Unreal Engine Completed Subverse [v1.0] [Studio Fow]

[PayneToTheMax]

havent played too much of this but why is it tagged netorare? from what i can see its swinging at most? unless there is a story scene i dont know about?

Some people on here consider swinging NTR, me thinks.

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

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Not much in here, as the HentaiExpo video more or less explained what they’ve got in store for 1.0

Though a couple details that is new, it’s aiming for a Q4 release (aka end of year as expected) and FOW-Chan will be coming after the story (ergo after 1.0)

While I find that a little disappointing, I do remember that she was an extra extra milestone past the game already being fully funded, so I think it does make a little sense why she wouldn’t be involved in the main story.

Edit: adding from twitter. Boing boing

 

[chinpoppo]

Dose this mean they aiming 1.0 for the end of the year ? fucking fow retards indeed are trash. Glad i didn't pledge or bough this game. those fags deserve nothing. Lmao.
Also u shill a fuck load for those cucks, why ? I do hope they pay u unless u do it for free.

 

[RedRock1948]

Well at least the end of this whole messy saga is finally in sight. Honestly almost 4 years of early access by the time of release is not a good look and I can only imagine how chaotic development has been. Hope they are able to satisfy at least some level of expectations with 1.0 and then take some time to assess what the future of the studio should be. Subverse as an IP has always been much more appealing than the game itself so maybe they should take that forward with movies or smaller projects either way, I bet they're not too eager to repeat this process a second time.

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

Honestly almost 4 years of early access by the time of release is not a good look.

Just thought I’d point out that this is fairly standard time for early access, even amongst bigger companies


And compared to other games on this forum, I don’t think a 4 year run (really 3 and a half, EA began March 2021) is looking that bad either. Especially when you consider all these devs have had Patreon income the entire time. Also do note how few are actually tagged as completed





Was it difficult? No doubt, anyone’s first game would be, let alone one of this scale. But they didn’t quit, they didn’t go and crowdfund themselves into oblivion like Star Citizen and make finishing the game practically impossible, they’re at the finish line.

Regardless I hope every other smut dev realizes the bar’s been raised. I can’t go back to just browsing textful of VN incest games with slightly edited Ren’py models. No generic moan packs for the sex, or sound effects over still images. The same thing occurred ten years ago with Lara in Trouble and Kuniochi. We went from soundless loops on tumblr to artists leveling up and producing voiced content and longer projects. Once someone else shows you it can be done, there’s more to aspire to.

 

[Purple_Heart]

Just thought I’d point out that this is fairly standard time for early access, even amongst bigger companies
View attachment 3693621

It is not standard for early access games, at all. If you are going to judge whole industry based on porn games alone that wouldn't be any close to truth that's why you can forget about all porn games(because they are known for milking people with billions of years of "early access development"). Also feel free to forget about these games because they have nothing to do with "early access" games:

• games that were never released as early access
• cherrypicked games that have been in development hell such as duke nukem forever
• games that are live service

And you'll realize ~90% of the list in that picture has no meaning when it comes to early access games. Btw pc games usually take around 4 years to complete, including their early access period(if they ever had one).

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

It is not standard for early access games, at all. If you are going to judge whole industry based on porn games alone that wouldn't be any close to truth that's why you can forget about all porn games(because they are known for milking people with billions of years of "early access development"). Also feel free to forget about these games because they have nothing to do with "early access" games:

• games that were never released as early access
• cherrypicked games that have been in development hell such as duke nukem forever
• games that are live service

And you'll realize ~90% of the list in that picture has no meaning when it comes to early access games. Btw pc games usually take around 4 years to complete, including their early access period(if they ever had one).

The picture specifies which ones are still in development, so it’s still relevant.

Also funny that you want to avoid comparing it to other adult games because ‘of course they’re known for milking’. That should make this game stand out even more, don’t ya think?

 

[Cpt.SumTingWong]

Look like the upcoming Ela devotion scenes will have a lot of gang bang scenes

 

[Purple_Heart]

The picture specifies which ones are still in development, so it’s still relevant.

