So the scope creep comes from having to expand the game in other directions because you have shut off one "easy" path (NPC as potential LI to LI), but then have to deal with the NPC still being around the rest of the game, just not as the LI?
Let's say the potential LI shows up in the game from time to time-if the overarching storyline (which is already determined) doesn't hinge on whether they are just good friends or fuckbuddies, but rather, they are just friendly enough to relate together to tell the story, would that be enough to avoid scope creep?
I may also be conflating LI with fuckbuddy, lol.
I guess it would be important to differentiate that some NPCs could be friends (PG), flirty friends (PG-13), friends with benefit friends (R-X), LI's (PG to X).
And you could have potential just casual one-time encounters (PG to X) (I don't have a problem with an MC having casual sex during the game with one-offs, as long as those are also optional for the player)
Feel free to dm me if you want more info to avoid flooding this thread with off topic posts, but I'll answer this bit:
I'm using LI as a generic term for "anyone you have sex with" more or less.
To answer your first question, yea basically. Even if they completely disappeared, that still presents an issue - how do you reconcile the difference in scenes - if you took their path and now they "exist", or if you didn't and now suddenly they don't. Even if you wrote it to be identical, you'd still need art for them being present and not.
As to your second point..... there are ways to minimize the scope creep, however there's limits on what you should do. The problem is, if you write it in a way that it doesn't matter if they're present or not, they feel unimportant, and players don't care about that character - that's not really something you want.
The other problem is, lets say they don't disappear, they show up from time to time, but what happens is irrelevant of their status with you. Well, that can quickly become an issue too - I know I'm very likely going to have different interactions with someone I just fucked, vs someone I sort of know, vs a good friend, etc etc. If the game is presented in a way where their interactions are identical irrelevant of status, people tend to notice stuff like that, and generally it's disliked.
You can do your best to come up with ways to minimize the differences, while still making things feel "real", but there's a limit to how much of that you can do before people start rejecting it. No matter what you do, unless you just say fuck it and make a game where your choices don't matter aside from what scenes you see, you WILL run into scope creep, and it will get exponentially bigger the longer the game goes on. There really isn't a way to avoid that once you start off with those sorts of decisions. (Actually there are ways to fix it, but that goes beyond the scope of what I'm talking about so I won't get into it, but basically it involves finding ways to consolidate your storyline to bring the creep back in line a little bit. It's doable but tricky to pull off without it feeling forced or weird).
I think personally any time you approach any sort of game where you'll have these sorts of decisions and you'll be creating a path for people to choose things that ultimately will have an effect on the actual game/gameplay/whatever, the most important thing to do is start with a solid, thought out story. It is a *lot* easier to create these sorts of scenarios within the confines of the story you wrote, than it is to just "go" - because if you do that, it's real easy to let things get out of control real quick.
