Anyone else notice that the quailty of games decreasing?

[khumak]

I think there may have been some drop off in dev engagement overall since it's practically impossible to get a GPU without paying scalper prices. So as some devs move on to other things, the devs who would normally take their place are still sitting on an old system with a GPU that's essentially unusable for rendering.

I haven't really seen any new games by a new dev that looked interesting in quite awhile, just stuff by devs I was already following.

I've started making some of my own games, but with a 4GB GPU I won't be doing any rendering until I can upgrade to an Nvidia card with at least 16GB of VRAM and I don't see that happening any time soon. The cheapest 3090 I've seen in stock is $2700. I'm not paying that.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

You can make renders with a 4gb card as i started off with a 1060 3gb card. It's down to settings and not making your scene heavy. There are a few devs ive spoken to that have 1050 gpu's and their renders look pretty damn good.

I think there may have been some drop off in dev engagement overall since it's practically impossible to get a GPU without paying scalper prices. So as some devs move on to other things, the devs who would normally take their place are still sitting on an old system with a GPU that's essentially unusable for rendering.

I haven't really seen any new games by a new dev that looked interesting in quite awhile, just stuff by devs I was already following.

I've started making some of my own games, but with a 4GB GPU I won't be doing any rendering until I can upgrade to an Nvidia card with at least 16GB of VRAM and I don't see that happening any time soon. The cheapest 3090 I've seen in stock is $2700. I'm not paying that.

 

[khumak]

You can make renders with a 4gb card as i started off with a 1060 3gb card. It's down to settings and not making your scene heavy. There are a few devs ive spoken to that have 1050 gpu's and their renders look pretty damn good.

Yeah it's possible. I made a mod for Babysitter with my 1050Ti, but it required a lot of wasted time optimizing scenes to fit into memory. That's fine for practice on a mod but I'm not willing to do that for a full fledged game. From what I saw of the memory utilization before optimizing, it seemed like 16GB is about the sweet spot where I would usually not have to do any optimizing.

 

[Alea iacta est]

It cannot be an hardware problem come on.

It is not about render quality the issue, but more about plot and soul of the game.

Tons amazing games with low quality renders.

 

[Cainhurst]

I don't think the quality has decreased but there are more games being released and with more games especially Ren'py or RPGM with DAZ or Honey Select models, they have all kind of blended together.

I look at F95 in two halves: a pre and post Big Brother world. Big Brother (a grindy but fun game with excellent renders) changed a lot of things and most of them were for the worse.
1) you saw a lot of copy cats (look at how many university games copy BADIK)
2) you saw creators stop catering to their vision and instead change plots to fit what fans wanted (almost always leads to disaster)
3) less content, more grind with the open world time of day stuff and repeating events till it moves forward.

There are still great games on this site (heck, the great games are much better now than they have ever been in the past) but, a lot of the new creators do not really focus on building their games and, old creators take more time to build theirs as they get more ambitious. Heck a lot of creators get burnt out quickly and just rush their ambitious games to a mediocre end.

Look at legacy devs like ICSTOR or ICCreations. They released simple games but they were fun with montly on the dot updates but now ICSTOR is in development hell and ICCreations is working on two games concurrently and neither get updates for 4-6 months.

 

[AnchovyFuta]

I agree with khumak and Cainhurst, I think that there is a lot of reasons why there are a lot of "low-quality" games.

Most devs don't have have a good PC to make good render or high-quality images, and even if some of them do, they are just amateurs that just got to learn on how to use Daz/Honey Select or any other kind of engine, there are people that see the developer in another way and give him a chance to improve but most of them just want something of high-quality in the very first release and sadly that's not how things work, everyone begins making shit but with time they can make a David (Michelangelo) out of their hard work, that just takes time...

There are some new devs that don't know what to do and then get bribed by their "fans" to make something that they like, and not what the dev like, and with that, most good developers just abandon their projects or they do what they like and see that it's not working and it has the same ending...

There are some that are hard-working developers and there are some that just want to gain easy money, but that is something that we might never know. Most of them basically act like the same, I think the most important thing for a developer to do is make a short game and see what people think (basically the same thing that some people said on this thread), see what people say, polish your game and then try to make it big the next time.

 

[AhoyLaddies]

It cannot be an hardware problem come on.

It is not about render quality the issue, but more about plot and soul of the game.

Tons amazing games with low quality renders.

