Ya, I am interested in the story, curious to see how it all goes, and I think they did a great job on the art / graphics, it's the way they're handling the relationship / romance / xeno stuff that will keep me from purchasing.
Unreal Engine Completed Subverse [v1.0] [Studio Fow]
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If they accomplish these promises I'll gladly take back everything I said about the game.
However, we should be realistic about this. These are not new promises. So I'll give them the credit when we see it in-game.
Since the steam site is blocked for me (living in Germany 
) can someone post the update text here?
They didn't post the update on their own blog which I normally use...
) can someone post the update text here?They didn't post the update on their own blog which I normally use...
Sure, here is a copy / paste, sorry for any formatting issues as I literally just copied and pasted.Since the steam site is blocked for me (living in Germany
They didn't post the update on their own blog which I normally use...
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Greetings, fellow pervs!
Now that the catgirl is out in the wild we’d like to take a moment to update you on the state of the game and what to expect going forward.
Without further ado, it is our pleasure to introduce our new designer, Bangkok!
My name’s Bangkok( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), and I’m the Lead Game Designer on Subverse. It is an absolute pleasure to have been given the opportunity to work on this title. First and foremost, I am an avid gamer and hentai enthusiast, much like you, and so I will strive to make Subverse the incredible experience it was originally envisioned to be. I hope I can make all of you proud and happy.
During my first two months, I familiarized myself with every nook and cranny of Subverse's design and finalized certain areas within March's patch. I can confidently say that this project has enormous potential to leave a long-lasting footprint as an authentic AAA adult experience. I am currently working on establishing the way in which to achieve this. We all know that we’re in the middle of early access, so the fans are not seeing the full picture coming together yet and there is some concern over where it's all heading. Hopefully DC and I can allay some of those concerns in this blog.
With Bangkok onboard the FOW train, we’re stoked to talk about some of the design philosophies of Subverse moving forward.
BUILDUP AND FOREPLAY
We as a team recognize that the build up to the critical recruitment sex scenes is lacking in eroticism and are too abrupt. They definitely need more fleshing out. For starters, we will be going through all the previous content and adding in foreplay videos to tie it in with what is happening. These short videos should establish some atmosphere and bridge the gap between the novel sections and the abruptness of the initial sex scenes.
The current dating sequences in the bar are also very limited with only barebones gifting being currently available. Dating your crew members is supposed to be a more intimate experience compared to the Pandora framework and it is in the process of a major overhaul. The connection between waifu and Captain is not really present in the current iteration of dating, and we are aiming to gradually implement some more interesting interactive features to help alleviate this.
SEX
The payoff for all your hard work needs to be porn. Lots and lots of porn. Titties, ass, splooge and big fat meaty balls all coming together in unholy unison. As of now, there is indeed not enough porn. But fear not, the porn is coming.
- Sidequests not ending with some kind of porn is a crime. Luckily with the help of our inspirational artists we are going to try and remedy this in an exciting way.
- Part of the overhaul of the Dating module means that it must be intertwined with sex in some way. To complete the intimate, one-on-one experience requires some intimate, one-on-one POV scenes. More on this soon.
- The aforementioned foreplay videos tying the recruitment together and introducing more buildup.
- The interactive scene in Taron hasn’t landed quite the way we hoped considering the amount of effort required to make it work, but we will reuse its components to give existing animations some more variety and shelf-life
- The main storyline starts getting darker in a couple blocks time, so its extremely difficult to intertwine random sex scenes into it without it feeling completely jarring. Sex for the sake of sex is just going to exacerbate the problem of it not meshing with the story. Having said that, once the drama is resolved we are looking into giving the player and the waifus some much-needed downtime via supplementary story beats.
- One of these beats is the Devotion Quest rewards (more on this below) which sees the return of StudioFOW’s famed cinematic eroticism within the context of a tightly-waifu-focused epic questline.
CLIMAX
For those of you that have been talking to the ladies on the ship (you HAVE been talking to them, right?) you’ll notice that they’ve been gradually revealing more about their backstories. These stories will be carried through to their glorious conclusion with a Devotion Quest for each Waifu.
Devotion Quests are inspired by the Loyalty Missions in Mass Effect 2, where you buddy up with a specific party member and help them out of a bind. Since the Devotion Quests are the culmination of a lot of invested hours into a waifu we want to make sure they are amazing. We want to do this by
- Giving you ample opportunity to interact with the waifu during her quest. This means talking with them, discussing the quest problems and their environments (each quest will take you to a place special to that particular waifu)
- Creating an environment that immerses you both romantically and contextually. The performances of the voice talent are incredible throughout these sections. The atmosphere must match their intensity and do them justice
- ROMANCE ROMANCE ROMANCE
- The payoff at the end of the quest has to be amazing and cinematic, as well as feel like a seamless part of the story - something StudioFOW will no doubt deliver
- Give you some cool rewards at the end thematic to the waifu for investing all that time into the romance
We are actively developing DEMI and Lily’s devotion quests at the moment and as soon as one of them is ready, we will make an announcement about the release dates.
