How do you start/play new games?

[FranceToast]

I just started playing these Ren'Py games/VNs, and I'm curious how people actually...uh...play them.

For one thing, a lot of them seem to be not just incomplete, but are designed to be so- like old time serials that keep you hanging on for the next episode. Do you just have like 4-5 games you are playing at different stages hanging around until the next update? How do you manage to remember what is what in each game? Or are you just waiting for major updates, and playing the game fresh each time?

The other thing that comes to mind from reading comments-tons of demands/requests for cheats and walkthroughs from the start. Do you play the game once without any cheats/walkthroughs just to enjoy the game and the sense of discovery, then go back and catch stuff you might have missed? Or do you just start with the cheats and walkthroughs from the start to get everything from the get-go?

(I started thinking about this because I'm playing Long Live The Princess, which I am enjoying, but started without a Walkthrough, and when I got stuck and checked one, I realized I had missed just a ton of stuff. But I kind of prefer not knowing too much )

Just curious how people approach this rather unique form of gaming (that I am new to).

 

[Daxter250]

i have a game folder only for porn games ^^. in that folder are all the ongoing games neatly listed with their names and patch numbers. it can get a bit messy at times but in general this folder reminds me of all the games i played so far and what game i want to follow in future updates. i do wait a couple of updates 'till i play the game again, 'cause most updates are too minor to be worth playing again.

if i didn't play a certain game for too long, i often play it fresh again. if i can still remember the game and its content, i'm using my old save (if compatible) and play on. thankfully i have quite a story memory (not so for names and numbers unfortunately x.x), so i don't have so many problems remembering contents of old games.
whenever possible i don't play with a walkthough. in my personal opinion, if a game really needs a walkthrough, the game designer did something wrong. therefore i rarely play games where walkthrough are a necessity.
and yes, once i played it though i often use cheats to get the other content too (if the game wasn't thaaaaat fun... in roundscape e.g. i don't use cheats, it's fun to play the game again the vanilla style ^^).

 

[kimoo]

I just started playing these Ren'Py games/VNs, and I'm curious how people actually...uh...play them.

For one thing, a lot of them seem to be not just incomplete, but are designed to be so- like old time serials that keep you hanging on for the next episode. Do you just have like 4-5 games you are playing at different stages hanging around until the next update? How do you manage to remember what is what in each game? Or are you just waiting for major updates, and playing the game fresh each time?

The other thing that comes to mind from reading comments-tons of demands/requests for cheats and walkthroughs from the start. Do you play the game once without any cheats/walkthroughs just to enjoy the game and the sense of discovery, then go back and catch stuff you might have missed? Or do you just start with the cheats and walkthroughs from the start to get everything from the get-go?

(I started thinking about this because I'm playing Long Live The Princess, which I am enjoying, but started without a Walkthrough, and when I got stuck and checked one, I realized I had missed just a ton of stuff. But I kind of prefer not knowing too much )

Just curious how people approach this rather unique form of gaming (that I am new to).

currently
iam trying the game if it's good i support the dev and wait for it to complete
i really dont like to wait every month for new update

some other games you cannot wait for it to be completed so you play it every month

but dont think you are going to forget the story or something there is some games i have played since years and still remember the story

if the story is good you arent going to forget it

 

[Gomly1980]

There are only a handful of monthly games I bother checking up on. Mainly I play completed ones and tend to stick with RPG's. There aren't many VN's manage to keep my attention, I need gameplay.

I don't like the monthly release on Patreon thing. Updates don't take very long to get through so I usually wait until they are finished.

It's probably why I ended up playing a lot of Japanese H RPG's, they launch them completed it's just a case of finding a translation or waiting for one.

I don't mean those shitty "woman goes to dungeon to be raped constantly" RPG's that get fired out like candy, I mean actual story driven RPG's.

