- May 19, 2017
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Expectations in a game
- Thread starter dangerdemon
- Start date
- Sep 13, 2017
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- Jul 8, 2018
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One thing a lot of games don't seem interested in, is having actual healthy relationships that build normally through pleasant conversation and interaction. It's like, these people have a magic boner meter that dictates how close they are fucking, and it's always linear and only goes up.
What about taking someone's coke away and selling it to someone else? The person whose coke you stole would be furious!
What about taking someone's coke away and selling it to someone else? The person whose coke you stole would be furious!
Hmm. Well, there are all manner of dating sims out there already, and if you want to model development of healthy relationships, you have to keep in mind you need to pull that off in a gaming context, where players are accustomed to mini-rewards given out steadily, with bigger rewards given out after overcoming challenges. So there still has to be some kind of challenge and some kind of conflict presented in-game.
A game with an emphasis on such relationships is likely going to be one with fewer potential romantic partners.
- May 31, 2018
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Do people play games to have virtual healthy relationships, though? Real life is a much better place to spend time developing healthy relationships. Games are also wonders of time compression, and one simple way to compress time is to throw out many insignificant events and increase the weight of the significant ones. Given that most real conversations are pretty insignificant considered in isolation, it's tempting to just abstract them away as events that add one unit to a meter. Also, how would it work from a mechanical perspective? Would it be a kind of eramaker system where conversation choices would add to a bunch of different meters, both good and bad, and you'd have to balance the choices that added to the good meters you cared about while not adding so much to any of the bad meters?
I mean, are you talking about devs putting more time into writing more conversations with meaningful and interesting dialog and choices? In that case, you're running into the problem of what the dev wants to spend their time working on, and also that it's hard for most video game developers (or people in general, I guess) to write volumes of interesting and yet nonconsequential dialog. Look at video games as a whole. It was actually noteworthy when more modern RPGs started to have more incidental dialog between your PC and your party, or even just between party members. Traditionally, they barely even had personalities.
(Now, if you're talking about VNs, then my points kind of fall a little short because they live and die on their writing.)
- Jul 8, 2018
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I am fine, generally speaking, with dating sims. Some of them are pretty good, and to be fair, many japanese VNs try to follow that same suit.
However, games that defy expectations are often the ones that get the most attention. There are tons and tons of platformers out there that mirror or bite the style of Super Marios Bros., but consider that a game like Default Dan, which punishes these kinds of habits players have, received quite a bit of positive acclaim and critical feedback.
I think visual novels dont have to put ass and tits in your face every 3 minutes. Even pornographic-centric ones on this site. Mine doesn't.
1. I will agree wholeheartedly that real life healthy relationships are much more healthy and meaningful than a fake one in a VN, but that shouldn't discount the value of it in a medium.
2. I will give you this point--time compression has to be a thing in any game, VNs included. Rarely do people have the kind of requisite free time necessary to indulge in a fantasy world that moves at the same speed of real life.
3. I would be okay with this as long as it is exceptionally well balanced, and provides tons of opportunities to both gain and lose friendship/trust/love/lust between the MC and a romance-able option. I think a system that levels from friendship, to trust, to love+lust would be fine, in that order. But a big point of my original post is that these are pretty unbalanced and often things that don't matter whatsoever in a real relationship matter to the VN--most likely due to the time compression aspect you spoke of earlier.
4. Sure, it is. But it's certainly not impossible, and I'd say it's worth it.
5. I'm not sure where you define a line at this point. You could look at games like Asteroids and confirm this, but games as old as Baldur's Gate or even Leisure Suit Larry had NPCs with oodles of personality just waiting to be discovered.