Yeah, I'm not sure where people got the idea that 'quality of games decreasing' somehow had anything to do with render quality. There are lots of games out there with 'okay' visuals that have a really intriguing story, writing, and gameplay.

Like I get that visuals are what draw the most people in and can make or break a game for a lot of people, but I feel like too many up and coming devs are too focused on having pretty renders and visuals and completely neglect everything else that makes an adult game great.
Like, you're making your first adult game and probably your very first GAME ever. Don't spend all your time on one thing!
There are so many avenues you can take to make your adult game or vn great. Perhaps it's ambition or pressure to create stellar visuals that cause some of these issues.

I dont know, I guess I'm a critic. All I'm saying is don't commission out $500 worth of artwork if you can barely write a script. And maybe don't dump $1000 into a gpu only to make what amounts to a 'game' where half the player base holds ctrl for 90% of the time and uses RPAExtract because the only merit the game has are its renders.

Really, I think I'm just frustrated. Like I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that can animate and render a great sex scene, but for me the whole fun of an adult game or adult VN is the buildup to those scenes and the connection and atmosphere surrounding the characters involved. For some of these games I just couldn't give a single fuck about the characters. Like who cares if you get to bone them? And if your game has choices and decisions to be made, who gives a fuck about those choices if you don't care about the consequences?

Maybe I've just hit the ultimate hole of depravity where I can't get my rocks off to two people just fucking anymore. If I was, I'd probably still be watching regular ol' porn. I'm at the stage where I need some sort of intimacy, some sort of sexual tension, some sort of mood, some sort of direction, something that takes advantage of the freedom and creativity of video games and lets you dive head on into a fantasy. It's not enough to have some cheap porno plot to bang my borno to anymore. There needs to be something special. I don't care how you do it, but please just have some sort of vehicle in place that makes all the sex and sin come together in a way thats engaging.

Interesting story? Okay.
Unique gameplay mechanics? For sure!
Likeable and dislikeable characters with depth? Absolutely!
Erotic writing? Fuck yeah.

Any or all of these things could be that vehicle.

tl;dr: Game dev hard, dont put all eggs in one basket, create a good vehicle for the adult content and make it engaging, and indulge in your fantasies and let your creativity go wild.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

You're one of few who think like this, nowadays it's all just MacDonalds and not fine dining. Each to his/her own i guess.

Yeah, I'm not sure where people got the idea that 'quality of games decreasing' somehow had anything to do with render quality. There are lots of games out there with 'okay' visuals that have a really intriguing story, writing, and gameplay.

Like I get that visuals are what draw the most people in and can make or break a game for a lot of people, but I feel like too many up and coming devs are too focused on having pretty renders and visuals and completely neglect everything else that makes an adult game great.
Like, you're making your first adult game and probably your very first GAME ever. Don't spend all your time on one thing!
There are so many avenues you can take to make your adult game or vn great. Perhaps it's ambition or pressure to create stellar visuals that cause some of these issues.

I dont know, I guess I'm a critic. All I'm saying is don't commission out $500 worth of artwork if you can barely write a script. And maybe don't dump $1000 into a gpu only to make what amounts to a 'game' where half the player base holds ctrl for 90% of the time and uses RPAExtract because the only merit the game has are its renders.

Really, I think I'm just frustrated. Like I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that can animate and render a great sex scene, but for me the whole fun of an adult game or adult VN is the buildup to those scenes and the connection and atmosphere surrounding the characters involved. For some of these games I just couldn't give a single fuck about the characters. Like who cares if you get to bone them? And if your game has choices and decisions to be made, who gives a fuck about those choices if you don't care about the consequences?

Maybe I've just hit the ultimate hole of depravity where I can't get my rocks off to two people just fucking anymore. If I was, I'd probably still be watching regular ol' porn. I'm at the stage where I need some sort of intimacy, some sort of sexual tension, some sort of mood, some sort of direction, something that takes advantage of the freedom and creativity of video games and lets you dive head on into a fantasy. It's not enough to have some cheap porno plot to bang my borno to anymore. There needs to be something special. I don't care how you do it, but please just have some sort of vehicle in place that makes all the sex and sin come together in a way thats engaging.

Interesting story? Okay.
Unique gameplay mechanics? For sure!
Likeable and dislikeable characters with depth? Absolutely!
Erotic writing? Fuck yeah.

Any or all of these things could be that vehicle.

tl;dr: Game dev hard, dont put all eggs in one basket, create a good vehicle for the adult content and make it engaging, and indulge in your fantasies and let your creativity go wild.

