I know someone's going to still try arguing that Fow knows what is and isn't NTR, so let me set it straight. Fow's devs clearly have some form of misunderstanding towards what is NTR. In their defense, neither do a lot of westerns to begin with. The people wrongly crying that EVERYTHING is NTR aren't helping either. They're just as wrong too. Here's a rundown on what NTR is:
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NTR is purely a contextual thing. For example, I'll take a scene FOW once described and explain how it can become not be NTR and can become NTR in different circumstances.
This is a scenario FOW once described we'd be able to encounter in the game. It would be a clear NTR scene if the player had already maxed Lily's Loyalty quests by then and has gotten to the point in the game where the two are considered lovers, or anything close to that level. At that point, the player character is literally being cheated on without his consent, hitting the NTR aspect very hard. If this was more of an introduction to her character and the player doesn't have that kind of relationship with her, then it wouldn't count as NTR or cheating. FOW was swearing that the game would not have NTR, but still teased that scenes like this would exist in the game.
The same applies to scenes like this:
If the player character has maxed Fortune's loyalty quest and she's basically become his lover at that point, it's extremely NTR-ish for players to select the main deck area of the ship and then find Fortune getting bred by a feral mantic. I don't get how this is hard to understand. FOW teasing the idea of scenes like this happening years back but also saying the game had no NTR was a clear sign that they themselves were ignorant to what NTR is. Maybe they assumed it meant consensual cuckolding?
Now, let's talk about the horde of people calling EVERYTHING NTR... Everything ISN'T NTR. Lily mentioning she has sex with aliens in passing isn't NTR, especially if it's at a point in the game where it's impossible for the player to have developed a close enough relationship with her through loyalty quests. What someone like Lily did in the past or currently does while not "being with" the protagonist is not NTR. It may gross you out, but stop calling it something it's not. Now if Lily were to have scenes of her fucking mantics after maxing her final Loyalty Quest where she admits to truly loving the protagonist, scream NTR all the way. Lily's entire character to the core is that she's a slut who fucks mantics. You need to accept it for what it is. She can have room to grow and evolve past that in loyalty quests, but stop expecting even chars built around this idea to start off with zero sexual experience. A character like Fortune is a different case, since she's clearly not someone who randomly fucks anything. It's fair to want an option to turn off Lily and Fortune fucking aliens AFTER you've completed their Loyalty Quests. It is fair to want an option to disable random mantic sex encounters in the game. It is NOT fair to want entire characters (Lily) essentially neutered in story personality to fit your fetish. The problem with FOW is that they'd rather just scrap entire features and ideas then put the small amount of work needed to have a "turn off mantic sex encounters" in the main menu. They'd gladly take the easy route of completely scrapping Bulgetto and Chodestool's random encounter scenes to do lazy loops in Pandora under the excuse of "wanting to not force things in people's faces", while still essentially doing that through dialogue. My gripe with Fow is much they clearly want to take the easy route for everything under the veil of wanting to please everyone, while still not even doing that correctly.
EDIT: What also didn't help the backlash they received from people crying "NTR!!!" at everything was their terrible communication. Hundreds of threads like
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would be posted of people pointing out that exact Bulgetto scenario. FOW's staff would either completely ignore them or issue a blanket statement that there would be no NTR, not addressing the fact that this scene itself can very well be NTR for those who may have leveled up Lily's Loyalty at the time of encountering this scene. It very easily makes people feel like they're not really caring about directly addressing issues and more focused on downplaying or blanket issuing statements to calm people down. This is the same kind of issue people had with the Pandora system on release. Their first Dev Journal entry after Pandora's negative feedback was to issue a blanket statement that they had plans to include more loyalty quest or personalized scenes with the waifus, and that they'd improve Pandora a bit more, rather than directly talk about what they thought of people's feedback on Pandora itself. People don't want to hear a "there is no NTR" statement when you already have the description of one on your steam page, they want to hear you address how that scene isn't NTR or the solutions to not making it NTR. People don't want to you to skirt around their feedback on the Pandora system with "Well, where adding more date scenes of Lily! and Pandora will get better too!", they want you to actually talk about what your plans are for it after hearing their feedback. Their constant blanket statements on everything is what led to those vanilla fans (some very obnoxious..) losing their shit until FOW caved and completely neutered the game's content. Maybe this could have been avoided with better feedback and more listening to people's comments?
