What a bunch of nonsense is this? I can't even point out what exactly you are unhappy with. The fact that MC has bad or stupid reason to rape Regina? Well, I have a couple of news for you: first, there is actualy no legitimate or smart enough reason to rape anyone at all. It's not something you can rationalize. The real reason MC does it is because he is a dick and feels like doing it.
That's it. People do irrational shit all the time, don't see a problem with that. Second, you push the buttons! Nobody is forcing you to see this scene. You playing one of the few games on this site with some actual choices and unhappy that you can make some choices you don't like? The only thing I can agree with is that this scene should be locked behind sufficient karma points, just like scene with a Manon later, but it's not a huge problem.
As for the alternative scene, I'm pretty sure there would be plenty of scenes that are available only to compassionate MC later. How do you imagine an alternative scene at this point of the story? "Thank you duke for listening to me vent my trauma and not torturing me, can I lick your balls?"
Oh boy, I really didn't want to write another wall of text but I suppose I'll just make peace with the fact that I'm yappi as fuck.
I'd agree with the first paragraph if the scene was locked, but it's not. I'll chalk it up to being an oversight and give the benefit of the doubt, since that breaks the experience of any run in which we're not playing a scumbag MC in a thousand pieces.
This extends to the justification the MC uses. Doesn't need to be rational, but the implementation just comes across as him being stupid.
"You push the buttons!" is a meh argument at best, because even though it is true, I can only select the buttons that are presented for me, as a player, to press. And I'd trust that the options presented would not
completely shatter the expected experience. I was trusting the dev, after so many people kept singing the praises of this game and the previous one, saying that despite the game having a lot of controversial content it was delivered in a way that suited the player's preferences and playstyles.
Now before all this gets chalked up and summed up to a simple "so it's just an easy to solve karma system unbalance, just lock the scene up and call it a day", I'll go ahead and say that no it's not. For a couple different reasons.
The first one relates to player experience with a preference for one specific playstyle/route/content over others (and it has to do with the update as a whole, not just that scene) - it feels like if you're not engaging with
very specific and highly controversial content and/or playstyle you get
significantly less content. In the long run it'll all probably even out (assuming the next update will have a lot of locked content for compassion routes and very little for scumbag), but the player experience throughout all this SUCKS.
Like I said in an analogy regarding controversial content and why it tends to turn into a heated debate,
everybody needs to wait for the "entire meal to be cooked" - but in the case of this update, some people are eating far better than others. All this is meta, sure, but it's still relevant.
You also made the point of me requesting scenes for alternative routes seem silly (your example ("Thank you duke for listening to me vent my trauma and not torturing me, can I lick your balls?") boiled down to "how would you expect the princess to have a compassion-route scene at this point?", yeah?). And if I was specifically saying that
the same character needs to have alternative scenes for all routes at once, then yeah, that'd be silly - it makes no sense for the princess to get action atm without her being forced into it at this point in time.
But have you considered that there are
other characters in the game that
could have an exclusive compassion scene right now? No? Shocker. Take Manon's scene for example - that didn't
need to be yet another scumbag scene. It could be shaped into a longer "good boy" scene where the MC goes down on her and helps her get more self confident with her body. Did that happen? No, it was a double down on scumbag. Did it
need to be? No.
And what about dog-girl? There's already an exclusive scumbag scene there as well (and it makes sense in the context). But could she have made an appearance this chapter for a compassion route scene? Or what about the elf we (possibly) helped escape on update 1 in Cascus? Now, I'm sure that at least for the dog-girl the dev has some plans in store for her since she's even in the LI list, but hopefully you get my point.
What about Selene? MC could've made her start to open up through the compassionate route too. Honestly, it'd make a lot of sense, especially if it happened BECAUSE we didn't torture the princess. Alas, all these are "what-ifs" and hold no value, but I hope it drives home the point of WHY this update, and more specifically that princess scene, felt like a kick in the balls.
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Now the second point, and I can't stress this one enough:
a lot of people, including people on compassionate playthroughs, wants to punish the Princess. She deserves punishment. But what we got was WAY off the mark with NO SATISFYING ALTERNATIVE. Either embrace being a psychotic sadist, OR embrace your messiah complex.
JUSTICE does NOT equal mercy or clemency. Sometimes it means being firm, heartless or even ruthless (which is not what happens in the scene. That was straight up psychopathy). It's doling out punishment when deserved and rewards when appropriate. And yes, REVENGE doesn't mean JUSTICE either, but at least they are not mutually exclusive, and someone who's on a neutral/good playthrough would attempt to justify that revenge with as many layers of "justice" as they can (even if, at the end of the day, it's self-serving because I agree with you that people are selfish , oftentimes irrational and contradictory). But that scene was just "schadenfreudean sadism".
"What would be appropriate as punishment for non-psychos then"? I can think of many things, most of them abusing the fact that she has a slave seal. For example: she caused ppl in Cascus to fall into coma so, as punishment, she's not allowed to sit down, nor lie down, nor sleep. If she does, then she'd receive a jolt of pain from the slave seal. MC could/should've also given her a standing order that she is never, under any circumstances allowed to lie to him, then proceed to ask and probe her for any and all info he could regarding her father and Lucius, extract any and all her secrets.
She could be made to eat only once every 2 or 3 days, and only from the slave bowl, and have her walked to the middle of the town square to be fed. Have you watched Game of Thrones? There was an event labeled "the walk of penance" (I think) that Cersei was forced to go through.
And I'm sure there are MANY other ways that revenge could be had without having to abandon any and all semblance of empathy. That didn't have to be turned into torture when the narrative for that chosen playthrough doesn't support it.