 

[gamersglory]

Honey Select is trash no matter how many mods are used. Daz quality depends on the person making the renders also helps when you can design your own assets and Character models and shaders.

 

[Cainhurst]

Yeah, I'm not sure where people got the idea that 'quality of games decreasing' somehow had anything to do with render quality. There are lots of games out there with 'okay' visuals that have a really intriguing story, writing, and gameplay.

Like I get that visuals are what draw the most people in and can make or break a game for a lot of people, but I feel like too many up and coming devs are too focused on having pretty renders and visuals and completely neglect everything else that makes an adult game great.
Like, you're making your first adult game and probably your very first GAME ever. Don't spend all your time on one thing!
There are so many avenues you can take to make your adult game or vn great. Perhaps it's ambition or pressure to create stellar visuals that cause some of these issues.

I dont know, I guess I'm a critic. All I'm saying is don't commission out $500 worth of artwork if you can barely write a script. And maybe don't dump $1000 into a gpu only to make what amounts to a 'game' where half the player base holds ctrl for 90% of the time and uses RPAExtract because the only merit the game has are its renders.

Really, I think I'm just frustrated. Like I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that can animate and render a great sex scene, but for me the whole fun of an adult game or adult VN is the buildup to those scenes and the connection and atmosphere surrounding the characters involved. For some of these games I just couldn't give a single fuck about the characters. Like who cares if you get to bone them? And if your game has choices and decisions to be made, who gives a fuck about those choices if you don't care about the consequences?

Maybe I've just hit the ultimate hole of depravity where I can't get my rocks off to two people just fucking anymore. If I was, I'd probably still be watching regular ol' porn. I'm at the stage where I need some sort of intimacy, some sort of sexual tension, some sort of mood, some sort of direction, something that takes advantage of the freedom and creativity of video games and lets you dive head on into a fantasy. It's not enough to have some cheap porno plot to bang my borno to anymore. There needs to be something special. I don't care how you do it, but please just have some sort of vehicle in place that makes all the sex and sin come together in a way thats engaging.

Interesting story? Okay.
Unique gameplay mechanics? For sure!
Likeable and dislikeable characters with depth? Absolutely!
Erotic writing? Fuck yeah.

Any or all of these things could be that vehicle.

tl;dr: Game dev hard, dont put all eggs in one basket, create a good vehicle for the adult content and make it engaging, and indulge in your fantasies and let your creativity go wild.

Exactly! I like lovely renders as much as everyone on this site but if they are not developed as characters then there is no purpose to them. Have a a basic flow plan for the plot and direction. You want Nerd X to get with cheerleader Y build the story in a way that it happen. I mean no game shows good and bad writing as much as Glamour by Dark Silver: the female protagonist has an actual plot with multiple story lines and interesting characters. Meanwhile the Big Brother side is just a gorgeous render fuckfest with no plot or characterization.

 

[desmosome]

Honey Select is trash no matter how many mods are used. Daz quality depends on the person making the renders also helps when you can design your own assets and Character models and shaders.

Are you sure? Pale Carnations looks much better than anything you've worked on.

 

[Vengel]

In general ...
Overall it's not even about the quality anymore.
The Scamming and milking in 2020 - 2021 peaked and reached the all time maximum levels in this segment.

And you can run around and just look over the games topics and their fanatical fans that keep making excuses for the creator over and over AND OVER again and again and again. Facepalming everyone who dares to have logical and different opinion than the regular simp ... desperate and weird one that supports some scammer who keeps producing nothing but 5 new renders in 6 months and just writes down long bullshit post about how HAAAARD is to get those money and deal with life!

So ... as the great George Carlin said - It's our own fault!

 

[MoolahMilk]

Honey Select is trash no matter how many mods are used. Daz quality depends on the person making the renders also helps when you can design your own assets and Character models and shaders.

I beg to differ my friend.

 

[homebrew]

I can't comment so much about the quality in the previous years as I'm relatively new to the whole VN thing. But I'm playing around with the thought of making my own game. I have an old machine and renders take time so I have a lot of it to think about my story. And that's the funny part of it. I didn't imagine what is required to actually make a consitent game. But I can imagine now that a lot of devs don't go there, just cranking out renders. And my first animation? I actually started to think of ways to avoid animations just for now. Replace them by some story.

So yeah, quality can drop fast if a lot of games are published without a long term comittment. And I have so far resisted the urge to buy a new GPU for faster renders as I'm not yet sure that I have the stomach for this.