dont buy the corset, has been bugged since day one. a search through the thread will confirm this (using the search bar)
In many hentai games your point is a very valid one. But because ThornSin is a roguelike/lite I don't think that contradiction exists here. In the sorts of games you're talking about defeat is a totally undesired failure state that just makes you reload a save, so it's only an annoyance/inconvenience. But in a roguelike, defeat is a valuable part of the gameplay loop, which is why death is permanent. It's intended that the player die many times on their way to an eventual (but never guaranteed) victory, and so in that case the "lose to sex" mechanic actually fits perfectly well, because in a good roguelike you should never need to deliberately lose just to see something, but instead losing is an inevitability forced on you by the game (until you get really good at it of course, and how long that takes depends on the difficulty of a particular roguelike game). So the hope with a game like ThornSin is that you just play as well as you can, and you will see at least most of the hentai content organically as you get defeated (for real defeated, not by giving up) by various mobs in various runs.
Now, granted, this ideal isn't necessarily executed perfectly or even very well at all in every game, and so a roguelike hentai game can still end up in a situation where, because it's too easy, the player has to deliberately lose just to see scenes they otherwise will never have a chance to. So the right difficulty tuning is a big challenge that games like these face. But in that case the answer is not to make the game easier so the player never dies and just give them an easy-unlock gallery (which turns what was a game into just yet another pointless CG collector that could've been an animation gallery). The right answer is actually to make the game harder, so that players fail more frequently and so see the hentai content more frequently.
But the guy I originally quoted seems to just want the first option: Turn ThornSin into a glorified animation gallery. And so I do think my original point still stands. If that's what he wants, there's endless "games" like that he can enjoy to his heart's content. But some of us actually like that ThornSin is trying to be a proper rogue-lite hentai game ^_^
Anyway to disable the minions? I want to give birth, but I don't want minions following me around...
I think my main issue with that in this game is that rn the basic level navigation is kinda tedious. The random nature of the map layouts means you often have to backtrack through empty rooms. Many of the rooms also barely drop any rewards, sometimes none at all. I think a smaller number of higher intensity combat encounters would work well, each with meaningful rewards, or hell, drop the """metroidvania""" aspect entirely and just have it be a random but completely linear sequence of rooms. Another option would be one I saw in a different roguelike where you can instantly teleport to any room via the map once cleared.
If they didn't go with one of those options or and equivalent, then they could just make the player movement and traversal actually interesting. I think the player's movement needs to "match" the map size and design. Like having dark souls movement in the just cause 2 map would suck and vice versa (if hilarious). So you can either do slow, deliberate movement in a smaller, tightly designed environment, or you go crazy with movement options/speed and bring the enemies and environment up to match. Right now it's in kind of a boring middle ground where the backtracking is both slow and uninteresting.
A lot of the items are also useless or outright detrimental, and they don't really vary the core gameplay in the way most roguelikes rely on to keep multiple runs interesting. The difficulty right now also stems primarily from the lack of healing, rather than the combat itself. That's really a spectrum, and I think the balance should shift a little more towards there being more healing, and more difficult individual encounters.
But the eternal curse of making a porn game is that a lot of the dev time has to go into sex animations rather than gameplay innovation, so we'll see how much development happens on that front.
what you mean like godsend mode, that heals you often between levels, ups drop rates and weakens enemies?
What component was it? And how can I check if this is the case for me? Im currently having this issue.
- Jun 2, 2021
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Sometimes there are rooms that have an area blocked off by thick pieces of wood with weird red plants on them. How are you supposed to get rid of those? No matter how much I attack them, they don't seem to break.
Agree on the level navigation. I've found myself wishing many times for the ability to just teleport to next stage once all rooms have been cleared in a level. Fortunately, that's a trivial thing to implement, and so I wouldn't be surprised to see a quality of life thing like that added closer to the end of development. And I think I mostly agree with all your critiques here. Again, fortunately these aren't necessarily fundamental aspects of the game that can't be modified/improved, and I'm hoping Scarlet Paper will make a lot of tweaks in improving these things as development continues. The game has a great foundation I think, but definitely has a lot of areas to improve. Still, by the standards of the hentai game genre, I think it's still up there amongst some of the best in terms of actual gameplay, which is both a compliment of ThornSin and an indictment on the majority of hentai games ^_^
- Dec 3, 2017
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In my experience so far, it mostly stops damage from direct attacks, but damage from sex scenes still goes through. You can get around this by tweaking max HP and using add HP to heal yourself to full, but it can be annoying to keep doing that. Still, if you set your max HP to like 1000 and top up, you should be able to take a lot of sex damage before you have to do it again.
Just one thing, the Dev has been lowering the difficulty of the game as time goes on. The earlier versions we have squishy mobs with basic attacks that take a third to almost half your HP, and bosses that can take you down in two to three hits and you'll need to memorize their entire patterns to eventually take them down.
Nowadays, even in Thornsin mode, mobs are wusses yet still the most troublesome opponents because of their numbers, but after you get a few upgrades they become easy pickings. Bosses are way squishier and deals a lot less damage so you can get away with dodging the first few attacks then spamming away. No need to memorize animation stances, attack patterns, weakpoints and such; if it looks like its going to attack, just dodge then close in and spam attack. Even if you get hit that's okay, they most likely will only take a fifth to a quarter of your health - if it was a special attack then a third, but they don't do that often and the animation takes way too long. If you've buffed yourself up with HP then they're little trouble at all.
Just this patch I thought the new boss was just a special mob, and then I checked in with the ci-en post to see that it was supposed to be a boss with news that the number of snails were reduced. The snails aren't even troublesome opponents, they deal less damage than a Red Goblin's jump attack, they have a big bulky body to show their presence, moves at a snail's pace so you can flit around them and take care of the annoyances first, and their wind-up animation is the slowest. Last patch you also needed a few more hits to take them down, this patch you only need to do a full combo with the sword - making the QoL update that allows them to be damaged while hiding in their shell useless for one weapon because they won't even have time to do that.
Even the werewolves now can be taken down in a few hits. I was preparing myself mentally for stage 2, because they were the most troublesome mobs with a charge from across the screen while you're busy taking care of the other mobs - but their damage output has been reduced and they're also more brittle.
Things just became way easier, it no longer felt like a Rougelike and my interest in the game started waning I had to make challenges like only take frost upgrades or try to get impregnated by all bosses.
Judging by general trend, its fine if the Dev makes it easier for most of their playerbase - just sucks to start purposefully losing to see sex scenes when you can take care of things just fine.