Really hope that they have an overarching post-release strategy where they will use the sales (with a price bump) of 1.0 to fund a decent amount of expanded content because as it stands, this initial release screams of massive resource mismanagement internally. I don't care about the stylistic elements people are taking issue with (fetishes catered to, dialogue/story structure, pandora narrative integration) but purely from a content design standpoint what we've gotten doesn't make much sense considering the time and funding allocated.
Yes, this is an indie game that only took one round of KS funding, it was never going to look AAA either in the presentation or gameplay departments and they do manage to get decent mileage out of strong cutscene direction and repurposed assets (some of the enemy models are originally from Paragon lol) but recognising their clear resource limitations they should have reigned in their ambitions extremely early. What they had as a foundation was a captive audience from their prior work, really strong character designs (and decently well defined personalities for said characters from a writing perspective) and a pair of shallow but serviceable gameplay systems (space and ground combat). The logical thing to do is pump the majority of your time and money into the good parts of that foundation (porn for the characters everyone likes in your porn game) and not waste it trying to implement awkward progression systems and feature bloat in all the wrong areas. Why does the DBZ power-up mechanic get set up in the main story only to be shunted down to the back quarter of every girl's progression and why does it even exist to begin with when ultimately the ground combat is so simplistic (as it should be), all that time and money spent on a mechanic that is utterly superfluous.
The progression itself is a mess, its scaled to fit the decent amount of (again very shallow) side content that all rely on you spending time with gameplay systems that aren't deep enough to warrant it but absolutely took serious time and money to develop. I don't understand that development goals here, any and all involved would absolutely be aware that the gameplay systems were not where the core appeal was and must have raised this internally, but at least judging by dev diaries, the messaging within the studio was to double and triple down on trying to flesh out the gameplay instead of playing to the actual strengths of the game (more porn, more character interaction). This whole project reeks of a disconnect between the leads and the people actually building the systems (surprisingly common at small studios), couple that with a really strange marketing and community engagement strategy that seemed to rubber-band from the initial "you know who we are and now we're doing mass effect with porn for our first ever game" bravado and then just flat nothing after the initial early access release, then a community focused regular approach with the dev diaries and social media presence and now back to the big trailers and "look its like mass effect" tone. Some of that is basic marketing logic (push the game hard when it comes out of EA to maximise first time sales) but the overall strategy, or rather strategies from the look of it, the past 4 years comes off as confused and muddled just like the actual game we've gotten here.
I don't think anything typifies the issues with Subverse and especially this 1.0 release better than the last act of the game. Last set of missions feature an infiltration sequence that (I'm not being hyperbolic) a first or second year game design student could whip up in a week or two, likely less. The "metal gear if it was a board game for children with learning difficulties" sequence is genuinely baffling and is immediately followed by two extremely boring boss fights that highlight exactly how little there is going on with the ground combat here (which anyone playing figures out much earlier in the game, so why emphasise it!) bookended by a series of final cutscenes that are some of the best directed in the whole game (but feature absolutely 0 porn in a porn game lmfao), it is such a remarkable feat of design whiplash that I actually might be sincerely impressed. Also Devotion quests unlock in the final act and they are for the most part a mix of the same shallow gameplay with admirable attempts to throw wrinkles into the formula (that struggle to overcome the sheer limitations of the core systems at play), bookended by short 'movies' ranging from 3-5 minutes in length. These are bound to be divisive, as they are by and large much more vanilla than what the core FOW fanbase probably wants/expects and they are some of the few times that the porn is actually attached to the narrative (not something that matters to me personally but I think open to valid criticism). It is more than a little damning that I came away from the DQs thinking "wow some of the best parts of this game are the non-interactive movies", none of them feature anything from their respective girl's progression systems either besides the actual investment to unlock them (no outfits, hair etc) since they are prerendered. This prompts the inevitable question of "would Subverse have been better if it was something like 70% FOW animation, and 30% gameplay?". A question I'm sure everyone involves doesn't want to be the primary take away for their audience here lol.
It's a shame because clearly a lot of talent and hard-work has gone into this project over a meaningful period of time, and there is such a good foundation here in terms of characters and atmosphere. I want to be clear that I don't think this is some irredeemable pile of shit or anything like that; FOW set out to do something ambitious (far too ambitious) and considering the strength of the initial ideas here (characters, world etc) its not hard to see why they would, however it is readily apparent that they quickly got themselves into a difficult position project management wise and that lead to crippling constraints on the end product. There's a general rule in creative fields that with a large scale project, you need to have the hard conversations early, clear restraints need to be set down so the project can be scaled (and costed lol) appropriately and the teams can know what they are working towards, and their managers can push them toward those *realistic* goals with clear messaging. This especially needs to be done before a public marketing push. Clearly, FOW (as an inexperienced team in this field) struggled with these fundamental principles and to be honest, its impressive that they were able to produce anything at all let alone something this decent. I hope they make enough to do further things with the Subverse IP, hopefully things that lean into their creative strengths.