That list specifies Star Citizen is still in development. And you are comparing it to Subverse. You are comparing Scam Citizen(online, live service, never ending game) to Subverse. For what? To justify long development time of a singleplayer porn game

Also funny that you want to avoid comparing it to other adult games because ‘of course they’re known for milking’.

Are you not seeing anything wrong with making comparisons to slowest game development examples in the world to prove your point?

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

That list specifies Star Citizen is still in development. And you are comparing it to Subverse. You are comparing Scam Citizen(online, live service, never ending game) to Subverse. For what? To justify long development time of a singleplayer porn game


Are you not seeing anything wrong with making comparisons to slowest game development examples in the world to prove your point?

No, because I’ve seen more than enough comments in this thread that claimed FOW would sit on the IP, that they’d milk it into oblivion, and I haven’t seen any of them come back and say ‘hey we were wrong.’

I bring up Star Citizen a lot, as other comments were saying the game should be done faster, constantly pointing out the amount the Kickstarter brought in. SC just passed 700 million in funding. It is the prime example of slow development, regardless of the genre of the game it’s being compared to.

That there are far worse examples of devs sitting on their monthly income and slow rolling their updates is exactly what should be highlighted. As I said in my earlier post, this game’s success is likely gonna serve as the same elevation of 3D adult animation. People may finally start thinking ‘why is this smaller game taking so much longer than this 30+ hour, fully animated game’. Maybe they decide their money is better used elsewhere. Maybe this convinces dev to stop dragging their feet.

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

Look like the upcoming Ela devotion scenes will have a lot of gang bang scenes

Well considering her intro declared her intentions to do all sorts of sex positions with all sorts of species, it isn't all that surprising xD

 

[Purple_Heart]

No, because I’ve seen more than enough comments in this thread that claimed FOW would sit on the IP, that they’d milk it into oblivion, and I haven’t seen any of them come back and say ‘hey we were wrong.’

Why would they do that? 4 years is a lot of time just for early access period and people know it. You've replied to this message in case you forgot:

Honestly almost 4 years of early access by the time of release is not a good look

That there are far worse examples of devs sitting on their monthly income and slow rolling their updates is exactly what should be highlighted.

You insist on highligting worst examples instead of highlighting best examples. It is basically same as telling poeple to eat bugs and be thankful for it when there are so many tasty food people can eat...

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

Why would they do that? 4 years is a lot of time just for early access period and people know it. You've replied to this message in case you forgot:




You insist on highligting worst examples instead of highlighting best examples. It is basically same as telling poeple to eat bugs and be thankful for it when there are so many tasty food people can eat...

Well according to you all the other adult games are milking it and slowrolling their updates, so by your own words, there are no best ones to compare it to.

 

[Purple_Heart]

Well according to you all the other adult games are milking it and slowrolling their updates, so by your own words, there are no best ones to compare it to.

This is such a twist of my words I am just going to stop replying to your non-sense.
4 years of early access by the time of release is not a good look for any game. Have fun coping.

 

[Seminole]

I'd milk the shit out of my Patrons too if they're completely fine with 10 minutes worth of content every 3 months lol

 

[chinpoppo]

he is a paid shill you can ignore all his posts

 

[RedRock1948]

Just thought I’d point out that this is fairly standard time for early access, even amongst bigger companies
View attachment 3693621

And compared to other games on this forum, I don’t think a 4 year run (really 3 and a half, EA began March 2021) is looking that bad either. Especially when you consider all these devs have had Patreon income the entire time. Also do note how few are actually tagged as completed

View attachment 3693626

View attachment 3693627

Was it difficult? No doubt, anyone’s first game would be, let alone one of this scale. But they didn’t quit, they didn’t go and crowdfund themselves into oblivion like Star Citizen and make finishing the game practically impossible, they’re at the finish line.

Regardless I hope every other smut dev realizes the bar’s been raised. I can’t go back to just browsing textful of VN incest games with slightly edited Ren’py models. No generic moan packs for the sex, or sound effects over still images. The same thing occurred ten years ago with Lara in Trouble and Kuniochi. We went from soundless loops on tumblr to artists leveling up and producing voiced content and longer projects. Once someone else shows you it can be done, there’s more to aspire to.