BREATHING LIFE INTO PRODIGIUM
World-renowned gameplay designer and shortstack-butt-afficionado Halfpint had some great ideas on this topic, which we are totally going to steal. In a December 12 video, he suggested that the galaxy should be reacting to the revolution in some way. Right now everything feels too static, too dead, you don’t feel like the disruptive force of change that the Mary Celeste is supposed to represent. A great idea he came up with was a simple reputation system, that keeps a track of all the battles you’ve fought against a particular faction. When you’ve killed enough Fuccbotts for example, a reward depicting a short 30 second cinematic would unlock showing Fuccbotts mobilizing to hunt you. If you slay enough Kloi, Landervoo and the council could react in some way to your extermination of their forces. Introducing reactive elements such as this will make Prodigium feel much more impacted by your actions. This is but one of the improvements we are aiming to make to Prodigium feeling more immersive.
STICKY GLUE
The main problem right now (and this is a common part of narrative games in Early Access phase) is that the story is still being released and therefore the connective glue is not live yet... So what is this glue we are talking about?
- Devotion levels being a meaningful part of multiple modules
- Having a Dating system that makes use of the galaxy
- Resources playing a bigger part in collectibles/upgrades
- More waifu interactions with each other and the Captain across all modules
These elements working together in harmony will make the experience of managing your own crew feel more cohesive. But as we keep saying, our focus right now is on delivering the story first and foremost and then leaving the glue elements for later releases to tie everything together once the building blocks are in place.
SUBVERSE IS NOT A MOBILE GAME
Things like gold stars and meaningless grinding have no place in a supposed top-end story driven product like this. The original philosophy of the Kickstarter and the no-bullshit stance of the StudioFOW OG’s were successful in capturing the imagination of the gaming public. Introducing artificial progression elements and psychological tricks at this stage would be a mistake for the brand. Our design philosophy for avoiding the mobile trap is as follows:
- Retool the way player performance is measured by utilizing more of the waifus and less gold stars and badges
- Remove replayable story missions. Do you replay Virmire in ME1, do you replay Ostagar in DA:O? No, these are climactic story set pieces, so why would you replay Temple of Defilement, especially after what happened there? Not only does this make no sense from a narrative design standpoint but it’s a huge resource sink on the dev team
- Reduce the sheer quantity of same-y missions and focus on making them memorable by increasing their quality
- Introduce elements that facilitate replayability through dynamic design, instead of mobile-like repetition
- Make upgrades and collectibles feel part of the world. Having to help someone or find a rare component to make your ship better should be an essential part of an RPG dealing with space exploration. We will have more on this in a later blog.
SUBVERSE IS NOT A SIMULATOR
The original vision for Subverse was that it is not a sex simulator. It was not designed from the ground up to be a sandbox style sex simulator. There appears to be some misconceptions out there that this game is supposed to be the next big thing to supplant Honey Select. This will never be the case because Subverse is a story driven narrative RPG with sex. There are plenty of well-designed sex simulation games out there like Honey Select and Koikatsu that focus on endless customizability, sandbox elements and interchangeable parts. These games have mastered the art of being a simulator and have years of experience and much bigger budgets than ours. There is no point in competing with them. Our design philosophy has always been the complete polar opposite of that, and while the introduction of some interactive elements and things like outfits are planned, they will never be the lynchpin of the game.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
We understand the game is not in an acceptable state for many of you currently. Quite frankly, Subverse (in its current state) is so far away from our personal standards that it’s not even funny, so there is a lot of hands-on work to be done here. This is a long marathon process and it will take time. We are not promising every single thing listed above will make it in. Subverse has a lot riding on it so we have to test every design decision internally. A lot of people are looking up to the game and we have to make sure we are delivering the absolute best product we can. Thank you to the fans for sticking with us and for reading!
DC
Creative Lead
Bangkok
Design Lead
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Nice to hear the good ol' ''we hear you, we will do better'' excuse. As if they didn't know that the game is seriously lacking in erotic scenes.
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That excuse works a lot better when you remember they're supported purely by sales of the game, not by microtransactions or shareholders to please.
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Didn't they get 2 million worth of sales on EA launch day alone? The excuse doesn't work because they decided to go a different route on what was promised with some key features people backed tiers for. It took how many dev diaries and patches in, and a new manager to come in for them to finally realize maybe the going the vision opposite of what was promised isn't the way to go.
They had mods on their discord and Steam (there's an infamous post people used to post screenshots of) saying that things like the Pandora and h-scene feedback was a minority thing, despite all their mediums for feedback showing it was not. It's good to hear that they'll actually work towards this better, but I'll wait until they actually do better. For the 50th time, we still don't have any transparency on what they want to do with the Pandora overhauls. The whole short foreplay videos thing they plan to add for devotion sex scenes seem pointless. Did they just forget that people don't like just watching small videos with little to no interactivity in this game? Why not actual foreplay scenes to interact it?