 

[NandabaCanti]

If I find a game I like, I play through it's current content then I'll wait for a few releases to come out and for me to get in the mood to replay it again. At that point when I'm feeling the urge to revisit, I'll grab the latest release and start over fresh from the start and go through everything it currently has. I don't like picking up where I left off and only checking out the latest content after a month or more away from it, but I also don't like replaying the same stuff too often, so waiting until I feel that desire to go through the content again works best for me.

 

[Pharan]

Pretty much exactly as Gomly said. I've got a hard drive with literally hundreds of completed games (lots of them jrpg's) waiting to be played.

I probably will never catch up with the rate at which new games get completed. I used to try and keep up with the whole monthly patreon thing, but I just found it too annoying.

 

[DarthSeduction]

I've always found I have a pretty good memory, so I don't have any struggle picking up the next chapter a month or two later. Since you mentioned Long Live the Princess, I actually wait a few months in between playing it, so that multiple storylines have been allowed to develop further and I don't feel like I am wasting my time.

I do think that developers need to pull themselves away from this day by day box they've put themselves in, though. The next release of my own game is slated to cover about a week's worth of time. You aren't seeing what the MC does in their downtime though, and I'm not packing each day with event after event. But another thing they need to do, like you said, is treat it like that old serial, make sure that each release leaves you with something memorable so that when you get back into it, carrying from where you left off, you're pulled right back into it.

I also don't play a lot of the repetitive games, your Man of the Houses and Big Brothers which are simply the same thing over and over with diffierent characters. I prefer the ones with a somewhat unique story. Even Babysitter, Parental Love, and My Sweet Neighbors, which, mechanically, are all clones of Dating My Daughter, manage to be unique with their own stories that keep you invested in the characters rather than the events.

Personally there are 5 games I've used a walkthrough on:

• I Love Daddy, which has 10 different endings, and I wanted to trigger them all, so I followed it after my second playthrough without it
• Big Brother, which even though I'd said fuck this game long ago, I had to go back to when I ended up writing for a parody and didn't know a character or two that were necessary.
• Dreaming of Dana, I got stuck and needed to figure out how to move things forward
• Summertime Saga, because I'd missed something
• My Legacy, because the game takes place over seven days and if you miss anything you won't advance a story in time.

I never start with a walkthrough, but when I need to speed run a game, like i did with Big Brother, or when a game has a time limit and very specific outcomes depending on interactions that I don't trigger the first time, I go back to find what I missed.

That said, I don't begrudge the people who demand one. Things can get confusing and not everyone has a lot of free time for this, like I do. It's kinda like cheats on single player games, sometimes you just wanna have fun.

 

[HalGLC]

At time of posting, my games folder is about 128Gb (though 34 of those are lifeselector which is mostly a large collection of video clips)

I generally won't touch a game until there's a good amount of content already. But I play, well, a lot. And because I play so many games I don't mind the slow update process, because one way or another I get a good amount of updates a week. That being said like I said before I generally like a good amount of content so often times I won't even look at a 0.1 (though dev's are getting cheeky and making their first released 0.15 or even 0.5)

Generally I keep all the games, I won't play back through the whole thing, but I do keep saves at each individual scene for my own interests (though I greatly prefer games with the gallery option)

As for walkthroughs, I'll admit I use them often. If I DL a new game and see a walkthrough attached to the OP I immediately grab that too. For me there is no sense of wonder or discovery, and to me the feeling OP described (checking a walkthrough only to find he missed a lot of stuff) is IMO one of the worst feelings with these games. In the words of Queen, I want it all. So I use the walkthroughs to make sure I get every bit of content I want and often times the content I don't. A lot of games like Babysitter will release walkthroughs with clear warnings like "Do NOT pick this unless you want NTR content" or another game that I forget had something like "pick this here and you get a femdom scene.

I'm not a developer, but I do recognize it's a bit of a mixed bag when walkthroughs. On one hand you want the people playing your games to experience as much of it as possible, but you also don't want people just using that and not getting the full experience. I'm on the side of giving us the option, but again I'm not a dev and I'm actually a biased gamer at that.

