What do you want to see in NSFW games?

[Leinad_Sevla]

One thing I wish every game had was the option to choose the cumshot. Sometimes the scene will have a pre-determined cumshot and I want to possibility to choose.
Other thing I don´t really like is when the player chooses cum in mouth and it´s a still frame of the girl with the dick in her mouth and there´s 3 flashes or the screen shakes and then switches to an image of the girl with cum leaking out of her mouth. I say at least make one or two renders of the cum going into the girls mouth. It doens´t have to be animation, I know that´s hard to do, but just one or two images of the cum exiting the dick and going into the girls mouth.

 

[PTSdev]

I still dream of a game with Disco Elysium like dialogue mechanics. You know, a game with ACTUAL role play. I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential, most erotic video games are just a collection of lewd scenes, tied together by a "plot". A game with a reasonably small scope, but deep relationship mechanics would be so awesome.

 

[NES832hhP]

I still dream of a game with Disco Elysium like dialogue mechanics.

Thanks for nudging DE up in my backlog. But be careful what you wish for. While better dialogue systems would be great for things like Dating Sims, ideas like virtual girlfriends and lazy use of AI art might make what's written as crooked as artificially created fingers.

Also the difficulty seems to be in combining the writing and the art - as having lots more dialogue options becomes meaningless if it's not represented in the game itself if you only care about the former you end up with text-based games and well browse through the main page that's not all that popular.

 

[x~Minchen~x]

H-games should be kept simple, fun and straight to the point. I try and drop a lot of h-games. The h part should get the most love and attention, that's the whole reason to play. For a visual novel, give me pretty art, likeable characters that don't live in a void and decent writing. Yuri and fictional d-girls are way too rare. Let me play my small, submissive female protagonist that isn't complety braindead. I like contrasts. Maybe she ends up on an island full of tall, strong and dark amazons for snusnu. Maybe they don't have men, so there is convenient dick medicine around. No icky 3d models, no weird super niche fetisches like gore or cheese. No useless grinding or fighting, no "Multiple protagonists - let's waste your time with the male perspective". Fmc also shouldn't be a total victim. She could be young and weak, but she brings creative solutions to problems. Sex should have some kind of meaning and it's more fun when characters made some kind of connection. Maybe she is seen as some kind of exotic trophy wife at first, but after a while she gets closer to the girls and earns her respect. If it's not kinetic, make decisions meaningful. (Also pregnancy and sleeping sex is always neat)

 

[PTSdev]

Thanks for nudging DE up in my backlog. But be careful what you wish for. While better dialogue systems would be great for things like Dating Sims, ideas like virtual girlfriends and lazy use of AI art might make what's written as crooked as artificially created fingers.

Also the difficulty seems to be in combining the writing and the art - as having lots more dialogue options becomes meaningless if it's not represented in the game itself if you only care about the former you end up with text-based games and well browse through the main page that's not all that popular.

Yeah, of course complex dialogue systems aren't great in classical VNs. People play these games to engage in erotic fantasy scenarios. They want to be able to make choices and most people want these to be meaningful, but if a system is too complicated, it both overwhelms the player and makes the game less sexy.

It boils down to the problem of simulating relationships. Rigid stat systems lead to grind and predictability. I think the best solution would be a system which leaves room for role playing elements (= let players choose HOW they want to win the LI's heart), but isn't tied to repetition. This requires good writing. And that's a problem, because let's face it: Writing is HARD.