They had mods on their discord and Steam (there's an infamous post people used to post screenshots of) saying that things like the Pandora and h-scene feedback was a minority thing, despite all their mediums for feedback showing it was not. It's good to hear that they'll actually work towards this better, but I'll wait until they actually do better. For the 50th time, we still don't have any transparency on what they want to do with the Pandora overhauls. The whole short foreplay videos thing they plan to add for devotion sex scenes seem pointless. Did they just forget that people don't like just watching small videos with little to no interactivity in this game? Why not actual foreplay scenes to interact it?
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Aren't you forgetting they have people to pay decent wages over 3 years, and brought on more staff this past year?
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It's about 3 mil or 4. They got around 1 million in funding and 2 million worth of sales at EA launch alone. Their dev diary claims Subverse doesn't have as much funds as Honey Select's development, despite Illusion being an indie studio until AFTER Honey Select took off, so I doubt it even had a million in funding to begin with. A good portion of HS's assets are re-used from past games, same for new games. I guess they didn't realize Illusion tends to release plenty of shovelware games, they're just good at what they do.
I do find it extremely annoying how Fow wants to keep touting that their game is supposed to be an AAA experience, yet still want to use these kind of excuses at every turn. You can't have it both ways. You're either AAA and have AAA porn game expectations, or you aren't AAA and have tempered expectations.
Every porn game team has to pay decent wages for 3 years, despite not having 3 million in funding, tons of funding from their past Patreon StudioFow works, etc. Maybe they shouldn't have invested in creating their own Crypto at the same time of working on Subverse?
They dropped staff too, remember?
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Have a feeling a lot of these people have no grasp of what bills and expenses is.
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Scratch that they got over 4 million in funding, likely 5 by now. Their Kickstarter received £1,668,626, which is $2,203,162 in USD. They then got over 2 million worth of sales during EA launch, pushing that to 4 million combined. Given that they've clearly gotten a couple more sales since then, they'd likely have fit a bit higher than 4 million by now. Even with Kickstarter's cut, they got a lot to hold people off.
EDIT: Something tells me that Fow is just giving everyone inflated checks and that's causing the problems.
And you like to repeat to repeat the same excuses with him. 4 million is plenty for game development. Are people forgetting Mighty No 9. had 3 million and that was considered more than enough? It failed, but only because the lead dev kept using it's funds to fund multiple other projects along side it. Even it's lackluster release, it still funded 3 different games and a TV show.
EDIT: Something tells me that Fow is just giving everyone inflated checks and that's causing the problems.
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It's not a concept. They already said they're working on it in early stages and that was about a month or so after they announced Fowcoin was going to be a thing. Fowcoin itself was announced only two days after the game's EA was release and they already had worked out dealings with people long before the EA's release to get Fowcoin off the ground.
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I'm aware there is a difference between hobby creators and an experienced dev team, but this is still moving the goalpost. The point was that they still recieved plenty of funds for their game, so much that they had more funds that that of the (fake) creator of Megaman's spiritual successor game. They even had plenty of fundings from their before Subverse days, which is why they had so many 3D model assets done of the Subverse characters before the thing even got off the Kickstarter ground.
Every time you guys make an excuse and someone has an answer for it, you guys just move the goalpost further.
So we should believe everything they say? Q&A, dev diaries, and staff on their Steam/Discord have been caught lying in the past. Remember that Pandora overhaul they promised would be in the Taron update that went missing? Some of the original devs of Subverse were also a part of the
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site and other companies helping create Fowcoin. It was entirely a conflict of interest situation. That same lead dev is now has his Subverse position replaced with this new guy in the dev diary, so what does that mean for Fowcoin's development now? Is he going to just fully work on Fowcoin now? What did it mean for Subverse when he was the head of both projects to begin with? How did that affect Subverse's scattered direction originally?
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In fact, the whole Zovolt/Streembit and Crypto situation with Fowcoin is no different than the Mighty No.9 one. Both devs tried immediately rushing towards expanding their brands and market before the game was even finished or closed to done. Both claiming no funds from the development went into it. While we can't really confirm no funds from the game went into Zovolt/Streembit services and their Fowcoin development, we do know that their Subverse's dev team has been working on it, as mentioned above that some devs for Subverse were simultaneously devs for those other projects/sites.
Ignoring the possible fund misuse and all the other stuff, just knowing that the lead dev was also the lead of the other two projects at the same time shows why the game's dev team couldn't be clear on what they wanted. Their main person for direction was already scattered among projects himself
Ignoring the possible fund misuse and all the other stuff, just knowing that the lead dev was also the lead of the other two projects at the same time shows why the game's dev team couldn't be clear on what they wanted. Their main person for direction was already scattered among projects himself
So we're back to you pretending the rest of my points don't exist and cherry picking one line to pretend it's my whole argument again?
Except one of their past dev diaries flat out states they were going to hire people primarily based on physical attributes. Did you forget that one dev diary pushing their forthcomings on their dev team being from an older generation and needing to hire new, and emphasis on "younger" devs for the current?