It says they heard people being disappointed with how everything Sexual is in Pandora only. And are planning to integrate that stuff more into the story.
I'm speaking about the game as it is, and with the information I have available.
Technically the main game does
already have erotic content.
There's spaceships in the form of a penis.
Killi's costume design has her show a little bit of nipple.
But that's not what people think about when they think adult content. No one's defined it though.
What constitutes as adult content that will be included in the main story?
How will the adult content happen while playing the game?
None of these questions have been discussed let alone answered so I'm speaking from that perspective.
What were your thoughts on other ways they could / should tackle the emotional involvement? I'm always open to hearing suggestions and other considerations as I've certainly not played every game out there.
For me it's complicated.
I think there's a fundamental issue with emotional involvement in the game. The captain isn't designed for it. He's a goofball character who's too distinct a character on his own to make decisions through while also being so much of a joke you can't take emotional discussions with him as a part of it seriously.
Honestly? At bare minimum for me, the pandora scenes should at least have dialogue, as well as insertion and creampie variations. Even if the dialogue repeats it's fine. Writing general erotic scenarios is a skill.
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1) Fundamental Change:
StudioFOW's history is basically this.
They like older hentai anime that's brutal and aggressive. Works like Kite and Mezzo Forte from Yasuomi Umetsu, and the Taimanin Series from Teruaki Murakami.
I was around when they started and they sold themselves by saying stuff like Teruaki Murakami was going soft making vanilla stuff. Where are all the hardcore hentai going where monsters brutally rape and put girls to tears? Their first public h-animation is kind of their magnum opus of ideals when it comes to this.
Obviously they started bleeding into becoming the thing they hate as they started getting fans and the fans wanted more vanilla because.... well there's a reason Teruaki Murakami tried to make vanilla.
Understanding that about them sexually, personally I think the problem starts with the fact that the captain exists at all. They don't care about emotional involvement. The parts that get them going are the sci-fi political shenanigans and the girls getting dominated by disgusting things much larger than them. This is how I feel about the game anyway. Character motivations and reasoning kind of get glossed over by the larger narrative, and if it exists it feels like you can remove it and the story still work fine.
Imagine if the protagonist was Lily and it was her starship. The game could follow her exploits sleeping around the galaxy with various powerful men trying to get people to approve her xeno research while fucking xenos she makes. In this alternate reality version of the game, merging the erotic content they like with the main game would be much easier as it fits their sexual desire easier and they'd come up with ideas to do it that I couldn't since I'm into femdom.
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2) Add an SLG.
Games like Teaching Feeling and The Sims 4 w/ mods have taught me a few things. Simulation elements can ramp up eroticism really fast. Just a mode where you look at and manage various stats of the people on the ship and make them do actions to manage those stats would make the erotic elements naturally appear.
Imagine if in-between missions in the hub area, you're in a simulation game (3rd person omniscient) as you have to travel to each mission location. In the in-between sections, everyone's got a horny stat, on top of hunger and other such stats. They move around the ship on their own doing their own things, and their stats change based on what they do. For instance, Lily could be in the medbay and whenever she creates the cell culture for a horrible monstrosity, her horny stat goes up. You can click on her and make her masturbate, go to the captain, or fuck one of her horrible monstrosities.
Not all simulation games play like the sims, but simulation elements are an easy way to blend erotic content into the main game, while keeping the player as an active participant. The player can even "write their own stories" regarding character relationships through their actions.
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I honestly don't have any clear and direct answers for Subverse though. The reason I care about about games that do not cater to me sexually
at all. Is because I'm curious about how their minds work when it comes to sexual content integration. Subverse is still EA so there are still things it can do to surprise me and I want to be surprised. Even if I don't like the adult content, if I like some design elements then there's something to learn. However... the game isn't really consistent when it comes to sexual content, and the game's design isn't conscious of it in any way.
For instance, I played an NTR RPG a while back. Like.. real NTR, as a developer because I wanted to know if I had built resistance to it, and it had a lot of pages of discussion so I know people liked it. Well, I learned some things and got rid of it tho.
The concept was that a girl needed to go down into a dungeon to save her husband, but it's impossible to make it through on your first playthrough. When you lose and want to get stronger you have to go fuck the asshole to get bonus stats to make it through the game. I imagine that on a design level, NTR lovers like it because of the humiliation the players go through not being strong enough to make it through the dungeon, and needing to rely on an asshole wife-stealer. The more times you go to the asshole changes the ending. The game forces you to go to the asshole at least once so there's no pure love ending.
That method of erotic integration was designed for cucks. It's something that only someone who has that fantasy can really think of, and the way it integrates with the game in a core way that you're conscious of the adult elements is pretty genius. Can't remember the name of the game though... Obviously this thing got yeeted from the harddrive after I learned what I could.
There are maledom games where the heroine cannot defeat monsters easily and needs to rely on equipment to get the job done. Equipment is expensive though so you have to make money by slutting yourself out to people, or fucking the shopkeeper to lower prices. Stuff like that makes the erotic integration of the game increase making you constantly aware of the sexual elements of the game.
Obviously the femdom games I like do the same, but I don't want to get started there. Waay too many good examples for me to choose from.
Subverse doesn't do any of this though... almost like it's embarrassed to be an adult game while also reveling in its adult nature. They're not designing the adult content to be integrated in any way that shows their sexual tastes as developers. Even if the adult content happens in the main game, I doubt it'll be integrated beyond it being a VN scene.
