Do Cheat's Ruin The Fun Of Playing The Game

[Droid Productions]

Why? I usually download full save after beating the game to look at scenes with defferent girls. Rarely playing another route will bring much in terms of story and that just saves some time holding CTRL =)

After you've played it, sure. But for Paradise Lust (especially), I get flooded with DMs and in-thread requests for 100% saves every time there's an update. I guess because it's 2D art, but still. We pour hours and hours into writing, puppeteering, adding quests, minigames, and the response is "stfu & senz nudz plz!"

 

[♍VoidTraveler]

After you've played it, sure. But for Paradise Lust (especially), I get flooded with DMs and in-thread requests for 100% saves every time there's an update. I guess because it's 2D art, but still. We pour hours and hours into writing, puppeteering, adding quests, minigames, and the response is "stfu & senz nudz plz!"

I started blocking some of those save beggars, i recommend you do the same thing.
Especially since it sounds like you really need it, to restore sanity points.

 

[ADuckInASubglacialLake]

it depends imo, if you just aim for the scene, then using cheat is absolutely fine. But I don't really use cheat on my own, since I feel like using cheat makes the scenes far more boring, but hey, it's your gameplay, you can do anything with it.

 

[Segnbora]

I think Droid's cheat system does this dance about as well as any game I've ever seen. You can play it straight. You can play it with a walkthrough. You can play it with relatively minor cheats (like fluffing your money). You can play it with fundamental cheats that do in fact affect gameplay (stat boosts, unlimited gems, etc.). You can apply your brain to the poker, you can let the game play poker for you, or you can cheat your way to instant victory. Basically, you can do anything you want, you can do nothing, or you can do anything in between.

I tend to agree that insisting that players must play the game with all the grind and progression intact is begging for someone else to write a cheat mod. I also agree with Droid that if all you want is to see porn, go watch porn. There's an entire internet of pirated free porn that doesn't require a single minigame. Go watch it.

But to keep talking about Love of Magic, here's how it does and doesn't "ruin" a game. The first time I played Book 1, I used the walkthrough with no cheats. I realized about halfway through that I found repeatedly battling my way through Elsewhere tedious; I didn't enjoy the poker strategy nearly as much as I did when the game started. So I played it again, this time giving myself all the money and all the gems.

Because I play LoM for the story, far more than I do the gameplay or the lewds, this worked really well. For a while. But...the later stages of Book 1 have a ton of unstructured time, which someone on a normal playthrough would spend building stats (exploring Elsewhere, reading books, training, acquiring money, buying gems, etc.). I already had all the gems and the money (and, as a result, all the stats), so that became a tedious slog, because I'd broken the progression. On a second playthrough, it was more or less worth it. On a first playthrough, I would've been annoyed that about a quarter of the game was essentially time-wasting. In that case, cheating "ruined" the game. Thankfully, I'd already played it without "ruining" it, as I did with Book 2 before going on to do a second, full-cheat runthrough.

Ultimately, I think it's about whether you enjoy the tension of not being sure if you'll win a battle, or not being sure if you'll get to bang the princess, or not being sure you're in the right location during the afternoon stage. If you can't tolerate not knowing, then cheat. If you enjoy that tension but don't want to play something a dozen times to see as many of the elements as possible, then use a walkthrough or a walkthrough mod. If all you care about is the story, and you can be certain that you won't lock yourself out of things, then go ahead and cheat, accepting that you're going to give up much of the intended fun. But a well-designed game has a structure, and shattering that structure is inherently going to damage your potential enjoyment.

In other words: cheating does "ruin" games. Whether or not that's a bad thing depends on the quality of the game. If I could cheat my way out of the mindless dialogue to finally put Perv and the Potatohead out of its misery, I would. On the other hand, I would never cheat my way through an initial playthrough of LoM's Book 3.

