Avoiding a game you love

[Segnbora]

With the latest release of Freeloading Family I had to acknowledge a growing category: games I love but which I won't play again until they're finished.

A game where the choices are somewhat inconsequential — Triangle, Life with Mary (though that label is still pending,as things could still go haywire) — I'll play every new update. But in a game with true threading (the aforementioned Freeloading Family), or intricate point structures (Lancaster Boarding School) , or gates (The DeLuca Family), I reach a point at which I'm convinced of the quality but I'd really like to have more...or full...clarity about my choices before proceeding. And so I stop, and wait, and hope for a completed game.

With FF, I reached this juncture at the

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choice, at which point I really didn't want to navigate my way through the game without more clarity about how much I was cutting off by making one choice or the other.

Is it just me, or do others do this?

 

[polywog]

If its a small increment update like V0.42 to V0.45 and there is no changelog. I'll ignore it.

 

[u z i]

hey @Segnbora
recently it has become a habit of mine to stop playing a game and wait for a number of updates before playing it again. my reason for that is kind of random tbh, but mainly because i get frustrated when the story comes to a halt and i keep wanting more. like for example i last played v0.06 of Melody and there has already been 2 updates since. and that's just the tip of the ice-berg. i have atleast 10-12 VNs on my laptop which have already newer updates available. it's kind of weird because although i thought i would enjoy the bulk of the new updates all at once, i actually lost interest after not playing it for so long. so what i do now is search for and play new games/VNs and when i suddenly have the wish to play a game i stopped played awhile back, i download it again. at the end of the day it all depends on my mood i guess

 

[Ataios]

No porn game I like has ever been finished, so wont wait for that. When a new update is out, I read the patch notes and then decide whether it's worth it or not. In most cases, the patch notes provide enough information for that.

 

[Rythan25]

I have done that but not for the same reason as you... To me its if I am going to keep giving a crap about the game to eventually keep playing, or end it at a certain point and have that as the ending point of that game in my head...

Examples... Acting Lessons... That game I played v0.1 thought it was a random run of the mill game, completely forgot it, didnt find it again till v0.4 (chapter 4) and thought it was the most amazing game ever !! Then came previews of what was going to happen in ch5... I didnt download as the choice annoyed me... ch6 came out and it became a depressing mess... didnt download and made up my mind that I would wait till the end to see if it was worth it or not... once the game got completed I downloaded it... but have yet to play it since I know not one of the so called 25 endings interest me...

I honestly prefer the games you mentioned first... Triangle I know will never leave me feeling embittered, Life with Mary is another sweet game I grab every update as I know it would take a lot of stupid choices to fuck up what I want for my ending.

Wicked Choices which pt1 is finished I havent been able to play again after the rape scene... I know it was necessary for the story, but it left me feeling weird to the point I never been able to play it again, despite going further and finding the story interesting...

 

[Rythan25]

I delay playing games:
- with tons of characters and a complex plot, like The Last Sovereign (too many key details to remember until the next release)
- with a shitty engine, because I hope they will be ported to a better one (cough... cough... Fate of Irnia... cough...)

isnt FoI in Ren'py ? I dont remember having any issues with that game at all... then again its been forever since I played that game, the last time I played it, it ended where the aunt gets bang in the palace bathhouse or some crap...

 

[W65]

Hm. It's an interesting question, really. With not-porn games, I've noticed that if I play the beta, I usually don't end up playing the real game for very long either due to burnout or, maybe, because of all the stuff that's changed.

With porn games, I dunno. It's not very entertaining to play the same (early) bits of a game over and over again no matter how good they are. But like another poster said, almost no porn games that work on the incremental-release model ever actually end up finished--at least not in the way they set out to be.

I dunno if I've ever had any system for playing or not playing games. It comes down more to what I feel like doing at the time. If a game looks good, and looks like it has enough content to be worth trying out, I'll usually try it out. Often lately I find myself saying that I'll hold off on trying a game because it's very new, even if it looks pretty good.

The worst ones are the games that release JUST slowly enough that I manage to get bored of the game between releases. Whether or not saves are invalidated by the new releases, I either have to start over (if saves aren't valid), or I just DO start over because I can't be sure something hasn't changed in what I've already experienced... and the save might end up being invalid anyhow.

It feels like kind of a stupid problem to have. Aside from adult games, nearly all of the play-before-release scenarios I've been involved in were betas, at least. For the most part, large portions of the game were reasonably stable. With alphas, everything's up for grabs. I dunno. Most of my other experiences were multiplayer games, and you'd pretty much HAVE to have a decent chunk of playable content to even keep people interested in "testing" them.

 

[redknight00]

Not at all, some of my criteria for good games are a good size of updates, not breaking saves every week and solid writing, so I usually have more than five minutes of gameplay, no need to worry about starting again or that the story will fall apart. Heck, the last one doesn't even matter much because I'll avoid spoilers anyway.

