Others Completed Future Fragments [v1.0.1] [HentaiWriter]

[silver24240]

After playing the new demo, I'm gonna have to agree with PM21's review on the point of there being so much text for the databanks. If it was maybe just one paragraph or even one page it'd probably be fine, but having to read through several boxes of text or just mash your way through the dialogue gets tedious verrrryyy fast. Granted it's not mandatory, but when the focus of an action-oriented game appears to be, in part, to tell a story with detailed worldbuilding, you run into a situation where you have two core tenets of the game that feel like they're competing for your attention to get the full experience. However, the way those tenets have been implemented (platforming and storytelling) directly conflicts with each other.

Action-oriented games are, by design, supposed to keep the player engaged and moving all about a level, so having that gameplay flow be interrupted by what feels like pages out of a novel is jarring to say the least. Conversely, rich worldbuilding stories are typically read at a slower and gradual pace, contrary to pace of an action-oriented game. It's not like this balance can't be reached either, the Metroid Prime games do this with the scan visor. You scan a thing while you can still move, it gets recorded, and you can either read a short blurb there or enter a menu to read all the detailed lore and entries. Why a similar function couldn't be a part of this game, I don't know. If there was a way to quickly interact with a databank without having to bring the game to a screeching halt, that would overall improve the gameplay imo.

 

[TJ412]

Alright. Thoughts: As I was afraid, the story and amount of dialog is what I would call bloated. Maybe a platformer wasn't the best way to tell this story because every room it's WORDS WORDS WORDS. I was not engaged in the slightest with the story and I'd say the writing falls short where it would matter most in this sort of game: the H scenes. They aren't erotic or tantalizing in the slightest, they try to be aloof and funny, and they just aren't, so it fails on two fronts. Irony? Considering they're written by a guy whose name would suggest he might be good at this, but HentaiWriter is seemingly the worst at writing actual HENTAI.
[...]

I'm in agreement for the most part. I can't really comment on the overall quality of the writing if I'm skipping through much of it - I will give props for having reactive and interlinked side/sub-plots within the levels, but it feels like that much effort and intricacy would be best reserved for a project of its own - because so much of it is disconnected from most of the audience's motivation for playing the game - much of it isn't erotic in nature - and this especially shows in the H-scenes themselves.

With the team, talents and resources they have - the art is good, the gameplay and level design are at least competent, and while maybe not befitting a porn game, branching/reactive dialog sequences and side-quests and morality systems with consequences aren't trivial things to develop, and like it or not people are willing to fund its development - they could easily (""easily"") make an S-tier H-game.

They just need to refactor where the efforts and resources go. Give us a boilerplate "majik gurl save da worl!! Rapey monsters o noe!!1!" or basically any other premise, an intro cutscene or even just a blurb to establish the setting, the character, their goal and their obstacles. Pump the majority of the effort into creating the enemies, their animations and any other H-scenes, and if you want to spice things up, systems that tie in to that - arousal, corruption, status effects, clothing destruction etc.

The levels this takes place in don't need to be elaborate, puzzling or challenging to figure out. Shit, Guilty Hell and its sequel are amongst the most highly-anticipated and well-regarded H-games out there, and their levels are mostly flat left-right side-scrolling with a minimum of platforming and the occasional gimmick. What carries them is their atmosphere for one, but mainly the content they contain. Some of that is dialog, but with most of it being untranslated, it gets skipped through just the same.

When I talk S-Tier, Mission Mermaiden and its upcoming sequel Hachina Ghost Story (

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) are amongst the examples I'd give. Most of its enemies die in one hit its levels are basic with some platforming. IIRC only the main character and antagonists are voiced. It's not going to pick up many points in the gameplay or story department and it's not trying to - instead its focus is on the H-content, with ample enemy variety and status-effects that can each re-contextualize the scenes, in a more immediate sense.

Even Kooonsoft's games, while not terribly ambitious even on the scale of H-games - they don't fuck around, they just get straight to the fucking. Dead simple gameplay, practically no plot, and a relative wealth of smut content compared to its length and the investment it asks of the player.

This doesn't mean there's no room for story and characters and all that jazz - but I feel these things are best treated as a fine spice.

All this to say, I hope that once they're finally done with FF and are ready to start a new project, they go with something more straight-forwards - less voice-acting, less writing, more fucking and faster turn-around.