 

[Gomly1980]

The other thing that comes to mind from reading comments-tons of demands/requests for cheats and walkthroughs from the start. Do you play the game once without any cheats/walkthroughs just to enjoy the game and the sense of discovery, then go back and catch stuff you might have missed? Or do you just start with the cheats and walkthroughs from the start to get everything from the get-go?

I made walkthroughs for a few games but it's that "demand" that put me off doing them.

It's not that people ask for them it's how they ask like they are owed one. No please, no thankyou just "walkthrough?".

It takes a few hours to make one especially in heavily choice driven games where we have to go through every path and type out everything you need to do. It's not exactly an enjoyable experience, it means we have to see outcomes we don't want to and it has ruined some games for me but it helped people so hey ho.

I just got pissed off with peoples shitty attitudes. If they can't be arsed to say please then fuck wasting my time on those cunts.

 

[GuyFreely]

I try a lot of games, but I vastly prefer finished games. Some games dish out content liberally and those are easier to play incomplete versions. The really annoying ones are where you start making progress toward some of the characters and they just stop. I don't mind a bit of a build up in a game/VN as long as it pays off. So many games are stuck in the build up phase. I don't know if this is a deliberate tactic (the cynic in me says 'yes') but it puts me off. You also run the risk of saves not being compatible in future versions and the game being abandoned.

I've mentioned this before, but here is my personal preference on cheats/walkthroughs. IF the game is a diverging path story, where there's no "wrong" way to do it, then I'm perfectly happy just blindly going through it. If I notice that the game has a lot of wrong choices, game overs, can only get to the content by making perfect choices, then I look to see if there is a guide. If the game is grindy as fuck, making smaller numbers into bigger numbers in some boring repetitive way, then I see if there are cheats. After I have played a game through one time, all bets are off. If I am curious to see the content I didn't see, I'm perfectly happy cheating or using a guide to get it.

 

[Loqic]

Somehow I have a good memory for stories, so I play a lot of new releases and updates. If the game impressed me I might play the next following update, but often I wait every few updates, especially if the devs are known to throw in 2 or 3 scenes for an extra 10 minutes gameplay each update.
My game folder is also blowing up and will need a cleanup soon. ^^;

It's sometimes funny to see a "walkthrough?" post on a 0.0001 release with zero choice in it. x)
I like to explore the story on my own so I'm not a fan of walktroughs, unless I'm really stuck somewhere or when I played it through thoroughly, but still miss a certain path. As for cheats, yes, I often edit a save file to take out the grinding element with adding 1M gold or the never ending battles with a +999 str. I really don't enjoy battles or farming for in these types of games.

 

[MaxCarna]

I'm always looking the "latest updates" page, when something catch my attention I download and immediately play. If I liked, I stay attentive for the next updates. I have a folder for all games. If I download more than one version, I create a subfolder just for that game. I don't like when I have to replay since the beginning, although. In this cases I think twice before download a new version, prefer to wait 3 or 4 versions.

My Sweet Neighbors in other hand, always retake where it stopped, so I download every version as soon as they are released. Summertime Saga was the only exception, I played from the beginning several times, except the last version, I'm not very interested on the character focused on 0.16, so will wait for 0.17. Also for Summertime Saga I never used a walkthrough, just old trial and error.

I use walkthroughs in 2 occasions: when the game is really complex and I get stuck, but is also very interesting, The Last Sovereign for example; or when the game is not that good and I'm not in the mood to spend hours to deciver puzzles.
Just want to check the goodies.

About the time spent in repetitive tasks, funny thing I had patience enough to play through Breeding Season, getting money, high level of monsters and so, but get bored quickly with Breeders of the Nephelym, although I considered one of the best graphics with real 3D.

I take some games looking as a player, just to have fun, but also as a developer to compare techniques, get new ideas.