POLL: For a porn game, would you prefer two customizable NPC or four non-customizable NPC?

[hakarlman]

For a porn game, do you prefer:

A) Two women NPC total, but who are highly customizable; changing their hair type, hair color, body type and breast size.
B) Four women NPC total, but can't customize them in anyway.

Ever play a game where you like the mother, sister or wife, but you don't like their body type, hair color, or breast size? Maybe you like short hair instead of long, or red hair instead of blonde. Maybe you prefer athletic body type instead of buxom?

Do you prefer more women NPC without customization, or less women with lots of customization?

Ideally, you'd have four highly customizable NPC, but that's A LOT more work. So if you had to sacrifice two NPC, to make the existing ones more customizable, would you prefer that?

EDIT: The poll can be viewed proportionally in regards to how much manpower your dev team has. Example:
One highly customizable NPC vs two non-customizable NPC?
Two highly customizable NPC vs four non-customizable NPC.
Four customizable NPC vs 8 non-customizable NPC?

The overall idea is sacrificing x amount of NPC to make existing NPC customizable.

 

[sonhot]

Definitely less but customizable. Heck i'd be happy if we could fully customize just one main heroine, her appearance and personality but i also want the male protagonist customizable as well, to a lesser extent of course.

 

[hakarlman]

Definitely less but customizable. Heck i'd be happy if we could fully customize just one main heroine, her appearance and personality but i also want the male protagonist customizable as well, to a lesser extent of course.

I like this idea. I thought about it, but then the question arises, how old should they be? What target age group is the most popular? Genre matters a lot, but still, I'm curious what's the overall favorite age group? I'm thinking around 18 to 19, but MILF's are pretty popular, so I'm not sure.

I made this Poll: POLL: What's your favorite age group for a sexable NPC? ... So we can see what the general consensus is for F95zone age preference.

EDIT: ... Now that I think about it... What if your game had ONE woman NPC only, but you could also customize her age which changes her appearance? Hmm. Then you could specify if you want her to be the MC's mother, sister, girlfriend or other, etc.

EDIT: One more thing to think about. If you're making a Harem game, what then? The rule of Harem is THREE women. However, is it safe to assume the overall idea behind Harem is: keeping the women to yourself only, so it's okay if there aren't three women available?

 

[sonhot]

My vote goes to milf .

 

[bazel]

Customizable if its rather extensive like basic stuff like hairstyles has types that fit certain age groups and can edit body types (including in 2D). Keep it short, if I can make a thick/plump milf then hell yeah.

 

[Stil996]

For a porn game, do you prefer:

A) Two women NPC total, but who are highly customizable; changing their hair type, hair color, body type and breast size.
B) Four women NPC total, but can't customize them in anyway.

I really dislike customizing NPC's (I don't even like when I get prompted for their name, Their name is their name tell it to me and move on), it really pulls you out of any immersion that might be there, though to be fair many of the games I've seen with this feature were pretty shit, with little to no content other than this gimmick.

More NPC's is better than less IMO (particularly if you are talking small numbers like < 6, more begins to stop being better every time when you reach double digits).

What about a generic Changes, ie questions in the opening that asks stuff "Big boobs, Yay or Nay", "Big Asses, Yay or Nay" etc any Yay's expand the relevant characteristic of every NPC by a few points while Nay's decrease them, that way you still get the joy of "meeting" new NPC's that have diverse body types, but biased towards the players preference.

 

[sonhot]

EDIT: ... Now that I think about it... What if your game had ONE woman NPC only, but you could also customize her age which changes her appearance? Hmm. Then you could specify if you want her to be the MC's mother, sister, girlfriend or other, etc.

EDIT: One more thing to think about. If you're making a Harem game, what then? The rule of Harem is THREE women. However, is it safe to assume the overall idea behind Harem is: keeping the women to yourself only, so it's okay if there aren't three women available?

Yes harem require at least 3 different women. Harem and customizable doesnt really mix well together since as you can see most harem featuring lots of girls and making them all customizable would be a lot of work.

I definitely prefer less or even one single heroine and she'd be fully customisable from personality, appearance to background but thats because i care more about the romance tag rather than the harem tag, quality over quantity.

Maybe it'd still work if only the main heroine is customisable while other side girls arent? It'd still count as harem imo, but that'd mean those other side girls would get significantly less contents.

 

[hakarlman]

I really dislike customizing NPC's (I don't even like when I get prompted for their name, Their name is their name tell it to me and move on), it really pulls you out of any immersion that might be there, though to be fair many of the games I've seen with this feature were pretty shit, with little to no content other than this gimmick.

What if there was an immersive way to specify a custom name for the NPC? I see your point btw. Straight up asking the user to specify a name, in an immersion breaking way, isn't that great. Thank you for bringing this up.

More NPC's is better than less IMO (particularly if you are talking small numbers like < 6, more begins to stop being better every time when you reach double digits).

I agree that in the double digits, things do go down hill. I've experienced that as well.

What about a generic Changes, ie questions in the opening that asks stuff "Big boobs, Yay or Nay", "Big Asses, Yay or Nay" etc any Yay's expand the relevant characteristic of every NPC by a few points while Nay's decrease them, that way you still get the joy of "meeting" new NPC's that have diverse body types, but biased towards the players preference.

Since we both agree that immersion is VERY important, what if you convince them to change their body types or breast size in immersive ways?

"Hey mom, I was thinking, why don't you get bigger breasts? I'll perform [game mechanic X] to earn [$$$], to get you breast augmentation."

or

"Hey mom, I was thinking, why don't we change how you work out in the gym, to make you more athletic, slim and tone, instead of buxom and big? Maybe alter your diet."

or

"Hey mom, why don't we change your hair color and style for the upcoming mission, so you don't get recognized as easily?"