 

[OmniFurious]

I saw basically everything you can in one go of the demo

To Noble 6,
Hey friend, it's me again. Can you clarify whether you meant that you "saw everything there is in the demo in one run", or that "you saw everything one run lets you see".

Thank you, have a blessed day
OmniFurious

 

[Noble 6]

View attachment 2981059

I did, but I think I worded it poorly. I saw as much as I could if you only do one runthrough.
Anything else would require a second save file to be done, but I also don't feel what I saw justifies a second playthrough of it. The platforming isn't very exciting, and the writing isn't engaging enough to make me do it all a second time.
The only thing I missed was the one imp on the bottom left. He refused to talk to me, presumably because of my alignment.

However, the way those tenets have been implemented (platforming and storytelling) directly conflicts with each other.

Yep, this is its first and biggest problem. The two don't mesh together in the slightest, at least in the way this game attempts them.

 

[TJ412]

when the focus of an action-oriented game appears to be, in part, to tell a story with detailed worldbuilding, you run into a situation where you have two core tenets of the game that feel like they're competing for your attention to get the full experience. However, the way those tenets have been implemented (platforming and storytelling) directly conflicts with each other.
[...]

Action-oriented games are, by design, supposed to keep the player engaged and moving all about a level, so having that gameplay flow be interrupted by what feels like pages out of a novel is jarring to say the least. Conversely, rich worldbuilding stories are typically read at a slower and gradual pace, contrary to pace of an action-oriented game.

Yeah you're on the money. Though you are forgetting the third element in this proverbial tug-of-war - and this applies on both the player and developer side - that's the adult content. It already competes with the gameplay its self in a sense - if you're watching a scene, you've lost or brought yourself closer to losing - and interrupted the action gameplay and progression therein. Having long dialog sequences, cutscenes and lore dumps diminshes it even further. This town (ie my attention span and why I'm invested in playing any given H-game) aint big enough for the three of them.

 

[Noble 6]

Yeah you're on the money. Though you are forgetting the third element in this proverbial tug-of-war - and this applies on both the player and developer side - that's the adult content. It already competes with the gameplay its self in a sense - if you're watching a scene, you've lost or brought yourself closer to losing - and interrupted the action gameplay and progression therein. Having long dialog sequences, cutscenes and lore dumps diminshes it even further. This town (ie my attention span and why I'm invested in playing any given H-game) aint big enough for the three of them.

I think there's some merit to this, though I don't know if I entirely agree.
But as an example, another platformer got posted here recently, Kiera Chase & the God Game, a sidescroller. It had very good scenes, and the art is nice. But the actual action-platformer segments didn't have anything to do with the rest at all. So people (myself included) suggested removing the instakill spike segments, but keeping the presentation of a sidescroller walkaround.

This game has the same problem, but it's too far along. You're either doing a platformer segment, a dialogue/terminal segment, or the very brief sex segments (many of which are only scene if you somehow died). But you can't do all three at once, or even two at once.
This wasn't as apparent in the past. Previous demos lacked most of these NPCs, so most text was kept to the terminals, but even back then people would suggest mashing through them. Now we have twice as much of that.

I read the dialogue of every NPC I met this time, but man some of those drone on. Several minutes, if you let their full voiceclips play out. I always feel like I have to readjust back to playing a platformer after that, like my eyes readjusting after turning the lights on.

 

[Grabity]

is there a gallery mod, or one unlocked in this yet? havent touched it in awhile but i dont wanna replay it the 20th time.

 

[beebooboobop]

any save for this version?

 

[TJ412]

Yeah I think one way to help with this specific issue is like Silver mentioned - let the player download the databank, and let the player resume playing. Even better if it were bioshock style where you can listen to the logs whilst actually playing.

 

[4de64r3esa64sa]

Played through the whole demo twice, bottom to top then top to bottom to get different reactions. Let every voice line play out in its entirety.

To echo some of the sentiment I've read here, the game fails to be cohesive. It's an audio book, mega man, and porn. Distinctly separate. I actually enjoyed the majority of the writing but there are admittedly some parts that made me cringe a bit. The whole "sex starved society" part is pretty forced. The platforming isn't particularly compelling but it should get a bit more interesting as the abilities are added. Hardly interacted with the porn, might come back to whack it after some post-databank clarity. Admittedly, I did enjoy the voice acting but considering it took several hours to get through one levels worth it's excessive. The unique reactions from the NPCs between my two playthroughs was pretty cool and should only improve with the full game. Powerups don't mean much as it's not particularly hard anyways with base stats. I'd consider myself pretty good at platformers and I never died.

