Feedback: 1.0

[Kamikaze_Llama]

I'm only a little bit into the story; I've just completed all but the last system of Dragon.

1. You can fail to finish the Tutorial, of all things. There's a bug where, on the last part (where you use the slam attack via Spacebar) where the second target doesn't spawn, locking the mission up.

2. Lily's special attack (in space combat) is still too weak. Killian's is much, much better. This is probably going to mean Lily's my least-favorite waifu to level.

3. I'd forgotten just how much Exposition Dump is involved in the first nebula.

4. In general, the space combat is over-tuned for the audience. The Fuccbots, in particular, cause some problems because of the odd camera angle; when they attack from below, the player has almost zero time to react to them, and will take damage. I haven't had serious problems clearing any of the space-combat levels thus far, but I'm an above-average player of these kinds of games. Most people will find these early missions Too Hard, gauranteed.

5. I'm a bit disappointed with the Pandora scenes. They are still non-reactive and most of them don't have controls or an ending; they're Quicktime events without resolution or interaction.

I think this may be the biggest complaint players have, whether they can identify it or not. The animation quality's great, the art's beautiful... but there's no control and it's just a loop. Fixing this, at this late date, is probably impossible, but man, I think you guys needed to go play some old-skool Meet 'n Screw or Super Deep Throat.

The latter, in particular, remains the gold standard for a porn game experience, mechanically, and it's well over a decade old now (and probably pretty obscure).

The sex content in this is more like the static Flash loops of 15 years ago, just done with fancy 3D graphics with a high-quality voice cast. It's fancy erotica... but it's not all that titillating, because the player is so divorced from the action.

I noticed that you folks incorporated the basic idea of interaction into the Studio on the last build I played. It was a start, but it should have been built on and emphasized in Pandora, imo. I think going the route you folks did, artistically, was a mistake.

If there's another game coming after this one, I strongly suggest that you start with the idea that interaction with the characters, starting with simple things like choosing positions or actions and being able to "touch" via mouse-clicks, is iterated over until it shines. This is much, much more important than building yet-another variation on, "monsters boning a hot waifu".

For example, let's say it's a simple, straight sex scene. In classic Meet 'n Screw, you'd choose from 3 positions, 3 different speeds, 3 different finishes. The more polished variations would start with some sort of "touching" or "stripping" mechanic, to build up the sexual tension. Control-wise, it was very very simple and basic- we're still talking looping animations here, but the choices made a huge difference; the player could tell an internal story to themselves; it was Choose Your Own Adventure for a sexual fantasy.

Ideally, you'd be able to hook up multiple Pandora scenes, interact with each in a pretty comprehensive way- camera, mouse-touch, positions, finishes, and boom, you'd have content that people want to return to multiple times, to tell a unique story with, instead of, "well, cool, I've seen that scene, guess I'll grind a bit more to see the rest".

The way it works now, each scene is not connected and there's no build-up; without interactivity there's just passive viewing that doesn't build up the erotic tension in any way.

I'd like to contrast this with one of the other recent big-budget games in this genre, The Genesis Order. It also has these problems of being largely passive experiences, despite its lavish production values. It has scenes that are long enough to have some tension and build-up, however, along with dialogue, and I think it's a slightly better product as a result. It's still not great, though; it ends up being more of a tease more often than not.

That said, neither that nor this quite works as well as the older Flash games did, because they simply don't have the player control that made them compelling, by making the player feel like they were, to some degree, in control of the action.

In the end, simple animated loops, no matter the technology used, aren't very effective mediums for erotica and are an artistic misuse of game technology in particular.

There are also the players who would prefer a lot of dialogue, preferably dialogue with choices that matter. I don't think that's invalid, but it's still mainly passive, which I think is far less effective, given the very real limits on budget for creation of realtime 3D art assets, rigging, etc.

To put it another way, which is more erotic: the buildup of Kay Parker's scenes in Taboo, or a 60-second peep loop from the same time period? They're both passive experiences, but one has a build-up and tension to it that's far more effective; it's not just what we're viewing, it's what happens before the action starts; the context of porn is often what makes it erotic, not the sex act.

In video games, however, there is much more that's possible. In some distant future, there will be games where players give directions to a LLM, building a scene to order in VR. We aren't there yet, and won't be during my lifetime, but it's still very possible to build interactive systems with this medium that take things somewhere interesting.

