- Mar 20, 2019
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I have mixed feelings about it, tbh. I was motivated to do it, because I felt like it's not something I see done a lot and I'd gotten a few reviews along the lines of, "There's the illusion of choice, but it's all linear. :< " So, I wanted to do at least one update where there were some radical divergences in what the player sees.The new chapter is extremely branchy, more than I expected really. That's not a bad thing, just an interesting contrast to how with many games your paths boil down to "do it or miss out".
Buuuut, it kinda reduced the overall length of the average playthrough. Between all five possible openings, there's like 400 images. Nicki's path is like.. 175 of those? So, if you go to Nicki's apartment in the last update, your playthrough will feel longer. If you don't, it'll feel a good bit shorter. Also, it was kind of a pain in the ass to unify all the paths.
I'm sure I'll do something similar again, but keep it to two possibilities, instead of five.
And yeah, I've never liked the way a lot of AVNs are like: Here's your choice, fuck her or don't. I try to even make the friendship/no sex paths interesting in their own right. Gabby's friendship one is a fun example. On her love path, she's angry at you for what she sees as you infantilizing her. On the corruption/dark path she's worried about how you'll exploit your hold on her, to varying degrees. But, on her friend route she's basically like, "Hey, it wasn't cool that you hid this from me," but MC explains (reasonably!) that he's known her less than a week, and didn't think it was his place to meddle in her family dynamic.