The game tries to be too many things before being a solid game and it feels awkward for it. The lengthy development surely played a part in this as in my experience integration of porn and gameplay has become more of a thing in recent years. Overall it felt closer to a visual novel. I do still feel like the project would have benefitted from a smaller scope. A tighter core concept instead of a grandiose play if you would.

All of that aside though and looking purely at the demo presented, I enjoyed the game. I do hope to play through the full experience someday.

 

[Opinade]

I mean, I can get criticism of release being later than originally promised, but the future fragments team has been very transparent about setbacks as well as straight up going "you don't need to support the whole time, if you paid 20 bucks over your time as a supporter, you'd get the whole game when they release it even if you stop.
And when they mentioned that due to how steam would require a sale right at the start that they could no longer honor the 10 bucks donated for full game instead of the 20, they also offered refunds.

 

[MasterXY]

Going echo the thoughts of many in this thread I think, I played through the demo about 2 times (I might try a third just to see if I missed anything but I don't think I can take much more visual novel reading)

One major complaint I have is the personality choice system, the way it is currently set up makes for an extremely frustrating playthrough in which it's impossible for the player to know which option will lead to gaining or losing a certain trait. The only way to know will be to look up a walkthrough guide or to play through the game dozens of times exploring each option and writing down what each option does. I do not know how the dev plans for anyone to be capable of going for any of the endings on purpose without consulting a guide especially when considering there are hidden dialogues that only unlock based on doing certain actions beforehand... and thats all well and fine, but it would be greatly appreciated if I could see "I can either increase my kindness, or increase my hatred for the 2 options". Early on in my run I got a cool power up (whip I think) which used violence to change how it worked and I decided I would try to pick the violent options if they ever popped up so I could see how it changed my power up, but it was nearly impossible for me to figure out which options gave or took away violence so I quickly gave up on that.

Like others have mentioned the silver databases are kinda a slog to get through, I tried my hardest to read all of them but it was hard to stop myself from just skipping through them, especially when many are just about random shit barely related to the world building or they are alluding to something in later levels, but bold of you to assume the player will remember anything from the silver databases when there are 30 of them in the first level alone. 2 examples of this might be the one about the nate clones, or the one about the vampire who inhaled nanomachines and no longer needed blood and just decided to wander the world eventually disappearing, I am unsure why these were worth mentioning to the plot. It took me nearly 2 hours to get through my first playthrough and that was with me skipping through dialogue reading rather than listening. I suspect listening to the full voice clips would turn this into a 4 hour playthrough.

I remember entering a room and seeing 2 databases next to eachother and just feeling dread. I dreaded coming across them. Because I want to enjoy the lore and immerse myself in the world, but the way the its set up makes it extremely difficult to because you're just bombarded with lore, names, places none of which mean anything to you and as soon as you learn about something you're just bombarded with unrelated lore that's sometimes not even relevant to the plot or world building. I feel exhausted after having played this, and I didn't even touch my dick once lol.

I've always been a fan of environmental story telling, for example in anthophobia I remember there was a barricaded room with a single normal zombie inside, after killing it you could discover in back of the room a tape? which contained the man's last words while also providing lore to the world, it was fantastic. I contrast that with this where you have a silver databank in a hole telling of a guy who died or a battle that took place and thats it. At very least could add a body or something.

As far as the NPC's are concerned, meh. I did 2 playthroughs one in which I picked top option, other I picked bottom option. Besides some minor changes in dialogue and nebulous personality trait gain/loss there's never a reason to not pick the obvious "this will generate lewd scene" there's some tiny bits of cool extra dialogue but you'll forget about it within 5 minutes because it was nothing ground breaking, or because you'll be bombarded with more lore, NPC's, databanks etc... There's probably some cool hidden secrets, for example in the lava room you can talk to the woman and she'll have unique dialogue for talking to her while you're in the lava and then again when you come back after turning the lava off you'll get +Kindness I think, but was it worth a 2nd playthrough in which I died talking to her and had to walk back? No. Cool, but a waste of time lol. Maybe that'll unlock some secret scene 3 levels later but I really can't see myself playing through this more than twice and that second playthrough will be a slog, playing the fire level has reminded me why the electric level was the "demo" for a while.

