Yeah, if it's a brain bender for me to play a game like TiTS or CoC and CoC2, I'd hate to be the one trying to code it.
What are your gripes/criticism of TiTs?
- Thread starter TheInfamousImmortal
- Start date
To be honest, as someone who can only really make junk food - I am painfully aware of my limits as a writer, that's one of the reasons I stopped - having it described as fundamentally pointless still hurts. These games were built on community-generated content, and a lot of the people with the enthusiasm necessary to create content don't have the skills or experience or time to make much more than junk food. Again, myself included. Maybe if I combined the skills I have now with the passion and free time I had a decade ago, but that's the Reaha expansion, and if that's still not good enough then I don't think anything I could do is.
If the argument is that "well, it shouldn't be that way, characters like Paige should be the bare minimum of what gets accepted or it's pointless", then okay, that's more than fair from an artistic standpoint. But a lot of people put a lot of effort into what they contributed to the game, and as someone who was one of them, I don't think I was capable of giving more.
Small gripe I've always had about Shourya, her content never explains what Spanner looks like outside of being a small foxmorph AI. Like when you choose whether your cool with sharing there should be an option that's like "Can I see what your husband looks like first?" before your choose, and get an appearance screen as she show your a picture. Legit matters to someone like me, I'm really only attracted to femboys when it comes to dudes. If Spanner was a femboy fox all for it! But if a small hunk bot? Not really interested...
I was initially driven to CoC because of the TFs, because I'm very much into TFs. The reason why I don't really engage much with it in CoC2 outside of just getting the TFs needed for the look I specifically want is really just because there's not much to it in CoC2. I'd be happy to engage in TFs more generally if it was more like CoC in mechanics, but CoC2 is more just a horny rpg.
I didn't mean to insult you! I have gripes about some of the community submitted content in the game, but for the most part I regard it as gravy - additional content that's not doing anyone any harm. Yes of course it has to be held to a minimum standard - and maybe that standard was too low in TiTS' earlier days - but there's no reason it has to be as intimidatingly high as Paige. A bonus of allowing community stuff too is that it acts as a pipeline for new writers, who hopefully bring new perspectives and vocabularies with them. I also think you're being overly hard on yourself - I always liked Celia.
The chief focuses of my complaints are:
* The requirement for all hostile encounters to have full suites of sexy times written for them. Enemies that fuck you or be fucked in return can be a lot of fun, and I love those that impart effects, have real risk or develop in some way - Ceraph was probably the one thing that got me into writing for CoC1, back in the day. I also know that Jasvalla is probably my single most popular piece of content. But if every enemy has them, and they are all one-shots with something that doesn't even have a name, then it quickly becomes utterly mundane and uninteresting. Worse though is that they are a huge bottleneck on development. From experience, writing sex scenes for generic enemies is the hardest and least rewarding thing you can do for this game. It's awful, and it takes so long to do for every individual encounter. We could concentrate on producing so much more satisfying content by rethinking the standard gameloop here.
* The similar requirement for virtually every character added to the game to be fuckable. Sometimes a vendor should just be a vendor. NPCs should be able to refuse the PC's advances. Again, this will serve to make those NPCs they can seduce more special, and concentrate more effort into them.
* The adjunct point to this is the tendency of writers to abandon characters half-done. I mean, I get it. Sometimes you have to move on, or risk driving yourself crazy. Sometimes if you chase an inspiration you can surge out 30 pages of good stuff in no time, instead of slaving over something you're exhausted with. Also community contributors will just do that, and that's the major negative attached to enabling them. But TiTS is absolutely littered with characters that go nowhere now. Players are constantly complaining about it. The most popular characters, like Anno and Paige, are those that have some kind of arc that was fully completed. There should be a hard limit on new Donut Steeles being introduced while other datable/recruitable NPCs are left in the void - a rule that could be made much easier for everyone by adopting the two proposals above.
That's my tuppence, from working on this game on-and-off for a decade now. A tighter central narrative, that involves and develops more characters, that would also be nice. But that's dependent on Fen, or whoever is the main writer for the next game.