Why there are no 1st person visual novels?

zekameka

Member
Aug 4, 2018
108
71
Seeing the success of different renpy visual novel type games, harem managers, trainers, etc, i wonder - why there is no such game in the first person genre?
 

freedom.call

Well-known Member
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Mar 8, 2018
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Isn't every 'I'm an 18 year old douche boning my fam' 1st person?

Or did I misunderstand your point.
 

polywog

Forum Fanatic
May 19, 2017
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1st person and POV games are immersive. It forces the mc to the player's perspective, rather than the voyeur / cuck perspective favored by most visual novels. In first person, YOU are the one having sex, rather than 2 characters having sex on screen, while you watch. Big Brother for example, you watch this guy named "Max" impossible to relate to the character, you just want to slap the guy most of the time. But you tune in and watch him fool around with his Mom and sisters. From the voyeur perspective "let's see what crazy Max is doing today" you watch and laugh at him.

A story like that, a VN, doesn't work in 1st person. 1st person means the player must control the actions of the mc, make choices and so on... not get led around by a linear story. It's not immersive when you're helpless, and just along for the ride, watching the vn story.
 

BeCe

Purveyor of Blood and Boobs
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Jul 26, 2017
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Just suddenly remembered Lightning Warrior Raidy. First person dungeon crawler but all the sex stuff is not first person.
 
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215303j

Guest
Guest
There are actually quite a lot of games where the MC's face is not or rarely shown.

As for an actual first person running around kind of game, there are a few, but the visuals are generally just not as good compared to either AAA games or Renpy / Daz kind of games.
 

mickydoo

Fudged it again.
Game Developer
Jan 5, 2018
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POV porn is very boring and limited, there are only so many camera angles you can do, a POV game is the same but even more limited, every porn render has to be done from the head of the character. Ever tried to watch your own dick in real sex, it's not very easy unless its doggy or blowjob standing up.
 

polywog

Forum Fanatic
May 19, 2017
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A large percentage of people today are "followers" They look to others as examples of how they should behave. They just like to watch a story, rather than trying things on their own. If a follower plays a real game, they will probably ask for a walkthrough. Unable to figure out puzzles, and clues by themselves, let alone think for themselves or grind games.

 

Domiek

In a Scent
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Game Developer
Jun 19, 2018
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I'm actually working on a POV game. It's the prequel to Personal Trainer called "Mnt Dew Doritos Hero". You play as MC during his awkward overweight stage in life. You can never see your dick because every time you look down, your stomach is blocking visibility.

It will be a ground breaking VN where 1/3 of the screen is usually occupied by your sexy belly.
 
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polywog

Forum Fanatic
May 19, 2017
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I'm actually working on a POV game. It's the prequel to Personal Trainer called "Mnt Dew Doritos Hero". You play as MC during his awkward overweight stage in life. You can never see your dick because every time you look down, your stomach is blocking visibility.

It will be a ground breaking VN where 1/3 of the screen is usually occupied by your sexy belly.
 

zekameka

Member
Aug 4, 2018
108
71
Yes, i meant something like Lightning Warrior Raidy, or something similar to fallout 4 but more centered on characters, relationship and nudity and story, rather than shooting and running around. As for sex scenes, you can do them from 3rd person, if needed.

Im am too, working on a such a game.
 

W65

Active Member
May 31, 2018
779
866
Yeah, a dungeon-crawler isn't a VN, because it has gameplay.

I'm thinking the problem you'd have with a first-person VN is the "walking simulator" syndrome. It's the same kind of complaint you get when a VN is made in an engine like RPG Maker: the player ends up spending most of their time walking around looking for NPCs to interact with. Well, it'd be easy to fall into that same trap with a first-person real-time 3D kind of game (or 2D for that matter), unless the amount of walking around was limited or carefully created to be exploration. You could teleport the player between interaction areas with a world map so that the area they'd be walking around in would be to a degree limited, but then you're kinda losing out on some of what the genre gives you.

The core of the VN is really the story, and the interaction kinda layers on top of it to different levels of game-ness. You might just have some options to choose from, or you might have some combat of some kind, or minigames, or a world map, or a day/night or real-time-like system etc. etc.

You've got your straight-up-VNs-with-RPG-like-battles (like Monmusu Quest), your pretty-much-RPGs-with-lots-of-character-interaction-that-sorta-operates-like-a-VN (like Lilitales, which I might've spelled wrong), and your actually-an-RPG dungeon crawlers (like Prizna or Princess of Puppets, or whatever its name is) for some examples of where the line between them sorta blurs. It's kinda like how the line between a real game and a VN blurs when you start to add game-like elements to it.

I guess it's rare because it's not straightforward to take advantage of what makes the first-person shooter/walker/whatever sort of genre distinctive. You see the occasional Japanese third-person adventure VN, where there's maybe some item hunting or other quasi-gaming elements. The West's fledgling porn games scene, though, seems to rely pretty heavily on game development engines even now, which might explain why rare game types feel so rare.