Shout out to billzerker, easily the best NPC in fire demo. The voice actors were clearly of high quality but I didn't care to listen to most of them beyond the main characters.

The only bugs I discovered were related to the NPC's, often it was possible to trigger a dialogue option without having picked it, or they would sometimes say the wrong thing and I only know that from having played through twice.

Overall I think they've turned a game that was about 5 hours long, into a 20+ hour long game which would be cool if it wasn't for the fact that 75% of that is just spent reading/listening as opposed to actually playing the game which really really does not mesh well with both a platformer, or a hentai game imo. And I think the game is worse off with all these databanks, not sure how I feel with the NPC's yet most of my complaints with them are a result of other systems (databank spam + personality system) annoying me.

 

[lrgokugames]

full save ? \AppData\Roaming\Future_Fragments save location

 

[Spatula22]

Development began in January 2015, so the game is in its eighth year of development.

Count with me, this game has taken the entirety of:

1. 2015 (first year of development)
2. 2016
3. 2017
4. 2018
5. 2019
6. 2020
7. 2021
8. 2022
9. 2023 (ninth year of development)

 

[JUDAEL]

Count with me, this game has taken the entirety of:

1. 2015 (first year of development)
2. 2016
3. 2017
4. 2018
5. 2019
6. 2020
7. 2021
8. 2022
9. 2023 (ninth year of development)

Also this game has been too protected by communities from the beginning, (many critics posts has been removed too)
people deserved it. So they should not complain.

 

[Rixen]

Is it me, or databanks are really not fun? There's at least one of them per screen, and it's nothing but disorganized loredumps. I like everything else in this new demo, but come on, walls of text which literally stop you from playing the game again and again?

 

[Getoffmypenarmods]

I wonder how great the game would have been had those 9 years been focused on making the sex scenes longer than 1-2 minutes and adding in more enemy types and animations instead of making hundreds of lines of text for lore and voicing them.

Should have made a web based game instead of a platformer if this was the direction you wanted to take.

I mean, fuck, 2 clicks for insertion, 4 thrusting to nut, and then 1 for aftermath. There isn't a shot in hell you can manage to cum in that timespan lmao.

Future fragments is barely a hentai game, the sex is close to non-existant. The difficulty is nonexistant, and I say that as someone who has only ever played platformers when its been in hentai games. I have close to no actual experience with them, and yet this one is a cakewalk.

Future fragments from what we've seen up until now should have been a book or VN. It feels like HW wanted to write this as a novel, but wanted the added money that comes with making games. The sex being added in so that any critics couldn't point out any flaws in gameplay as "its just a hentai game, what did you expect?".

 

[RandoCard3]

Been a few years since I touched this, because it being broken up into parts seemed like a hassle. Is this a single download and playable from beginning to end of the current available content?

 

[StonedFish]

Been a few years since I touched this, because it being broken up into parts seemed like a hassle. Is this a single download and playable from beginning to end of the current available content?

That'll be a BIG nope. It's still same as usual with barely any content

 

[ArsenicManson]

I prefer to voice my opinions here than in the HW's discord and risk causing a ruckus there.

The Good:

• I think the game plays well and have a beautiful art direction. The level is great, the animations are smooth and clean.
  
  
• I do like the "game-over"cutscenes, they are light-hearted and funny. I (in my humble opinion) detest cutscenes were the protagonist is forced into sex against its will (all this rape bs leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it is disgusting!). Also, sorry to say, but I think that the cutscenes beats most of the souless Daz content that we see day-after-day here.
  
  
• It is a plataformer. A breath of fresh hair against the tsunami of Renpy novels.
  
  
• I really think the characters are cool and look striking, all of them.

The Bad:

• The databanks. THE FRIKKING ENDLESS DATABANKS. I mean, when I started playing it, I read them all... But the middle of the game, I simply couldn't. They didn't add anything and was just a lore dump. MasterXY wrote exactly what I felt. In the end, I just skipped through them.
• Could have used more cutscenes instead of endless walls of text.

I don't think HW is a bad writer, far from it. But he could had used a little restraint with the story, really. I do think it is a nice lore for a hentai game, but it is just too much sometimes.

That said, I do hope for a final release. I really think there is a imense potential there.