Oh GOD why would you want to replace this game's gorgeous art with another RPGmaker clone? Literally the plague on adult VN's, everyone and their mom thinks they can shit out a porn game with that tool and they all look the same.ANY RPG MAKER VERSION?
Yeah it's so eyerolling when a dev will advertise 10 hours of gameplay in an update and 8 of them turn out to be clicking through the same few screens of a point and click "minigame" to farm up enough cash or "stamina" or "magic points" or whatever to see the next scene. That's not really gameplay, it's padding.RPG Maker porn games be like: hey anon, if you bring me 600 tufts of grass I'll show you my boobs! uwu
Yeah the devs for WAL have their flaws but not including shit like that is a design choice I'll be forever thankful for.
Minigames that are actually minigames and demand a little thought or skill would be fine.I mean everything that makes a porn VN game something more than just a flood of text between lewd scenes. By 'mechanics' I mean exactly this. A fishing mini-game, a doll-dressing mini-game, an exploration or a fighting mode, multiple plot lines - these are mechanics. You playing a game by using mechanics, otherwise it's just a VN. So iirc WaL is a straight-forward VN with no gameplay. It would be nice to have something to do in a game but it takes an actual game design.
They didn't have a choice, it was take out the incest shit or get booted off patreon. No great loss IMOOkay, so, let me get this straight. In the last two updates (granted they were only a second degree update, not like a 0.7 or anything), the only things that have changed were... making a couple scenes less nonconsensual? Feels like the devs could've just kept those in the WIP version and rolled those changes out in the next major update.
Painfully accurate. These large "get it all done in one" updates feel railroady.When starting from scratch, the game feels like it's going to be a sandbox, roam-around-the-map-looking-for-the-next-minor-event style game, however it does feel like it's become more compartmentalised, particularly with how the latest updates are rolled out: Click on that section of the map, talk to that characters, and then an entire episode will roll out before you.
So in that sense, the original mechanics have been dumbed down, resulting in a mostly VN interface, with a fuck load of (well conceived) reading.
My expectation is that Episode 7 will follow that new approach: A new section on the map will be open, we'll click on it, and be whisked away into the realm of some lustful orc.
It'll probably run for about 4 or so hours of reading time, and then it will all be over, and the patrons willrun screamingcontinue to pay out for the next few hours of reading, and people here will bemoan the money they never spent, and the time they shouldn't have wasted; they will decry the poor value, and will stick around complaining until the next episode comes out.
There is a good solution: abandon the "patrons vote every year or two for Best Girl" system. It may have increased subscription back in the day but now it's just frustrating everyone bc the majority are mad their waifu wasn't chosen. The Nuts should explicitly abandon the pay to vote idea, replace it with "patrons can submit ideas / have their name on an NPC" sort of thing, and go back to designing a clever interactive world where it feels like the main character can pursue any woman he sees.Now it makes sense why the game feels less and less fun as it goes on when you guys point that out. The early game was structured in a way that you couldn't possibly do a "Gomira and nobody else" update. The game's still good for its wholesome fun story and art (although the anatomy in the sex scenes feels a bit off when viewed after all this time without a boner). But the gameplay was that secret sauce that made it fun to play.
There's no good solution though. You either progress everyone's story by a small amount each update, which feels more cohesive as a whole, or you compartmentalize and give a lot of story to one character. Either way, it either becomes "not enough progression for two years" or " two years for one fucking orc" and people are unhappy