Saw the main game thread, came here to see the dev thread, it looks like it'll go the way every other BB remake goes. Destroys all the characters by having NTR (Edit: Took out five words because it seems that those five words make everything else irrelevant...). It's like people don't get what killed the original game in the first place. Maybe I'm just pessimistic... but I've seen it several times before.
I can hear the argument already, "iT's AvOiDaBlE!" Why does adding avoidable NTR still kill the characters and the game? Glad you asked. It makes the MC and all the female characters schizophrenic and a coherent story almost impossible outside of the simplest of porn plots. It doesn't have anything to do with the exitance of other males, or even the threat of NTR. The "threat" of NTR isn't the problem. It's wasting time adding variables and choices for it and then actually making it seen on screen. If the player rejects a girl, why do I need to see her have sex? And if she fucks another guy because I accidentally picked A instead of B then she is a slut I need to babysit and isn't worth the time. The same character being a slut in route A and a loyal lovable girl in route B makes her a bad character. You can have another male in the game, not every threat or enemy needs to be sexual in nature by the way, and just having the MC beat him by default works. Nearly every other plot point will be resolved this way. MC needs a job? Are you going to give the player the chance optional fail that and end up homeless, or just have him succeed because that's the point of that part of the story? Maybe you will add a variable where he can fail to get the job, but then you'd likely have a game over and force a restart, which gets tedious, but I doubt you'll have a bunch of scenes with him panhandling. The MC winning the game is kind of the point of the game, too many tedious game overs or failure states isn't fun or interesting. If I spent 60+ hours playing Mass Effect and then got to the end and saw that some random Alliance soldier had killed Saren (the main villain), and it was because I picked some random option at the start of the game, yeah, I'd be pissed.
I play as the MC, he can face challenges, but the whole point of the game is to beat those challenges... or to fall to those challenges if the player wants NTR. A game that came out Sunday comes to my mind; Modern Family: Cuckold Stories. It's an NTR game, and more power to it, I'd never play it, and it would be dumb for me to go there and ask to make NTR avoidable, why? Because adding a non-NTR route would actually screw up the story. The story is about cucking the husband, it's about the girls getting banged by other guys, which is fine. That's the success state of the game, but a non-NTR focused game is the opposite. Why even give the option to fail, and worse, why waste time and effort showing that failure? If your game has two different play states, then you are making a broken story. One group of players fails if they get NTRed, the other group fails if they don't get NTRed. These two things can't be reconciled. Harem fans see it is a waste of time to play the game because they will always be waiting for the true colors of the game to come through, or a broken variable to make them see an NTR scene, or the developer to put out another NTR scene while the non-NTR scenes fall behind. It would be a waste for the makers of that other game to make a few non-NTR scenes, just the same as it is a waste for a non-NTR game to make a few NTR scenes. EDIT: By a waste I mean in the attempt to court both audiences. I'm sure some NTR fans would not be put out by having one of two non-NTR scenes, from their perspective it may even make teh NTR sweeter, I don't know.
It also cuts into players experience and forces them to support stuff they hate to get to what they like. As an example, I don't like racing games, I don't play them or buy them, but I like RPGs. So, if someone made the best RPG (All the RPG stuff is perfectly done) with 120 hours of game play, but 60 hours is all racing, but it is skippable or avoidable... I'd pass. I'm missing half the content, yet I'm supporting all of its creation. I don't do that. I'd rather support 100% of content I like, as opposed to having half my money and half the developers time going to things I hate.
As for NTR being "rEaLiStIc," I'm about tired of that argument. I have never once, in all my life, watched someone I broke up with or who broke up with me fuck another person. It isn't realistic, it doesn't make the story more compelling or interesting. It's a fetish, just like any other. It isn't inherently better or worse, more realistic, nor does it add to the interest of the story just by being added. It's just a fetish. Adding bestiality doesn't automatically make the story more interesting. Incest doesn't make a story more interesting either, it's just a fetish. Same for harems, it's just a fetish. Some fetishes don't mix, like motor oil and olive oil. Both of those are oil, and very useful in their proper places, but different enough that you should keep them apart.
NTR fans often see female characters in two lights, "A boring girl who is loyal to the MC," or a "Slut who fucks every other guy but the MC at the drop of a hat," but that is so porn-brained it hurts. Those are only extremes, innocent good girl and total slut. There is so much more to a person's personality than just their sexuality. You can have a range of personalities and never show characters banging at all, let alone swinging back and forth between loyal or slut based on a single choice. You can have the "threat of NTR" just like you may have the "threat of player death," or the "threat of any number of things." But outside of NTR most of those "threats," don't come to fruition. Because you as the creator know that offering a bunch of game overs where the MC gets hit by a car for picking right instead of left at the road sign or gets food poisoning for picking the chicken instead of fish, or whatever isn't interesting, it's tedious. NTR is either the point, or it is a needless failure state that most players will avoid, if they play at all. If it's the point, that's great! Make that the point and have fun and get your fans who like it. If it isn't the point, then why are you wasting time and effort and hacking history up into paths that makes the characters one dimensional charcutiers defined only by their sexual actions? Because he's the thing, NTR fans will ask for more NTR, and non-NTR fans will ask for more vanilla content... if they haven't already left because they've been let down or screwed over time and time again. And all that is leaving out the fact that you'll likely prefer one over the other, and human nature will often lead to you doing it more justice than the other.
Sorry for the rant. And feel free to ignore it if you like. I just felt like writing a bit of an essay about what I had read in this dev-log and a response to some other people's comments.
I appreciate the honesty about the content, and I'm not telling or even asking you to change anything. Just using the public forum to express some of my opinions. Maybe you'll enjoy reading them. Make the game you want, try and mix things if you like, and I truly wish you all the best. Maybe you can prove me wrong.