Does that sound better? That way immersion is preserved?

 

[bazel]

Also on the topic of customization, for 2D games I have wanted the scenes to be customizable in a way but haven't seen this before. Two ways thought about this is character mood/certain stats affected how they start to behave in a scene like if mood is low during a scene with a focus on exhibitionism then she becomes more embarassed.

Other idea for it was unlockable customizations either through similar to a "exp" system for either character and/or pay for unlockables. Example be like during basic handjob scene then unlock blowjob but for handjob element you can say unlock ability that you jack off onto her instead and can get multiple ejaculation options to bukkake. Would like to see this because a lot of more basic scenes in games where you can repeat them I tend to start ignoring when you can do more exciting stuff with them, feel like this would be relatively low effort to bring in effectively more scenes.

 

[Stil996]

Since we both agree that immersion is VERY important, what if you convince them to change their body types or breast size in immersive ways?

"Hey mom, I was thinking, why don't you get bigger breasts? I'll perform [game mechanic X] to earn [$$$], to get you breast augmentation."

or

"Hey mom, I was thinking, why don't we change how you work out in the gym, to make you more athletic, slim and tone, instead of buxom and big? Maybe alter your diet."

or

"Hey mom, why don't we change your hair color and style for the upcoming mission, so you don't get recognized as easily?"

Does that sound better? That way immersion is preserved?

Sure that works, was that what you meant when you posted the poll? you might want to edit your OP then because that didn't even occur to me, all I could think of were the Games that had an edit page where you where shown the NPCs with sliders to select each characteristic.

Ultimately for me the most important thing is the story and the how the kinks are represented, the look of the characters and the number are all secondary. Some of my favorites actually had really ugly characters, "The Simpsons" and "Rick and Morty" levels of ugly

Edit: It occurred to me I didn't address the OP question in my response, I'd still stay with the 4 over the 2, I'm not really into waifu simulators, and would rather have the game with more potential choices.

 

[bazel]

I like this idea. I thought about it, but then the question arises, how old should they be? What target age group is the most popular? Genre matters a lot, but still, I'm curious what's the overall favorite age group? I'm thinking around 18 to 19, but MILF's are pretty popular, so I'm not sure.

I made this Poll: POLL: What's your favorite age group for a sexable NPC? ... So we can see what the general consensus is for F95zone age preference.

EDIT: ... Now that I think about it... What if your game had ONE woman NPC only, but you could also customize her age which changes her appearance? Hmm. Then you could specify if you want her to be the MC's mother, sister, girlfriend or other, etc.

EDIT: One more thing to think about. If you're making a Harem game, what then? The rule of Harem is THREE women. However, is it safe to assume the overall idea behind Harem is: keeping the women to yourself only, so it's okay if there aren't three women available?

Thing with being able to customize them to like differences like mother or girlfriend you need a ridiculously flexible story around it that quite frankly would likely fail at hitting the specific fetishes. I would like extensive customisation but keep the changes to that they're still that character type.

 

[Stil996]

Thing with being able to customize them to like differences like mother or girlfriend you need a ridiculously flexible story around it that quite frankly would likely fail at hitting the specific fetishes. I would like extensive customisation but keep the changes to that they're still that character type.

I think you've misinterpreted the question, you weren't asked if you wanted to change their roles, it was whether you would change their body types if you could.
Make your moms tits bigger, your girlfriends ass smaller etc

 

[bazel]

I think you've misinterpreted the question, you weren't asked if you wanted to change their roles, it was whether you would change their body types if you could.
Make your moms tits bigger, your girlfriends ass smaller etc

Erm did you read what I quoted?

 

[Stil996]

Erm did you read what I quoted?

Not really I skimmed it and picked the wrong end of the stick, the mistake is mine.

 

[Hagatagar]

It really depents on the type of game.

In a more straightforward porn game (e.g. Illusion games) in which the focus is almost exclusively on sex and animation, yes, I want customization.
But in a story game like the typical VN? No, I don't want NPCs that are 100% tailored to my tastes. That just feels weird and frankly breaks the immersion. Similar to Stil996, I also don't care for naming NPCs myself.

With each NPC customization the dev leaves to the player, he also cedes some control over the story.

 

[MarshmallowCasserole]

Assuming that only appearances are customizable (and the first answer lists only physical traits), then my pick is four NPCs purely on the chance that one of those would have a personality I like.

Character > appearance

 

[Guntag]

I voted "Other". Because for me, the total number of NPCs matters and 2 isn't enough. So, in the OP's example, I would vote for 4 non-customizable. But if the choices were "4 customizable" or "8 non customizable", I would vote for 4 customizable. Of course, a mix of customizable and non-customizable could also work. But 3 NPCs is the bare minimum for me.

 

[woody554]

I played artificial girl 3 for years just because of the customization. it didn't really even have a 'game' in it, but just making those fantasy girls for roleplay was enough.

but I rarely miss that in a VN. mostly in cases where the model doesn't fit the story, like 'moms' with juvenile bodies, or straight-up rule 7 territory.

I doubt it'll ever be worth the extra work in a VN, and certainly not just to change breast size. if there's a more impactful reason like whether the mom is a 20yo bikini model or a slightly overweight homely mom, then maybe.

 

[Jaike]

After the limited options in the previous poll, I prefer four customizable polls.

 

[Loganfin]

Customizable NPCs sound really great. But a sex game with only two fuckable characters seems like it wouldn't be my style at all. Four is on the really low end.