 

[Ophanim]

Why? I usually download full save after beating the game to look at scenes with defferent girls. Rarely playing another route will bring much in terms of story and that just saves some time holding CTRL =)

As fo the topic, it's strange so many think it depends on a game. It actually depends on a player. What each particular player at each particular time considers "fun". One day I may play with cheats, another without on the same game, depends on what I want. Sometimes using some legit game mechanics is somewhat of a cheat and using\avoiding it is also a part of game experience.

That's an interesting point, but I think it really amounts to approaching the issue from opposite ends. The people saying it depends on the game are attempting to play the game via some kind of authorial intent, as in, presupposing some 'intended' way of playing the game and cheating being an intentional break from that whenever we dislike what we perceive the author's goals/decisions to have been. You, on the other hand, seem to be approaching it more in line with the death of the author model, where what the author wanted literally doesn't matter at all, and whatever you consider to be fun is the de-facto intended method, with cheating being your method of changing the gameplay to fit your liking.

No shade on you, I just think it's interesting. Wild how, after literally years of fanfic, I'm still thinking about what an author wanted out of their game when I could just twist it into knots if I wanted :O

 

[Segnbora]

You know, I failed to mention one of the great things that a dev can do to combat cheating.

In Love of Magic, you can cheat all your stats and skip everything but the A story. (Almost) no Elsewhere, no café, no bookstore, no working at the Crowley...nothing but the core narrative.

But you'll miss tons of content, lewd and otherwise. You want sex with your boss? With your bookseller? With a sex-crazed fairy? With your fellow Evoker and her ginger lover who you really should meet? Your very horny blonde Chosen? You want to meet Aiofe? You need to actually play the scenes you don't "need" to play even though you don't need the stats. So even if you don't need the money from working as a bouncer, you want to work as a bouncer because of the scenes it enables. Same with reading at Starcucks. Same with buying books. Same with visiting the nutjob in the library. Same with watching Molly dance. There's a reward for cheating, but there's also a cost, and Droid gives you both: you can race through the narrative, but you'll miss the color.

Honestly, most sandbox-ish games could do this, if they wanted. If the preferred narrative is the one with all the interstitials, then the speedrun is the one in which the player doesn't care. Both are fine, but there's absolutely no harm in giving the explorer a more enjoyable experience. Everyone gets what they want.

 

[chujkus]

I believe that you cannot cheat when you're not competing with someone so that means you can't cheat in singleplayer games. I play porn games mainly for the story and porn so I don't really care for challenging gameplay especially that I would need a third arm because one is usually preoccupied, sadly I only have third leg .

 

[rk-47]

you have the choice of using them or not, if it ruins things then dont bother, but if you wanna have an easier time go for it

 

[MechaEks]

I can only speak for myself but I always like to grind and unlock everything myself, I get satisfaction from exploring and finding everything on my own. Be it collecting the bonus art like in Legend of Queen Opala or simply earning money to progress and unlock new scenes or buy new costumes like in Akabur's Princess Trainer. I personally like it when there is fun gameplay added or some RPG elements, games like Lightning Warrior Raidy where lesbian stuff is not my cup of tea were made fun due to the old-style dungeon exploring and combat.

In my opinion, working for the goodies gives that much more satisfaction in unlocking a certain scene, especially when the devs really did their best to go the extra mile and add more options and possibilities. Using cheats just gives you the goodies or just simply eliminates that obstacle in the way and just hands everything to you on a silver platter, and to me, that takes away from it a bit and everything has a risk of becoming mundane after a bit because you never really have to work for it and there is hardly any buildup.

To each their own of course and if you wanna use cheats then that's fine but for me, it just takes away from the experience.

 

[Deleted member 5460870]

You'll negate any kind of difficulty you may plan on adding to a game, like a hard boss. Granted, said game needs to know the difference between grind and difficulty.

I made them secret, like a troop can be instantly slain by taking the high ground.

 

[Grand Duke]

Honestly It really does depend on the game, you wouldn't get much value from cg unlocking a story filled VN but it wouldn't make much of a difference on your average Nukige. Some VNS h scenes happen directly after centralizing emotional events in the story that characterize that herioine so you wouldn't be getting the full experience if you just skip over to it.