Before this update I was really hoping this game would beat out the SO/WW sequel in the Patreon poll but now I'm on the fence. Alice is so fucking annoying that the mere mention of her name ruins the following sex scenes at the moment. I mean I could believe her getting you banned from the club was a joke from the dev. And I could buy it being a catalyst for us fucking a number of wives/girlfriends while their husbands/boyfriends have fun at the strip club. I can even understand how Alice would be rightfully pissed at the MC for basically turning her into an alcoholic sex worker. But, if it was a joke it just missed somehow. Maybe because turning him into a voyeur was bad enough(although the making him a private detective was a good save). Maybe it's because I'm afraid no, convinced that it's going to be abandoned in favor of the series longtime Patrons are more invested in. But, this game still has a lot of potential. Alice still has a lot of potential. I'm still very interested to see who the killer is and how I as a player will react to and relate to them.
But, if the other girl is always going to talk about Alice every time MCs about to get laid and we can't go watch her and the other girls strip I'm going to lose my mind. Because it seems like it's going to be quite a few (if not damn near all) updates before we get to see MC fuck Alice. And hopefully she becomes less antagonistic after they fuck. Don't want to see her do a 180 and either ruin her character development. IF she gets any. Also the writing makes it seem like it could be a really fun place.
Whatever if gets abandoned it gets abandoned. Ain't shit I can do about it now. And I know regardless of which game gets the go ahead that the animations are going to be top tier. The pacing of the sex scenes should be really good. Hopefully everything else is good enough.
Thanks for the honest review. It's refreshing to see someone actually making a point why they feel the way they do. You made the effort to write it, so the least I can do is respond.
First of all - a little backstory on why and how i34 was started. Roughly a year in making of WW, I had plans for it to be the last game in the series. Going forward, I had a couple of options - a new sci-fi game or a completely different genre. I came across the Daz3d bundle for an island with villas, airport, downtown district, a hotel - basically the whole setting, so I started writing a story for it - in it's initial version it would've been a couple's resort where you and your wife went to resolve the issues in your marriage. No 'hardcoded' story - more like a sandbox game in which the more you progress, the more events get unlocked. Based on the comments I got for WW in messages from my Patreons I got the impression that most of them would enjoy a game which is more like a VN than a sandbox. So my attention shifted to planning the sci-fi game. The gameplay I had in mind was what you see in i34 - VN chapters with sandbox elements in between the chapters. Again - the plan was for it to have no connection to SO/WW story.
Fast forward a year and WW was coming to it's final release so I had to start making the next game. I wrote the story, I even have the dialogue for the first episode. But when I started looking for Daz3D assets to buy to make the actual renders, the sci-fi ones are not consistent enough. The end result would've been something like SO where bedrooms don't match the style, etc. So I decided to wait (for a year?) and do a placeholder game - I already had bought the island and all that remained was to add some kind of a plot to the game I had planned and change it's gameplay from a pure sandbox to a VN/sandbox hybrid. This is how the 'murder' element of the game was born. i34 is planned to take about an year to complete and the pace of the game is based on how the story is split on episodes. Events will be added between episodes, but they will not have any impact on the story, so it doesn't really matter how many I'll be able to do.
With the start of i34, there was a drop in Patreon pledges - maybe it was the second wave of Covid and the new lockdowns forcing some of my supporters to cut their non-essential spending, maybe they didn't like the i34 being in a different genre, maybe both. Like it or not, the funding I get on Patreon drives the game forward. I can't get the assets for the game or justify spending my free time working on the game instead of my family if there is no funding coming in.
That being said, i34 will NOT be abandoned. The worst that could happen to it is to be put on hold while I work on the third SO/WW game. As with SO and WW, that game will have a clear timeframe and once it's done I'll come back to i34. I don't want to go into details about it's story because the WW epilogue is not yet publicly released so I don't want to spoil it but expect something like WW in terms of development time (roughly 2.5 years).
Now about Alice and the others in i34. First of all, keep in mind it's stil ep.2, so the story is still building the relationships between the characters. Alice is annoying and is trying to piss you off with everything she does. As us software developers like to say - this is not a bug, it's a feature. In the beginning spiking her drink to loosen her up, sneaking a peek while she's having a bath will be your way to get even at her. Later in the game, those will become much more... explicit.