- Dec 13, 2018
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This is the thing; narrative and character inconsistencies. Aside from what the MC can do before that Cathy non-decision, it's also contradicted by the fact that he can then have casual trysts with as many as 3 other women in the very next episode when he's still with M&J.So... you're saying Jill is moving too fast for you?
More seriously, though, I don't mind the MC automatically declining encounters in theory. But in practice I wish there was a coherent rationale for his decisions. The MC will automatically turn down Cathy if he's on M&J's path, yet he's happy to bang Nora or Envy AND Sandy. On Jill's path he'll turn down N/E&S, but he's still happy to fool around with Cathy, or even Jade. And he'll turn down simply kissing Lily (purely for her scavenger hunt!) even though he could pay her for a blowjob a mere one episode before.
It's hard to see pattern connecting those dots. Jill's path at least includes a monologue where the MC will call himself out for sleeping around, so it's possible he'll be more consistent now that he has that polaroid. But then again, Jade doesn't even come up in the monologue so maybe not. Maya & Josy is even worse, since the MC will brazenly say they agreed to an open relationship if Derek asks about Bella; can't very well claim he needed to turn down Lily, can he?
So yeah, I understand the need to keep the options to manageable level but I wish DPC would either give us bit more choice or stick with a more consistent explanation for the MC's choices.
It doesn't even seem to be about managing options but more about managing storylines to avoid lots of branching and/or to avoid issues where certain plot threads won't be compatible later on down the line, but it doing so it creates these seemingly inexplicable inconsistencies in other aspects of the game.
DPC might have paid for their assets, but there are websites where you can get literally hundreds of them for free, so any dev, both established and starting out, could get assets from these sites and it would save them a lot of money. The biggest expense is in the hardware because that's what's most necessary to produce high quality renders as quickly as possible.I've been browsing that site, the DAZ one, how much do you think DPC has dropped on this game? In his post he said the game's expensive and I don't know how the music thing works but some of the prices on that site are crazy like character models and clothing
It's possible these roadblocks are being put in place to prevent incompatible plot points and storylines later on, but if that's the case I'd say that's pretty poor planning on DPC's part.I'm pretty convinced that these sudden dead ends are related to future situations in the game.
i.e., that at some point MC can't be both tied to Cathy and M+J, or Jill and Nichole, or Quinn and M+J (and maybe Jill and Sage).
and then to avoid this situation DPC places blocks earlier in the story
otherwise there would remain some really very arbitrary plot choices as you were pointing out.
What they'd essentially be doing here, if this is the case, is saying that there's something about being able to pursue something with Cathy that interferes with the M&J path in such a major way that they, the dev, have to take away your ability to choose to take things further with Cathy because they either haven't figured out how to make it work on the M&J path or have elected not to make it work, whether this would work out good or bad.
In either case, I think it reflects very poorly on them as a dev because aside from the fact that even lesser quality, choice-based VNs are able to make multiple paths compatible with each other, even if that compatibility means there's a consequence for your earlier decisions and for being on different paths, it also creates narrative inconsistencies as we've seen where he has no problem plowing his way through several girls at the party and will have a threesome with 2 strippers, but draws the line at Cathy for some reason.
This?I doubt it. Especially at the pace of the story, Holy Bacchus gave a pretty good time line of events happening in the game but who's to say there won't be a time skip.
Doing this little chart reminds me that I made a post a while ago showing just how much the MC has and can get up to during his time at college but I hadn't updated it with the events of Ep 6...until now.
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