Nah... The real problem is that this is not a game. There are different versions, different stories, but there is no feeling that you are playing a game. Yes, there is a lot of text and a good story, but you might as well find and read a more interesting book. I've told others many times and I believe that a good game doesn't need a story. If the game does not have interesting gameplay, then why i should to play it?
I realized this last week that there are two main problems related to this.
1. Instead of clicking a hyperlinks that send you from the airport to the place that you're staying at and from there to the taskforce safe house and from there to the Hard Cock Cafe, at that point in the game, the map should have become a gameplay device.
It's okay that this prologue is linear. There's a certain amount of set up you need to do to get to the main part of the game. Like being in Bangkok and getting hired at the Cafe.
But the gameplay itself should not be literally linear. When I "play" this game, I spend a lot a lot a lot a lot of time just fast scrolling to the bottom so I can click the hyperlink that sends me to the next screen and the next scene. This is boring and it's an enormous wasted opportunity. The whole thing is on rails. It's the difference between making an auto-scroller game and giving the player a gun and making the objective "get to the other side of this level."
If there was an interactive map with all of the locations (like Photo Hunt or A Tale of One City or Lesson of Passion games or My Tuition Academia, there are countless examples), you can still block the player's choices into moving linearly, but it's already better than just forcing them to click page after page of text with
no choices.
Let them manually click on an icon to go to the night market. Once at the night market, click the clothing stall to get the new clothing you need.
Let them click on the safe house to initiate the scenes with taskforce. If there's nothing to do there yet, put up a flag that blocks the player from accessing the next scene, saying, "There is nothing to do here right now."
When you need to go to the Cafe, actually have the player click on it on the map to start the hiring process. Even in this prologue phase, the player should still have the agency to decide how they use their time. If they take more time to get the lay of the land before making contact at the Cafe, that could even play into the story. Making themselves familiar with the environment makes them a better operator. But keeping everything on rails and completely restricting player agency makes this less interactive than a visual novel. This leads me into the second problem.
2. Game development is going to come to a grinding halt the moment they start working on the open world portion of it.
Basically all Crush has been doing is writing linear scenes that always have the same outcome and putting hyperlink transitions at the bottom. Once you open up the world and players are expected to be able to go to different places at different times, that is a
completely different kind of gameplay and Crush and their team will have to learn an entirely new workflow. If you had done everything that currently exists in the latest version but made it so that the scenes were accessed via a map or travel system instead of a "click to get to the next scene" button, you have the main gameplay framework in place. The development team is all on the same page and it's been training the player on where everything is and how it all functions.
But instead, because it's been entirely linear up until now, the team is going to get to that part and then are going to have to learn how to do something completely new and no content can be made during that time while you're just trying to get the foundation into place.
And these long scenes are completely killing Crush to write. The entire first day at the Cafe is probably no less than a hundred screens long and you could have separated them into no less than 10 different events. That's content that could be randomized and cycled through and show up every time you click on the Cafe to show up for a shift. Crush is taking months and months to write scenes that are only showing up
once and don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Making the player get molested by customers 5 times in one linear event is not as impactful as making the player get molested 5 times across five different events. You can also split up the dancer's scenes to show on different days, which would make more events as well.
Basically, Crush has set himself up with a workflow that prioritizes content that is antithetical to the promised core gameplay of Female Agent. He hasn't been doing the proper due diligence needed for the game to succeed. I guarantee you that the moment this prologue is done, you're going to get an even dryer content hiatus than you've seen in the last 3 years because of this hurtle.
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On a personal note, as someone who's read a lot of spy thrillers with a lot of sexy scenes with them, what's most disappointing about this is that the premise of being the bait in a honeytrap operation is a very compelling and engaging concept. But the execution has been so flawed, I can't see it ever being finished in a timely manner.
I'm also very miffed that you are forced to get nipple piercings if you make an avatar with small boobs. It's an unnecessary and annoying requirement and is a real killjoy for someone who likes small boobs and doesn't like nipple piercings.