but it's crucial to recognize that fans of the roguelike genre actually tend to like the permadeath. As far as we can tell, it seems pretty clear that Scarlet Paper has designed this game from the outset to involve permadeath as a primary mechanic. So if that mechanic is causing tedium for many players (and it's not just because those particular players aren't fans of permadeath games), then the right way to address it is to make the early levels less tedious to play, by introducing more enemy/trap variety, enabling ways for experienced players to move through early sections faster, and so on.
I accept there's many players who would agree with you on this, and it's not necessarily bad advice for a lot of games. But I think there's also a difference in philosophy going on here about what games (and hentai games) are or should be. I don't think all games need to or even should try to accommodate both these types of players. Now, if what the dev cares most about is selling as many copies as possible to the widest audience possible, then sure they'll need to target the lowest-common-denominator of player. But not all games need to or should want to do that, or else we'd live in a pretty bland world.
Maybe that sounds silly to some people, but I do think (at least some) hentai games have the potential to be real works of (pornographic) art that are more than just pure consumer products whose main responsiblity is to "respect theplayers'[consumers'] time andpriorities[demands]".
P.S. I do agree with you that for all these games the porn is the main selling point. That's undoubtedly true, it's what gets hentai game players in the door (including myself). But I don't think that means anything else is secondary. A game can have amazing porn, but if the gameplay is garbage then the game becomes only worthwhile as a glorified image/animation gallery. And I think this is partly the reason so many people on F95 seem to just want gallery unlock codes for every game: because they're used to wading through garbage games with no challenge that are boring, mechanical copy-pastes of each other. So it becomes a self-reinforcing loop, where bad games set poor expectations, and poor expectations lead to pressure on devs to make bad games.
Didn't the dev say he was going to change a shit ton of the gameplay loop in coming updates? I can't remember exactly, but i think he said something about reinforcing the current gameplay loop to some extent.
Also, agree with you on most your points, most h-games have close to no gameplay. Thornsin is one of the few that's managed to do it well. Only other games i could say would have to be Iris, corrupted saviors, or maybe Alien quest eve. Reducing it further would be a great mistake. The game is also not that hard once you get a feel for the movement mechanics, even on the hardest difficulty.
I do wonder why people who just want to look at the sex scenes don't just go on rule 34 vid and just watch gallery vids there, or xvideos. Don't mistake me, i agree a gallery should be in place. But i feel like people are asking for something that's practically already here.