I feel like you folks approached this stuff as filmmakers, instead of studying these things from the standpoint of game design, and didn't spend enough time looking at the best examples from the past to see what really worked well. Each Pandora scene is a short film loop. The problem here is that loops that don't have enough buildup aren't effective.

Even details of how the camera worked feels very filmmaker-ish; the POV is very locked down, because you wanted a very specific, "best" shot. I think this was a missed opportunity; you should have let the player be the cinematographer and feel that they were participating as much as possible; it wasn't going to add significantly to the cost or time of production to add enough scenery for a scene (and you could just recycle them for the most part anyhow), and the chief problem would have been technical control over the camera to keep it from clipping too much (and players would have forgiven a fair amount of that, if they could move their POV around freely).

Sorry that this part's harsh critique. I can very obviously see the many hours of work and sheer money that went into all of this. I just wish the end result worked better.

For the record, I never thought I'd ever be writing a fairly-serious artistic critique of a game that's basically just trying to be Porn With a Plot And Actual Gameplay, let alone attempting to dissect why, in my humble opinion, it's still not an entirely successful design, despite what looks like a pretty hefty budget. I never thought I'd be saying, "but this game's still not... hot". But that's where I'm at on this.

6. The use of the slider bar in the few scenes that are vaguely interactive remains a mystery. There appears to be 2-3 different states that can be triggered; why is this a slider, rather than a simple 1-3 button system?

7. I cannot figure out what's up with the upgrades for our lovable android. They appear to just be automatically unlocked by completing Anomalies, and they don't feel like they're doing much.

8. I like the idea of the additional items that the waifus can "wear", but it's pretty limited thus far.

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Overall... am I glad I bought this early, to financially support this project and left one of the early positive reviews? You bet. I really, really hope that Studio FoW has emerged from this process healthy financially and willing to make another game. Congrats, you made it across the finish line.

Do I think this is a bad game? No.

Do I think it could have been better, if the core systems- both sexual content and gameplay, had had more time to bake, as systems, with more work done to make them fundamentally interesting? Yes.

So far as I can tell, the turn-based ground combat has gotten a nice heavy pass, largely nerfing the difficulty spikes that made it wildly harder in spots. It feels like a nice puzzle game now. The space combat, however remains harder than it probably should be, and the game doesn't have any difficulty settings, other than, "ok, loser, you can skip this mission now", which will not improve people's perception.

Am I looking forward to seeing how everything turned out in the end? Sure. There is obviously a lot more content than before, and I'm hoping that it's all fun to unlock and figure out, and I'm curious as to who all the new waifus are, etc.

Anyhow, that's my $0.02. I'm not going to follow this thread, so if you're a huge fan of this project and you think everything I've said is stupid, have at it. I do think that the things I'm saying in this critique explain a lot of why this game remains at a Mixed rating on Steam, despite in many ways representing a lot of good ideas and serious production value, and like most people who bought it in the first month of Early Access, long, long ago, I truly wanted this to succeed in every way.

In the end, I hope this was a good learning experience for FoW Studio, that it was profitable for them as a business, and that as artists, they take this critique and examine their work on this with an eye on making an even better game the next time.

So much of this game when the first version came out was heading in a good direction- I liked the campy silliness of the writing, the irreverent humor, the quality of the VO work and animations, and that it took the responsibility to have some actual game mechanics fairly seriously. That it's still not quite the "best porn game ever made" doesn't mean it's awful; I think it was going to take a lot to achieve that on the very first go.

[RevengeR]

Dude, it's ironic, but this game has like 10x times better writing than Dragon Age: The Veilguard :DDD And this fact is hilarious, cause it's a porn game :DDD

[DevilsBane99]

Confirmed the tutorial issue.

Originally posted by RevengeR:

Dude, it's ironic, but this game has like 10x times better writing than Dragon Age: The Veilguard :DDD And this fact is hilarious, cause it's a porn game :DDD

Dude so mad at a game they had to bring it up here. Damn thats some hate.

[scythewielder]

I wonder how you would factor in the devotion quests (and their rewards). Well, when you get to them.

[Zaflis]

Originally posted by Kamikaze_Llama:

3. I'd forgotten just how much Exposition Dump is involved in the first nebula.

What do you mean by exposition dump? Only thing i noticed in early game was that waifus capped at level 10 some point and excess experience was being "stored" in a blue orb for later. First nebula was the absolute shortest and is still the only one i completely cleared.

[ShadowLL]

Careful of critisizing the game
I've got a warning for a comment where I said that Kaiju Princess devs handled things like interactivity and clothing much better