Introduction
Hello everyone, it's me again with another wall of text regarding corruption games. In my last post, I was not very clear as to what I meant to discuss and this lead to some misunderstanding for which I would like to apologize.
Without further ado, This time I would like to approach the problem in a more practical direction, not so abstract.
Problem Statement
Why do players pick corruption options? Because that is the way to obtain what they want.
Why do players not pick pure options? Because they have no reason to.
We can look at it from two perspectives: gameplay and narrative. Let's start with gameplay.
An universal problem
Corruption is a resource that you can gather.
The more you get, the more you can do stuff you enjoy.
If you get an OP sword in an RPG, but you don’t have the stats for it. What will you do? Continue on the main quest, or grind? We will almost always grind. The same happens with corruption. If you lock content behind “corruption points” the player will grind corruption points to unlock it.
This is fine if that is the goal of your game, the same way grind is accepted in JRPGs, but I feel that most games abuse this mechanic without actually realizing the implication.
Let’s look at Netoria Tactics Revolution Sure, you can play normally and do your best to avoid corruption, or you can always let the heroine be groped by the bulls to be sure you get the NTR route. If you came for the NTR, what would you do? If you've delved into design before, you've probably heard the phrase "Given a chance, players will optimize the fun out of games." This applies to adult games just as as much as it applies to any other type of game.
In those cases, we need to get rid of the grind. There are various ways we can approach this issue, but I think only one can be applied universally across the board. Still, let’s look at some of the more obvious solutions first.
Remove the corruption resource
Obviously, if you cannot gain corruption points and you do not need corruption points to unlock content, there is no need to grind for it. But I think we can agree that having a tangible progression indicator adds a lot to the game. Imagine playing RPGs without seeing your stats go up. It goes against the very reason we play those games.
Separate corruption points from narrative
While this solution would allow the narrative corruption to go at the right pace, it would only create more narrative dissonance. If one grinds so much corruption that they unlock sex attacks in battle, it would be very weird if their character were still pure and proper in the narrative.
Scale corruption logarithmically
So if we can’t get rid of it and we can’t separate it from the rest of the game, it’s clear we need to keep it. Well, one thing we could do is just make it very hard for the player to get too much corruption. If they get more corrupt than the story allows them to, make it harder to get corruption points. But to me, what that really means is that you’re making the grind more tedious, which might just make the player not enjoy your game.
Locking corruption away
So far we have thought about corruption points as being the resource that determines how corrupt you are. Why don’t we try to flip the relation around. The story determines how much corruption you can possibly get.
How do you do that?
Design lock -> You design the gameplay in such a way that you mathematically cannot get more corruption points than the story allows. This works well for CG hunter type games, time limited games, or in general, games where you cannot repeat actions that would give you corruption. But that is pretty limiting.
Hard lock -> Have the player simply lose if they acquire too much corruption. Such a solution can be applied to almost any genre, but it is also quite rough. Why should the player lose just by doing what they enjoy?
Soft lock -> Raise the difficulty the more the player strays from the expected corruption levels. This gives the player an organic reason to not get too much corruption without knowing there is an invisible artificially designed barrier.
What does this achieve?
Well, it makes the player not want to always choose corruption. That is a first important step towards making the player want to pick the pure option more often.
But so far we only took away the appeal of corruption. It kind of feels like we are punishing the player for enjoying corruption content. In reality what we should do is simply allow the player to play out the character the way they envision them. And if we want to give them a reason to pick something other than corruption, we also have to make the pure choices attractive. Now in gameplay, that is pretty simple.
So far, most games I’ve played always give you some sort of advantage if you pick the corrupt option. I understand this is meant to showcase the appeal of corruption, to give an explanation to the question “Why would a paragon of purity such as the heroine do something so corrupt?” but that only works when the one playing the heroine actually has something to lose by going against their morals.
The balance of Corruption vs Purity
For the heroine, the benefits of the corruption choice are equal to the ones from upholding her morals and ideals. This is what makes the choice so tempting, difficult and alluring for her, and exciting for us. But to the actual player, the scales are more like this: “If you pick the pure route, you miss out on content, but if you pick corruption, not only will you see the content you came here for, you also gain a gameplay advantage.”
In this case you might think “Okay, let’s move the gameplay benefits to the pure route.” Unfortunately, that is completely counter intuitive. It just leads to more narrative dissonance. If the heroine wants to remain pure AND she gains the advantage by doing so, why the hell would she pick the corruption option.
It’s obvious it is very hard to balance these two options. And this is the root of the problem, this one dimensional progression of corruption. I will talk more about this in a later post.
I initially wanted to discuss how to make the pure options more appealing in narrative choices as well, but I think I’ve already imposed too much on your time. Next week, I’ll continue this discussion with the narrative aspects of this conundrum. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on this idea and hopefully I’ve improved a little from my last post.