Yes, this is an indie game that only took one round of KS funding, it was never going to look AAA either in the presentation or gameplay departments and they do manage to get decent mileage out of strong cutscene direction and repurposed assets (some of the enemy models are originally from Paragon lol) but recognising their clear resource limitations they should have reigned in their ambitions extremely early. What they had as a foundation was a captive audience from their prior work, really strong character designs (and decently well defined personalities for said characters from a writing perspective) and a pair of shallow but serviceable gameplay systems (space and ground combat). The logical thing to do is pump the majority of your time and money into the good parts of that foundation (porn for the characters everyone likes in your porn game) and not waste it trying to implement awkward progression systems and feature bloat in all the wrong areas. Why does the DBZ power-up mechanic get set up in the main story only to be shunted down to the back quarter of every girl's progression and why does it even exist to begin with when ultimately the ground combat is so simplistic (as it should be), all that time and money spent on a mechanic that is utterly superfluous.
The progression itself is a mess, its scaled to fit the decent amount of (again very shallow) side content that all rely on you spending time with gameplay systems that aren't deep enough to warrant it but absolutely took serious time and money to develop. I don't understand that development goals here, any and all involved would absolutely be aware that the gameplay systems were not where the core appeal was and must have raised this internally, but at least judging by dev diaries, the messaging within the studio was to double and triple down on trying to flesh out the gameplay instead of playing to the actual strengths of the game (more porn, more character interaction). This whole project reeks of a disconnect between the leads and the people actually building the systems (surprisingly common at small studios), couple that with a really strange marketing and community engagement strategy that seemed to rubber-band from the initial "you know who we are and now we're doing mass effect with porn for our first ever game" bravado and then just flat nothing after the initial early access release, then a community focused regular approach with the dev diaries and social media presence and now back to the big trailers and "look its like mass effect" tone. Some of that is basic marketing logic (push the game hard when it comes out of EA to maximise first time sales) but the overall strategy, or rather strategies from the look of it, the past 4 years comes off as confused and muddled just like the actual game we've gotten here.
I don't think anything typifies the issues with Subverse and especially this 1.0 release better than the last act of the game. Last set of missions feature an infiltration sequence that (I'm not being hyperbolic) a first or second year game design student could whip up in a week or two, likely less. The "metal gear if it was a board game for children with learning difficulties" sequence is genuinely baffling and is immediately followed by two extremely boring boss fights that highlight exactly how little there is going on with the ground combat here (which anyone playing figures out much earlier in the game, so why emphasise it!) bookended by a series of final cutscenes that are some of the best directed in the whole game (but feature absolutely 0 porn in a porn game lmfao), it is such a remarkable feat of design whiplash that I actually might be sincerely impressed. Also Devotion quests unlock in the final act and they are for the most part a mix of the same shallow gameplay with admirable attempts to throw wrinkles into the formula (that struggle to overcome the sheer limitations of the core systems at play), bookended by short 'movies' ranging from 3-5 minutes in length. These are bound to be divisive, as they are by and large much more vanilla than what the core FOW fanbase probably wants/expects and they are some of the few times that the porn is actually attached to the narrative (not something that matters to me personally but I think open to valid criticism). It is more than a little damning that I came away from the DQs thinking "wow some of the best parts of this game are the non-interactive movies", none of them feature anything from their respective girl's progression systems either besides the actual investment to unlock them (no outfits, hair etc) since they are prerendered. This prompts the inevitable question of "would Subverse have been better if it was something like 70% FOW animation, and 30% gameplay?". A question I'm sure everyone involves doesn't want to be the primary take away for their audience here lol.
It's a shame because clearly a lot of talent and hard-work has gone into this project over a meaningful period of time, and there is such a good foundation here in terms of characters and atmosphere. I want to be clear that I don't think this is some irredeemable pile of shit or anything like that; FOW set out to do something ambitious (far too ambitious) and considering the strength of the initial ideas here (characters, world etc) its not hard to see why they would, however it is readily apparent that they quickly got themselves into a difficult position project management wise and that lead to crippling constraints on the end product. There's a general rule in creative fields that with a large scale project, you need to have the hard conversations early, clear restraints need to be set down so the project can be scaled (and costed lol) appropriately and the teams can know what they are working towards, and their managers can push them toward those *realistic* goals with clear messaging. This especially needs to be done before a public marketing push. Clearly, FOW (as an inexperienced team in this field) struggled with these fundamental principles and to be honest, its impressive that they were able to produce anything at all let alone something this decent. I hope they make enough to do further things with the Subverse IP, hopefully things that lean into their creative strengths.