 

[Elo91]

H-games should be kept simple, fun and straight to the point. I try and drop a lot of h-games. The h part should get the most love and attention, that's the whole reason to play. For a visual novel, give me pretty art, likeable characters that don't live in a void and decent writing. Yuri and fictional d-girls are way too rare. Let me play my small, submissive female protagonist that isn't complety braindead. I like contrasts. Maybe she ends up on an island full of tall, strong and dark amazons for snusnu. Maybe they don't have men, so there is convenient dick medicine around. No icky 3d models, no weird super niche fetisches like gore or cheese. No useless grinding or fighting, no "Multiple protagonists - let's waste your time with the male perspective". Fmc also shouldn't be a total victim. She could be young and weak, but she brings creative solutions to problems. Sex should have some kind of meaning and it's more fun when characters made some kind of connection. Maybe she is seen as some kind of exotic trophy wife at first, but after a while she gets closer to the girls and earns her respect. If it's not kinetic, make decisions meaningful. (Also pregnancy and sleeping sex is always neat)

I just randomly wandered into here looking for sub games and your response popped up. I just have to say I feel most of what you said *so* much (esp. the lack of choice and that forced 'male perspective' eww). Before I start, I just wanna say I really don't mean to offend anyone here. I don't pretend to know everything that's going on and these are all just matters of taste and mine are no better than someone elses. Also I have ADD so I know I can be impatient, but that's rarely held me from an actually good story either. I apologize to everyone but this is gonna be a bit of a rant as it's my first time really opening up about all this.

But for most NSFW games the problems for me start at the very basics. Too many have just a LOT of issues that never needed to be there.

• The controls & usability are horrid as a rule
  • Just look at RPGM default or Ren'Py's typical arrow navigation where up goes down and left goes right, and ofc skip and back is disabled by default bc why would we ever want to go back and check what the last panel said right? So much better to force us to spam quick save & load the game to change a choice made by a simple missclick, or better yet disable even those entirely like some devs do it.
  • Even if you can technically rebind them, you can bet most of anything you try won't work and more than likely just break it entirely
  • The user-experience in general seems to barely even be a consideration
  • Yet every single game with 1h controls can easily be fixed in barely a minute with Autohotkey, even by an amateur like myself. Most of the 2h control games(!) can be fixed and changed into 1h the same way, which is HUGE for accessibility and especially for lewd games. How can devs with all that skill and time and dedication far beyond mine, sometimes with their livelihoods on the line, not be bothered to spend that 1 minute doing something that affects potentially thousands of customers and reviews?
  • The games that don't even have fullscreen
  • Games that come in multiple separately downloadable packages for no reason, bc they're not actually modular so all that stuff should've been packed in the same one single download anyway
  • 10GB games that haven't even been compressed. When a simple zip would've taken all that down to ~600MB instead. Like... how? Some of those get frequent updates, yet somehow nobody ever thinks to take the 5min compressing it so literally everyone saves an eternity downloading it, nvm often can't download it at all? The uploader themselves would save SO much time just uploading a smaller file! How does stuff like this happen, and so remarkably often too?
  • Or the many English games with horrible translations or full of spelling errors and bad writing, which could probably all of it be fixed in a few hours spent with ChatGPT or something
  • UI design with constant pointless prompts or buttons positioned on opposite sides of the screen, to maximize the effort needed for even the smallest actions. Or Unity games that are identical to Ren'Py games, except without any of the QoL or usability features like skip, quick menu, browse back, etc. Why do more effort for a worse outcome, must be something I'm just missing here like licensing costs or something idk...
• The pacing and delivery is all over the place
  • Like that 100:th RPGM-game where it takes hours of grinding to barely even get started, while ofc the skip button won't work and cancel/confirm keys autoselect dialogue. So now you're forced to reload and do it all over again.
  • Or yet another Ren'Py so overly verbose you can hold lctrl and skip for 2+ minutes straight without missing a thing, and haven't seen anything interesting yet
• Random nonsensical mechanics and lack of choice in general
  • Like being forced to make choices you don't want to grind up stats like corruption, so you're able to choose something you DO want. Even tho story / fetish-wise your choice had nothing to do with the non-choices before.
  • Missing that submission can (and often should, imo) be a choice, or that submission isn't just BDSM & leather with none of the relationship and every-day power dynamics that revolve around it
• Less about games and more about the categorization and labeling of all things lewd in general. The different interpretations and even just plain tag misuse is something you run into on every site, comic, image forum, game or otherwise, everywhere.
  • Like femprot that's really a futa/trans prot / male prot / other, sometimes with genderbending and sometimes not. The protagonist's identity and what choice you have in it (if any) is the single most important thing about a game for me, yet it's often ambiguous regardless of the tags and you need to check the comments & reviews to know for sure.
    • What gender/body type do or can I start as? If, then when can I change that? Do I have a choice? These are absolutely essential questions for anyone who has a strong preferred identity and want to play as themselves.
    • If a game (yet again) has me playing 2h as some guy before I can even get started as a woman, it matters. Bc I will either not play it at all, or skip every single bit of everything until the game starts for me.
  • Missing tags entirely
  • Ambiguous stuff like my newest fetish and constant headache of vore vs. unbirthing, and whether that means giantess / same size ppl eating ppl stuff / creature inside / transformation & expansion / literally 50 other things, nvm snuff (no thx) or soft or neither etc. All of it used completely interchangeably so what you get is anyone's guess.
  • Or stuff like futa on female, which can mean female on futa, futa on futa, futa on male, trans (and every subcategory of that), or just about anything else
  • Or tags like lesbian, which may mean the whole game is lesbian only, or that it has a single 2-second scene in it with 2 girls kissing and you're not even one of them.
• And finally as Minchen said, where are the games where we can be sub as heck without being nothing but useless, victims, or dumb bimbos (no, not happening EVER)? I always max out my int / magic / heal where I can, I can and want to be useful. Being a sub and/or wanting to serve shouldn't take away from that. Why is it so hard to find games that recognize this as a choice? Or are my wants really just that niche?