Hello everyone, it's me again with another wall of text regarding corruption games. In my last post, I was not very clear as to what I meant to discuss and this lead to some misunderstanding for which I would like to apologize.
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Without further ado, This time I would like to approach the problem in a more practical direction, not so abstract.
Problem Statement
Why do players pick corruption options? Because that is the way to obtain what they want.
Why do players not pick pure options? Because they have no reason to.
We can look at it from two perspectives: gameplay and narrative. Let's start with gameplay.
An universal problem
Corruption is a resource that you can gather.
The more you get, the more you can do stuff you enjoy.
If you get an OP sword in an RPG, but you don’t have the stats for it. What will you do? Continue on the main quest, or grind? We will almost always grind. The same happens with corruption. If you lock content behind “corruption points” the player will grind corruption points to unlock it.
This is fine if that is the goal of your game, the same way grind is accepted in JRPGs, but I feel that most games abuse this mechanic without actually realizing the implication.
Let’s look at Netoria Tactics Revolution Sure, you can play normally and do your best to avoid corruption, or you can always let the heroine be groped by the bulls to be sure you get the NTR route. If you came for the NTR, what would you do? If you've delved into design before, you've probably heard the phrase "Given a chance, players will optimize the fun out of games." This applies to adult games just as as much as it applies to any other type of game.
In those cases, we need to get rid of the grind. There are various ways we can approach this issue, but I think only one can be applied universally across the board. Still, let’s look at some of the more obvious solutions first.
Remove the corruption resource
Obviously, if you cannot gain corruption points and you do not need corruption points to unlock content, there is no need to grind for it. But I think we can agree that having a tangible progression indicator adds a lot to the game. Imagine playing RPGs without seeing your stats go up. It goes against the very reason we play those games.
Separate corruption points from narrative
While this solution would allow the narrative corruption to go at the right pace, it would only create more narrative dissonance. If one grinds so much corruption that they unlock sex attacks in battle, it would be very weird if their character were still pure and proper in the narrative.
Scale corruption logarithmically
So if we can’t get rid of it and we can’t separate it from the rest of the game, it’s clear we need to keep it. Well, one thing we could do is just make it very hard for the player to get too much corruption. If they get more corrupt than the story allows them to, make it harder to get corruption points. But to me, what that really means is that you’re making the grind more tedious, which might just make the player not enjoy your game.
Locking corruption away
So far we have thought about corruption points as being the resource that determines how corrupt you are. Why don’t we try to flip the relation around. The story determines how much corruption you can possibly get.
How do you do that?
Design lock -> You design the gameplay in such a way that you mathematically cannot get more corruption points than the story allows. This works well for CG hunter type games, time limited games, or in general, games where you cannot repeat actions that would give you corruption. But that is pretty limiting.
Hard lock -> Have the player simply lose if they acquire too much corruption. Such a solution can be applied to almost any genre, but it is also quite rough. Why should the player lose just by doing what they enjoy?
Soft lock -> Raise the difficulty the more the player strays from the expected corruption levels. This gives the player an organic reason to not get too much corruption without knowing there is an invisible artificially designed barrier.
What does this achieve?
Well, it makes the player not want to always choose corruption. That is a first important step towards making the player want to pick the pure option more often.
But so far we only took away the appeal of corruption. It kind of feels like we are punishing the player for enjoying corruption content. In reality what we should do is simply allow the player to play out the character the way they envision them. And if we want to give them a reason to pick something other than corruption, we also have to make the pure choices attractive. Now in gameplay, that is pretty simple.
So far, most games I’ve played always give you some sort of advantage if you pick the corrupt option. I understand this is meant to showcase the appeal of corruption, to give an explanation to the question “Why would a paragon of purity such as the heroine do something so corrupt?” but that only works when the one playing the heroine actually has something to lose by going against their morals.
The balance of Corruption vs Purity
For the heroine, the benefits of the corruption choice are equal to the ones from upholding her morals and ideals. This is what makes the choice so tempting, difficult and alluring for her, and exciting for us. But to the actual player, the scales are more like this: “If you pick the pure route, you miss out on content, but if you pick corruption, not only will you see the content you came here for, you also gain a gameplay advantage.”
In this case you might think “Okay, let’s move the gameplay benefits to the pure route.” Unfortunately, that is completely counter intuitive. It just leads to more narrative dissonance. If the heroine wants to remain pure AND she gains the advantage by doing so, why the hell would she pick the corruption option.
It’s obvious it is very hard to balance these two options. And this is the root of the problem, this one dimensional progression of corruption. I will talk more about this in a later post.
I initially wanted to discuss how to make the pure options more appealing in narrative choices as well, but I think I’ve already imposed too much on your time. Next week, I’ll continue this discussion with the narrative aspects of this conundrum. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on this idea and hopefully I’ve improved a little from my last post.