 

[OhWee]

I really like Dreams of Desire, mainly for Tracy. I stopped playing that game around Chapter 10, because I took a sneek peek at the art for Chapter 11 and saw a few things I didn't like, plus I was burned out on playing games at that point.

Similarly, I stopped playing Dating My Daughter shortly after Chapter 2 started (i.e. after her mom takes her back home). I did play the first installment of chapter 2/part 2/whatever you call the second part of the story, but haven't played it since.

I HAVE continued to download each chapter for both games (Dreams of Desire is completed now, DMD is still doing the MMP/Milking My Patrons thing), mainly just to look at the pretty pictures in the images folders. That's pretty much what I do with a lot of games at this point. I don't want to be bothered with playing them and trying to figure out the various game designer's logic for their stories at this point, because life is too short. I mainly am just interested in the pretty pictures.

You can pretty much follow the story progress fairly well just by looking at the pictures. That's how I know that D in DMD finally had vaginal sex in DMD. Not by playing the game - just by looking in the images folder for the last installment (a new installment was released just yesterday, I haven't unzipped the folders yet).

Playing adult games just isn't all that interesting to me these days. Plus, a lot of games end up getting abandoned midstream, so I'm tired of getting invested in characters, only to be left hanging. See Meghan from Teacher's Pets. I've sorta kinda continued her story in my crossover comic, but I definitely wouldn't consider what I've done with her backstory 'TP canon'. I just like how Meghan looks, hence her inclusion in Enthralled...

A few of the games I was excited about recently got slapped with the 'abandoned' tag. In one case, it turns out that no one was keeping track of the developer's Patreon, but in the other case, yeah yet again a bunch of us were left hanging. Par for the course, but still annoying.

This is probably why I haven't done much with my own WIP game, Consent. I like rendering the characters, I just am not looking forward to the game mechanics coding part. I have those all figured out, of course, and I've even mapped out a good portion of the story, but my heart just hasn't been in it. Hence why I'm currently working on a crossover comic instead of my game currently.

Fortunately, I haven't released Consent in any form, other than some artwork I've shared and few mentions in my development thread, so no one has been left hanging midstream so far. Some people were kind of excited about it, which I feel a little bad about, but my interests tend to wander, plus my skill as a Daz artist has increased significantly since Consent was put on the backburner. So Consent may happen someday, just not anytime soon.

 

[Deleted member 14950]

I really like how Dr Sin made episode system in DoD, it really made sense to play it. Most of the times episode feels complete, except the cliffhangers. Todays systems where developers upload only small changes makes literally no sense to me, i mean, i kinda think that theres no sense at all and they just posting without realizing anything. Updates doesn't feel complete, especially when it just few scenes and 200-300 pictures. Todays state of market is really sad, wish devs could have access to more tools to speed up their development process and produce more content. But yeah, agree with yall.

 

[freedom.call]

Is it just me, or do others do this?

I understand your point, but sadly I'm weak and furthermore my body doesn't listen to my brain.

For now I'm trying to avoid 0.0.1 releases. Got to start somewhere right?

 

[Deleted member 225174]

I usually wait 4 or 5 updates for the sake of knowing there will be more than 15 minutes worth of content to play through, though.

 

[Hadley]

I do that with Games like Man of the House or Town Uncovered because they do rather small Updates.

But lately I played some Games I missed before and they had a huge amount of Content. I played like Lust Epidemic which I ignored because of RPGM and it had like 10hrs of Content.

Its definitely nice.

When a new Version comes out of a Game I love I most of the time start with the previous Version so I remember what happened and I have more Playtime.

 

[くもり空]

games I love but which I won't play again until they're finished.

Exactly how my mind works. I feel like if I keep playing the same unfinished game I'll eventually burn myself out. I just "watch" the threads until they get finished, even if it takes a lot of time.

 

[coquettishtir]

I'm totally with you, I definitely stop playing a game and wait a long, long time before I'll ever pick it back up again. I think it stems from regular games; especially with RPGs, it's very, very difficult for me to ever replay a game just because I already know what happens and I just find it extremely boring going through everything again because I always try to get as much done as possible the first playthrough. I hate it honestly, but I just can't force myself to get over it. Oh well.

I think that mindset's made its way to these games now as well, where I just want to do everything I can but.... you know, most of these games aren't finished so I'm left unsatisfied and typically updates don't include too much content and are spaced out quite a bit. So damn unsatisfying.

One game I really want to get back into is Harem since I had quite a lot of fun with it about a year ago but I deleted it and so I'd have to start all over again. I spent a good 20 hours on that and imagining myself doing that again just to get back to where the content ended the first time and then continuing onward is just not pleasing to me. I want to force myself but I have't gotten around to it yet. First world problems lol. Same with Roundscape Adorevia, I put a ton of time into that and I stopped at what I thought was the ending of the game but apparently it still has updates. Zero way in hell I'm running through that game again, way too much time needed...