Really sorry about the rant. This turned out to be all negative and I didn't want that. But I've wanted this stuff off my chest for so long I'll leave it here anyway. I really do apologize. x.x

It's just... I see all these games and these people who have such amazing skills and passion and know-how. People who've undoubtedly spent so much effort and time and pains to create these beautiful experiences to share with us. And then so many of them miss the most basic, simple, easy to fix things that end up holding them (and us) back. I don't mean to blame. I have nothing but admiration for devs, indies especially! It's just such a shame. Many of these problems seem to be on the engine level, like those RPGM controls for instance.

 

[PTSdev]

As someone who's trying to develop a game, I can tell you that it's just a lot of work. And remember: Most devs do this as a hobby. Some are talented at creating 3D assets. Others are great writers. And some are skilled programmers. Most games are made by one person / very small teams, no naturally, they're not perfect in every category. But I totally understand your frustration. Some games come with absolutely crazy levels of jank. Mismatched UI elements, incoherent controls, tedious navigation, the list goes on and on.

Let's face it: Most games featured on this site are never going to be finished. Only a few devs actually know how project management works. Most devs (me included) do this for fun, which leads to bloated dev times, lots of bugs and even more false promises.

The lewd game market reminds me a lot of the good ol' times of the 80s/90s when solo devs actually could influence the entire industry. But back then, there was an ungodly amount of trash. Even more than there is today, which is hard to believe when you go dumpster diving on Steam. But due to low barrier of entry, the market was FLOODED by trash. For every gem like Ultima IV you got ten buggy, glitchy crap games coded by monkeys with Alzheimer's.

The thing that always baffles me is how many games go into Early Access while being FAR from feature complete. EA done right can both fund a dev team and create a nice feedback loop with the community. But what's the point of releasing something with a version number of 0.02? Delivering proof of concept is cool, but imho, it should NOT be monetized. I get it, people see the big games and want to have a piece of the pie, but they're never gonna get some if they put out absolute crap. Maybe they just don't care, I don't know.

On the language thing:
I'm not a native speaker, so I usually make some grammar mistakes. But I totally feel your anger, it's actually not that hard to use modern tools like AI to at least spell check a game. But again: Maybe people simply don't care.

But remember: Nobody's going to remember any of the "trash" games. The hits are hits for a reason. Support devs who care. Ignore the scammers.