Its been three or four versions since I last commented so I wanted to chime in a again. Still speaking as someone who hasn't finished two entire rounds of campaign mode, there is only so much I can say, but I do have a few comments.
The major flaws in this game for many versions have been twofold-- first, considering how complex the game is, there are way too many ways to make simple mistakes that ruin your turn, with the only reasonable way to redo the mistake being to close and reopen the game to load a save. That was mainly endemic to the hatred/friendship mechanics and especially to distortions. So, the distortion planner interface and color coded labels + warnings when breaks are imminent are possibly the best QoL addition imaginable, short of a quickload hotkey / the load interface being available at all times. Amazingly well done, makes the game more enjoyable to play many times over. The next thing to consider along exactly the same vein is Forsaken training. Trying to execute a training schedule only to realize you run out of stamina on the critical step or consent will be withed, and thus having to reload the game is an enormous PITA. Barring a quickload system, maybe an idea would be the ability to queue trainings and see their results before executing them so you can just back out to the starting interface if you mess up the order? Or, you know, a quickload system.
The second major issue is that, for an erotic game designed to repeat rounds over and over again, there isn't much variety of content in terms of sex scenes. The chosen are randomized, but regardless of their personalities, core values, or costume themes, the scenes they are involved in stay pretty much the same. By the time you have played through three or so rounds, you've seen all the variations on the erotic content except for possibly stuff tied to forsaken defilers and special chosen types. If those add a huge extra breadth of content, I'll look forward to eventually progressing far enough to see it.
In a sense then, this game is partially a victim of the game design being so engaging and addicting, since that both motivates the player to continue playing despite the content not changing, and also motivates the player to pound the next key to progress without even reading the content. Honestly if big changes were introduced, I'm not sure I would notice at this point since I haven't played the game to fap since somewhere around hour twenty / end of campaign round one once I finished learning the game in standard mode. I was excited for a bit when I heard the default game mode toned down the farcical/grimdark violence in exchange for bondage fetish, but I could hardly tell the difference and stopped even looking for the changes by around day 15-20 of my new playthrough. Not really sure how to address this... the primary reward offered in the game is bigger numbers faster, not porn, so even if you add more porn at this point, you've already trained players not to notice. Don't get me wrong here, you've made a great game, amazing really, I'm just not sure if you've made a great porn game.
I appreciate the effort to diversify the early game with items. It needed something and this is something. I've only seen a few and so far the effects are pretty underwhelming, but maybe some of the deeper campaign items will produce more gameplay variety. I'll let you know what I think if I ever get around to going that far in a campaign. One thing that seems a bit silly is that your first item is granted at the end of the first day... so if you reload to get a new item, you have to play through the first day again, and also you are re rolling your chosen set. That makes it just annoying enough to be bothersome to do without actually discouraging the player from newgame scumming to get a different item. All things considered, why not just let the campaign player pick the first item, if not from all eight starters, then from a small random set, before the first day starts? If you make all the items worth having to suit one or another strategy, letting the player pick instead of forcing them to roll for it with an annoying delay seems like a no-brainer. If some of them are supposed to be booby prizes you need to work around as a gameplay challenged, the delay before getting it needs to be way bigger to discourage reloading.
general comments:
-good job on the new guide text, and good riddance to the old tutorial
-you need to emancipate the stat screen from the portraits so the one can be shown while the other is disabled
-do all the different forsaken combat styles have different battle text? because some of the styles are distinctly better than others and the worst ones will likely never be used by anyone, so that seems like a huge waste
-the special commanders represent some of the best content variety in this game (and must have taken a ton of work), so it seems paradoxical that the entire forsaken system actively discourages their use without being nearly as interesting in terms of content. I haven't tried forsaken defilers yet, maybe i'll still be impressed.
Anyway, great work as usual. Really appreciate the responsiveness on toning down the mutilation and suicide themes, despite the fact that I've already tuned out the content generally in pursuit of the big numbers. Still needs more tentacles. Quickload when?
