IIRC that's illusion's development blog twitter account, most likely the management killed the company and the former employees decided to start a new one. Seeing as they didn't use the illusion name they probably don't have the rights for the name and its IP. It happened with studio ego => debunosu and squeez => milk party before.
- Thread starter Maleficent
- Start date
Lots of games suck because of managment alone. I wonder if a dev-started company could overcome some of Illusions usual issues and actually release a good game. A man can dream, can he not?
Guess we will see whats going on in 7 days.
For some reason it made me awkwardly happy to see what happened today, but I dont know why.
Lets hope we finally get games that are thought through and not just cashgrabs. (There is so much potential in what "not illusion" now has, I hope they make use of it, even if it takes some time.)
For some reason it made me awkwardly happy to see what happened today, but I dont know why.
Lets hope we finally get games that are thought through and not just cashgrabs. (There is so much potential in what "not illusion" now has, I hope they make use of it, even if it takes some time.)
Yeah, now that I thinking more about it, this might be true. Whoever found Illusionsoft 30 years ago, if he is in his 30s he is now in the 60s and might not been able to continue and doesn't have a successor willing to lead the company.
Also see you next time is very sus, if you going to close your company for good usually you'll say along the lines of "thank you for all the support".
If they really wanted to resurrect, I REALLY-REALLY hope they at least keep one of their motto -INNOVATION- to carry on their new company. One of the biggest strength of the old Illusion is their innovative spirit. We won't have many great games like Bikou, Rapelay, Jinkou Shoujo, Jinkou Gakuen, Koikatsu etc if they just rest in their laurel and just launch one game over and over and over again (looking at you KISS/COM3D).
Koikatsu, while it's a good game on its own, isn't even the best Illusion soft can do. On the contrary it's just a shadow of their former game Jinkou Gakuen, which has, what I believe, the best school life simulation to date.
Imagine going to school in the morning and at the front gate you saw some girl getting her ass kicked by another girl because she witness her getting sex with her boyfriend on the other day.
Or when you just stroll peacefully after lunch in cafeteria when suddenly the screen flashes white and the school announced that some girl on your class is murdered by someone else from different class because of bullying and the victim snapped and killed her.
Or hell, just after the class end, some girls from other classes suddenly comes barging to your class and slap you silly because she thought you stole her girlfriend because you talk to her one time yesterday...
The crazy interaction of so many different trait and personality is what makes this game so good. The girls can freely developed their feelings on their own (but you can interfere if you want of course). You can literally write your own teens angst novel by just observing the girls doing their own things in school.
Koikatsu, while have much better graphics have severely toned down the girls interactions and makes it linear and dull. Illusion is too pre occupied on creating a great graphics and pretty UI but neglect the core gameplay. What makes Koikatsu series successful is the vibrant and active modding community behind it. I myself just bored playing Koikatsu after some hours because it's just not interesting.
That's why I really hope that if Illusion resurrect I hope they can get back to their old self as innovative company but with their new found strength outlined in their Illusion Lab progress. I hope they just don't come back as another DAZ3D clone who just sell studio and char customization, or god forbid, Kiss clone.
Well, whoever is behind the Teatime and Fulltime, and however brilliant programmer he has been, he should be in the late 50s now at the very least. And his engine while very advanced in his time (REAL-TIME OPEN WORLD (with real-time, sticky cum shot to boot lol), first time for h-games and even more advanced than Illusion, in that time) is now obsolete compared to Unity and Unreal Engine. The only thing the new Illusion can carry on is its spirits of creating and challenging the new frontier.
Illusion always did that and never was good at "improving".
This is how I remember some of their games:
SB1: the base game
SB2: some improvements
SB3: very limited amount of changes/additions
SBZ: A Reskin? I dont even remember anymore what it improved or did.
SBPR: They tried... tried... garbage performance, limited gameplay and interactions, just weird.
AG1: Never played that
AG2: same
AG3: many of us remember it positively, but technically it still was a very barebones game with limited gameplay.
AIS aka "AG4": Actually not that bad, but unnecessarily limited and performance was screwed until we unscrewed it with mods. They at least tried to improve and add new things.
