Now I never post on this site and I know I'm clearly not the target audience for this game, but this has got to be some of the (unintentionally?) funniest shit I've ever read so I feel like I have to comment on it.
How does a romance quest/option or whatever fit into a game where said "romantic interests" regularly fuck everything with a dick in the galaxy, whether the player wants to or not? Like what the actual fuck; is the player character gonna ask the doctor out for a romantic dinner after he walks in on her getting spitroasted by Jabba the Hutt and some dogalien?
Or how about watching a movie and then some missionary afterwards with the robot chick before she goes off to get gangbanged by a spacelizard and a tentaclemonster?
That’s just hilariously true, and something I didn’t even think of. Especially with how the writing has been to begin with, it’s about what I would expect. I guess that’d actually be pretty funny. “But it’s not NTR!” Like seriously?
I remember playing the first part when you fight those who originally had Demi and she basically implies that the other alien didn’t fuck her and that the Captain was her first.
I was thinking, oh that’s to counter the people eventually calling it NTR.
I also remember the VA in an interview talking about how deep the character and the story was, and talking about the character’s feelings and loyalty to the Captain.
Of course she’s canonically, and relentlessly fucked by any alien dick she sees. Right, about that loyalty, right?
"Just don't unlock the scene," as if they don't talk about it and make it a part of the world. Everything except for, of course integrating pandora scenes into the game in a flowing and natural manner.
While the models and story are unique, the game feels to me like something that grew in scope as ambitions and funding grew, and in some areas met a hard wall because of talent, and game dev experience.
The animations are good and the presentation is good. The game itself, however, just is functional, and that's about it. There's a sense of, "Is that it?" when I hit actual gameplay. It feels like a compromise the devs had to make because anything more complicated is currently beyond their skills.
The VA and the cutscenes are good, but then the actual writing itself, which is fine in a vacuum, would make me doubtful that any intimacy could be achieved without thinking, "she's going to cheat on you immediately, possibly in front of you." Yep, fun.
Without attributing the miscommunication to malice, I think it comes from an inexperienced dev team that had to continually change their plans as they found that certain things fell outside of the reach. Early dev logs saying things like you'll hear sounds as you walk by, coming from the lab your doctor is getting pleasured by her alien while you can't stop her, first are well NTR, secondly, imply that navigation was likely supposed to be WASD and you could walk through the ship. I feel like that's what people expected at least. Even with how the game is now, I'd expect to see those emergent sex scenes within the game. Not the case. That can be said for a lot of things.
So with Pandora, which most people gave scathing reviews for day 1, we are promised an update/overhaul to the system the update after this one. While better than not changing it, it is in general a cause for concern for me that they are changing something this late into development, instead of changing it much earlier, or having it better to begin with. Can they even make major changes at this point? Will it force them to go backwards and rework a new system and waste even more dev time, or will it just be an unsatisfying change? Nothing I've seen so far shows me that they will bring back the detractors, or excite new players.
With that, more questions come to mind. Has the game been successful enough that they can continue to fund their rather slow development pace? Have they brought enough new players per update to keep going? I read in a dev log that some people have left but also that they have hired new people, which added to their dev time. Pretty honest actually. It also makes me wonder if those people left, thinking it was a sinking ship. Who'd want to leave a booming, new business, right at its inception?
With the rate things are going, I'm not sure it'll ever really finish. Who's to say. It'll be years out, but I doubt they'll get another influx of cash the way their kickstarter and first EA did. I've heard rumors they're dipping into NFT's too. It's already been years of development, and I'm just imagining the loads of revisions and change of plans that've happened behind the scenes. At this point, this game is a case study for me. While they have shown no signs of stopping, they've shown little to prove to me that they can follow through with their promises. At least they aren't complete no shows. My guess is what some other person said, some "compromise" that is also different from what they said earlier, that technically allows them to finish the game. Some 20 chapters that are stupidly short with the game ending way faster than expected. At this point, I wish them luck.
Edit: This ended up way longer than I expected, I probably shoulda made it a review