My main issue with the 4 year (3.5 if you feel so inclined) development cycle is that from what we can tell, (a lot hinges on 1.0 naturally) it has not been 4 years of efficient development or even time well spent. We had the debacles with terrible community engagement and the whole china thing in the first 18 months or so, which credit where credit is due, they did improve on with the dev diaries, but when you look at the actual game it is really hard to shake the impression that they either bit off more than they could chew or have completely mismanaged a confused vision from the outset. What we have is a mix of a very shallow xcom clone and a slightly more in depth twinstick scroller. They haven't added much depth to the actual gameplay systems despite a lot of vague promises about doing so, this could change in future but the foundational gameplay here is just pretty mediocre (obviously enjoyment is subjective but the lack of depth is not).

Then we have the porn which is meant to be the main selling point of the game, whilst they have maintained fairly high (if sometimes inconsistent, but EA so whatever) production quality, their actual management of the content has been messy to say the least. The whole point of ongoing early access updates is to provide content that players actually want to engage with, giving some girls 3x the pandora scenes of others and then deciding to hold back all pandora content for final release is a bad choice from a marketing and player engagement perspective and speaks to several uncomfortable possibilities. Like you said they only took 1 batch of funding and whilst I'm sure they have found ways to secure more money behind the scenes (this is normal) it may be running very thin and they simply haven't created enough content to both supply a drip feed of solid updates through EA as well as sufficient new content for the full launch. It was admirable for them to want to avoid the star citizen issue of ongoing milking but if they didn't sufficiently budget according to their first and only batch of public funding then the game was on shaky ground from the start and would explain a lot of what seem like wider internal management issues at FOW.

The problem with comparing Subverse to other games is that it doesn't really even know what it wants to be to begin with. This is not mass effect with porn like initial marketing wanted to position it as. It isn't a low prod value VN with some porn stapled on either. It isn't Xcom, or The Ascent. It occupies a weird middle ground with a confused design philosophy that has clearly taken a toll on development and it is all well and good to say it has raised the bar for you, but in terms of actual comparison there is no bar to be raised because you cannot make apples to apples comparisons to any other game, since it doesn't know what it is in the first place. What Subverse does well it does really well: the character designs are great, it commits very hard to its writing approach (whether you like that or not), and has a fairly cohesive aesthetic (despite the assets taken from Paragon lol), FOW are good at visual storytelling and so is Subverse but as a game it falters on so many levels that I struggle to see what 1.0 can do to meaningfully fix that.

 

[Mr. Weeaboo]

My main issue with the 4 year (3.5 if you feel so inclined) development cycle is that from what we can tell, (a lot hinges on 1.0 naturally) it has not been 4 years of efficient development or even time well spent. We had the debacles with terrible community engagement and the whole china thing in the first 18 months or so, which credit where credit is due, they did improve on with the dev diaries, but when you look at the actual game it is really hard to shake the impression that they either bit off more than they could chew or have completely mismanaged a confused vision from the outset. What we have is a mix of a very shallow xcom clone and a slightly more in depth twinstick scroller. They haven't added much depth to the actual gameplay systems despite a lot of vague promises about doing so, this could change in future but the foundational gameplay here is just pretty mediocre (obviously enjoyment is subjective but the lack of depth is not).

Then we have the porn which is meant to be the main selling point of the game, whilst they have maintained fairly high (if sometimes inconsistent, but EA so whatever) production quality, their actual management of the content has been messy to say the least. The whole point of ongoing early access updates is to provide content that players actually want to engage with, giving some girls 3x the pandora scenes of others and then deciding to hold back all pandora content for final release is a bad choice from a marketing and player engagement perspective and speaks to several uncomfortable possibilities. Like you said they only took 1 batch of funding and whilst I'm sure they have found ways to secure more money behind the scenes (this is normal) it may be running very thin and they simply haven't created enough content to both supply a drip feed of solid updates through EA as well as sufficient new content for the full launch. It was admirable for them to want to avoid the star citizen issue of ongoing milking but if they didn't sufficiently budget according to their first and only batch of public funding then the game was on shaky ground from the start and would explain a lot of what seem like wider internal management issues at FOW.