AA1: They tried something new, but aside from interactions between NPCs it was the most barebone game they would get away with
AA2: As AA1, but with some improvements.
KK: If they had combined that and AA2, we would have actually had an interesting game, but they didnt, pretty much another "as little as we get away with" game.
Emotion Creators: what was this supposed to be, flopped hard afaik.
KKS: A sidegrade to KK, in some areas even a step back, but it got a new UI and improvements to the talking interaction, that make $60 then, thanks.
Real Kanojo: Very limited, but at least it was something new at that time.
Premium Play Darkness: The first iteration of the "scene selectors", which we got a lot of.
Real Play: the 2nd one of those
Play Club: 3rd one
Play Home: 4th (the last one that had the interactive position-square at the bottom right, I still miss that in the newer games.)
Honey Select 1: 5th
Honey Select 2: 6th
Room Girl: Actually a great Idea, if they hadnt watered it down to the absolute bare minimum and then screwed up performance while also using IL2CPP which makes fixing the game very hard in the beginning and people lost interest.
As it turns out, illusion never was good at innovating. Koikatsu is probably the result of them swallowing TEATIME, and the other games (with some outliers) are "meh" at best, but they made the dick hard, so they could sell plenty of them even though there were almost no improvements.
I do not expect anything from the first game of "new.illusion" (or whatever they will call themselves) because this game still was made under old.illusion lead, unless they did split shortly after Room Girl came out. I think that the patches, DLCs and next game after this one will show what has changed, if anything has changed.
Sexy Beach is originally created as a parody of DOA's Extreme Beach Volleyball, the full-fledge hentai version of it. This game is one of the earlier hit of Illusions games besides the Bikou series back in the day. SB3 is the peak with the most feature and interactions.
SB Zero is supposed to be the restart of the series with overhauled graphics but it comes with many problems especially with the new real-time shader and slow performance.
SB Premium Resort are another attempt from Illusion to restart the series. Notable things about this game is Illusion tried to incorporate open world to the Sexy Beach series. The problem is the open world attempt actually degrade the overall enjoyment of the games. Because of the complexity of the world, the interaction with the girls is severely limited compared to SB3 even though there's many scripted event. The girls feel more alive with SB3 even though it's technically inferior.
Jinkou Shoujo/AG 1 is really revolutionary game at the time. The only open world real time 3D hentai game with character customization and trait simulation element. Everyone is at an awe.
The AG2 improves on that BIGLY, so many feature added without bogging down the game (runs great even with bad PC).
AG3 is the best AG with much bigger map, story and interactions. I can't count how many hours I sunk playing AG2&3. AG3 is also, I think the first time the western modders scenes exploded and added so many things. Before that we only have limited mods from Japanese modders (uppervolta's goodness).
AG is the face of Illusion Software for so many years so when AI Shoujo released many people were disappointed with its horrible performance that takes the fun out of the game (not even counting how limited the interaction with the girls compared to the AG3). Illusion clearly have insurmountable technical problem handling modern 3D programs, which I think because of their difficulty of recruiting excellent coder/programmer.
As I said before, Jinkou Gakuen is already "perfect" with the simulation, so when Koikatsu is out, some people are disappointed at how "basic" the interaction is. Everything is lovey-dovey, vanilla and boring. No conflict, no jealousy, no fight, no murder. BUT this game SELLS. This series maybe the biggest hit title Illusion has. I agree that KK should have been combined with AA2, or for me I hoped that KK is the modern version of AA. But it's not. As a long time Illusion fans KK is the only series I really hate.
This one is really "innovative" in the sense they tried to realize GFE (girl friend experience) through a series of real time event. But then as usual they stumble with tech difficulty and can't really achieved that. I applaud Illusion to go to the new frontier, even though this one is a flop. Too bad they kill this IP.
All of that game is the evolution and derivative of Interact Play VR, Bikou series and Rapelay. All of the games with "Play" names is the anagram of Rape in Japanese (Play: Purei / Rape: Reipu). The difference is the IPVR, Bikou and Rapelay actually have real-time stealth stalking gameplay element, while the newer games completely removed that and just leave training and scene selector element. I think with the strengthening of stalking law in Japan, Illusion doesn't want its game to be used as incriminating evidence of criminal activity in the court of law LOL.
Honey select series even tone down more of its "dark root" and became 100% pure & vanilla.
Yep ironically this is the best game of Illusion of the recent years. They go back to their roots of close and intimate interaction of girls, with gorgeous customizable face, body and clothing. Too bad they hampered it down with zoning system. Imagine if they takes more time with this game and make this open world, ala Koikatsu, I'm sure they will have another big hits and doesn't have to close shop. But oh well.
For me I think, Illusion is the best at "innovating", creating something new, opening new frontier, but they are the worst at "optimizing" their games, making their game feels "incomplete" and not cohesive. They have MANY IPs that span different genre and gameplay, but every time a new game launches, something feels off, incomplete and riddled with tech difficulties. That's why the Illusion grief circles is born.
Oh well, now their homepages is really dead.
Goodbye old Illusion, hope if you really reincarnated somewhere, you can learn from your past mistakes and strengthen what makes you loved by many. As a 20 years long fan (since Interact Play VR days) I bid you farewell and good luck.
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Goodbye old Illusion, hope if you really reincarnated somewhere, you can learn from your past mistakes and strengthen what makes you loved by many. As a 20 years long fan (since Interact Play VR days) I bid you farewell and good luck.
Dont worry, we will see on Friday when they announce "totally not koikatsu 3" by "totally not illusion".
Interesting enough, the screenshot seems to be from the character editor, and there are already some improvements visible, like an "undo" button.
Setting looks kinda like a COM3D2 or so, could be interesting.
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So a metaverse.
The closest thing anybody has come to actually making that was Second Life by Linden Lab. It was AWESOME back in the day. Now it's controls and engine are very recognizably dated compared to modern times. The player-base is a shell of what it used to be. If they spent more time on keeping up with the times, pretty much everybody with a tv or computer would know about it. After the movie Ready Player One came out facebook (now called meta) tried, failed, and are still failing miserably right now to make a better version of something that was already made in 2003.
I'll stop because I'm already getting off track and would eventually start ranting about how despite AI being much more advanced and frankly awesome. it's not a hot new thing, in fact it's been in video games since the late 70s.
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Also I find it funny how "Metaverse" is essentially trying to copy VrChat rather than copying Second Life.
As much hate as Illusion got for how low-effort their more recent games were, it's still a shame to see one of the first 3D erogame developers disappear like that. They may not have been the most innovative, but in a market that's still mostly dominated by 2D VNs, they still stood above a lot of their competition.
RIP Illusion.
RIP Illusion.
Aaaand, I was right.
Illusion just renamed
New name: ILLGAMES
Next game: Honey come?
This is on 2chan (could only get the preview from google):
Illusion just renamed
New name: ILLGAMES
Next game: Honey come?
This is on 2chan (could only get the preview from google):
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bruh... if this is just "Honey Select with Koikatsu graphics"...
That totally sounds like one of those stunts illusion would do.
Y'know I could almost jive with that. I prefer Koikatsu's graphics except it is lacking some of the effects Honey Select 2 has, and as a yuricon there's extremely little of value to its gameplay mode. There's much more of a chance for Illusion / Illgames to actually cater more to my interests if they just copied Honey Select 2's model, since that has much more immersive threesome scenes with the ability to pair up girls and see them go through a progressive sequence of motions and voices.bruh... if this is just "Honey Select with Koikatsu graphics"...
That totally sounds like one of those stunts illusion would do.
It really does seem like the laziest thing would be for Illgames to take the scripting of Honey Select 2 (if that's the kind of game they want to make), the horrendously unoptimized but sometimes pretty engine of their latest game, put the anime filter on it, and ship it. The laziest option just seems the most plausible, though it's really too soon to speculate I suppose.
Of course this kind of cheap and dirty publishing is way more acceptable if I don't plan on paying for it, it cuts both ways. If they surprise me with a high effort release I'd be much more likely to support the developer, if money grew on trees I'd buy the couple games of theirs that I've really enjoyed, but their track record is very uneven and most of the value has come from mods at the best of times.
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