The problem with comparing Subverse to other games is that it doesn't really even know what it wants to be to begin with. This is not mass effect with porn like initial marketing wanted to position it as. It isn't a low prod value VN with some porn stapled on either. It isn't Xcom, or The Ascent. It occupies a weird middle ground with a confused design philosophy that has clearly taken a toll on development and it is all well and good to say it has raised the bar for you, but in terms of actual comparison there is no bar to be raised because you cannot make apples to apples comparisons to any other game, since it doesn't know what it is in the first place. What Subverse does well it does really well: the character designs are great, it commits very hard to its writing approach (whether you like that or not), and has a fairly cohesive aesthetic (despite the assets taken from Paragon lol), FOW are good at visual storytelling and so is Subverse but as a game it falters on so many levels that I struggle to see what 1.0 can do to meaningfully fix that.

Don't think we'd ever hear entirely how development goes. Devs don't usually go into details like that until after the game is done. There were some hurdles for sure, like the pandemic starting by the end of 2019 and making life difficult for everyone. I can imagine it was even for a team that's divided around the world and not focused in a singular workplace. As for the China thing, I wouldn't call that too big a deal. It basically boiled down to FOW picking one form of Chinese for translation, China having a fit and review bombing the game, and FOW capitulated and agreeing to do both versions of China.

Gameplay wise it is not meant to evoke XCOM vibes (people just naturally click to that because its the most well-known one), its more evocative of the Final Fantasy Tactics games (so much so that one of the older dev blogs talking about it is named Tactics Ass-Vanced, a ref to the GBA game Tactics Advance). It isn't meant to be complex, they've said as much during the early stages, the gameplay was designed to be simple, its their first game after all. Even so there's been plenty of feedback regarding difficulty. While it might seem shallow or easy to you, it may not be the case for everyone. It definitely isn't Mass Effect, which they never claimed it to be, that was articles writing about it.

Regarding Pandora, this is a bit of an oddball topic, because as much as I see comments on it, either complaining about their length (5-second gifs, like we're in the tumblr age of smut), or the content not being connected to the game, they still want to see the rest of it. Personally I knew things wouldn't go smoothly when the game launched with about 8-10 scenes for the first 3 gals and that's all we had for 7 months. It wasn't a great first impression, I knew that much. While more scenes were added up to Taron (her amount was a side effect of working on the experimental 360 scene in her mission. Which proved to be more hassle than its worth), around Sova's update they decided to change their release strategy. So each update purely focused on the new lady in question, and added a sizable amount of their scenes to start. As for why the rest hasn't been added I'd say is about the same reason why they didn't add the costumes they've been teasing for several diaries now, you gotta save for the end. Adult game or not, if they gave you every scene except for the devotion quests before the main game is complete, you wouldn't feel as inclined to replay the entire game again only for the cinematic scenes that lay buried in the game files.

That they're having the save files wiped upon 1.0's launch is a good sign that the game that comes out of early access is not liable to be the same thing we've been testing out the last few years. The progression system is changing to lessen the grind, planet missions and descriptors are being redone, as is the dating system in the bar. Coupling that with the number of costumes teased, the length of the devotion cinematics, and there still being another waifu with her own scenes to add to the rest in the future afterward, its gonna be quite the substantial update when that day comes.

 

[RedRock1948]

Don't think we'd ever hear entirely how development goes. Devs don't usually go into details like that until after the game is done. There were some hurdles for sure, like the pandemic starting by the end of 2019 and making life difficult for everyone. I can imagine it was even for a team that's divided around the world and not focused in a singular workplace. As for the China thing, I wouldn't call that too big a deal. It basically boiled down to FOW picking one form of Chinese for translation, China having a fit and review bombing the game, and FOW capitulated and agreeing to do both versions of China.

Gameplay wise it is not meant to evoke XCOM vibes (people just naturally click to that because its the most well-known one), its more evocative of the Final Fantasy Tactics games (so much so that one of the older dev blogs talking about it is named Tactics Ass-Vanced, a ref to the GBA game Tactics Advance). It isn't meant to be complex, they've said as much during the early stages, the gameplay was designed to be simple, its their first game after all. Even so there's been plenty of feedback regarding difficulty. While it might seem shallow or easy to you, it may not be the case for everyone. It definitely isn't Mass Effect, which they never claimed it to be, that was articles writing about it.

Regarding Pandora, this is a bit of an oddball topic, because as much as I see comments on it, either complaining about their length (5-second gifs, like we're in the tumblr age of smut), or the content not being connected to the game, they still want to see the rest of it. Personally I knew things wouldn't go smoothly when the game launched with about 8-10 scenes for the first 3 gals and that's all we had for 7 months. It wasn't a great first impression, I knew that much. While more scenes were added up to Taron (her amount was a side effect of working on the experimental 360 scene in her mission. Which proved to be more hassle than its worth), around Sova's update they decided to change their release strategy. So each update purely focused on the new lady in question, and added a sizable amount of their scenes to start. As for why the rest hasn't been added I'd say is about the same reason why they didn't add the costumes they've been teasing for several diaries now, you gotta save for the end. Adult game or not, if they gave you every scene except for the devotion quests before the main game is complete, you wouldn't feel as inclined to replay the entire game again only for the cinematic scenes that lay buried in the game files.

That they're having the save files wiped upon 1.0's launch is a good sign that the game that comes out of early access is not liable to be the same thing we've been testing out the last few years. The progression system is changing to lessen the grind, planet missions and descriptors are being redone, as is the dating system in the bar. Coupling that with the number of costumes teased, the length of the devotion cinematics, and there still being another waifu with her own scenes to add to the rest in the future afterward, its gonna be quite the substantial update when that day comes.

I agree with some of your premises but it doesn't do much to change the situation. I reference Xcom because most people have not played FF:T or Tactics Ogre, which I know are the primary points of reference. The issue of shallowness (which is not the same as difficulty) remains and is not subjective. If people enjoy the gameplay for its simplicity that's great for them, but a lot of people have complained about it so it's certainly worth discussion. The Mass Effect comparison is fair because whilst FOW never directly discussed it, the early marketing and game itself is full of references both indirect and direct, its an unavoidable comparison even though obviously a game of Subverse's scale should never really be expected to be comparable, but they walked into that trap with their own marketing decisions and use of terms like "revolutionary" and other general hyperbole.

You are right about community response to Pandora, it has taken a long time for people to accept it for what it is (you even still see occasional comments about camera control, even though FOW have been very up front about that not happening and why exactly it won't be happening). But I fear a lot of the cognitive dissonance in the community is a direct result of the poisoned chalice of bad marketing choices early, a confused design, constantly changing approach to early access content drops etc. As unfair as the community has been at times, FOW has laid so many traps for themselves it is a bit embarrassing to watch.

Regarding distribution of content. Yes of course they need to hold back stuff for 1.0, I think not showing the full devotion cinematics was the correct decision both design and business wise. That does not explain the lack of pandora content though, Pandora is a core driver of engagement throughout the early access process, to stop releasing content for it is directly harmful to that process and the only reason you would do it was if you did not have enough content to provide both satisfying amounts for EA updates as well as 1.0. All evidence points towards them having a severe resource crunch and needing to shift content to 1.0 in order to drive sales, something they can only do if 1.0 is a decent value proposition = has enough porn.

If we are to believe that there is no resource issue, then they decided to consciously tank the appeal of EA updates for *some* reason other than a resource issue, which requires us to disregard all the evidence to the contrary. I don't know man that is too many hoops for me to jump through mentally, I really hope I am wrong and 1.0 comes out and is everything you have suggested it will be, but it is just blind hope in spite of evidence at this point.

 

[Sebastianw]

I have been waiting for a long time to see this promising game ends its EA. I hope Fow can make it before 2025.