@Norn Berg
Here is another example where a person's NSFW preferences as a player make all the difference. I personally have never been interested in 'gameplay vs porn balance' as a concept in games, quite simply because I don't care about porn. Porn is boring to me and if it's present in a game I'm just waiting around for something more interesting to happen. So for me, content that actually is sexy and fun to me in a video game is necessarily going to be something that affects gameplay and uses gameplay in order to make those sexy and fun things immersive.
Playing a game with some eye candy added that has little to no realistic in-game justification and then regularly breaking from the gameplay to watch in-game porn, or even just bondage art or whatever, without gameplay significance, could not be less interesting to me. I'd rather play Stanley Parable for an entire duration of a Tuesday, because at least I'd get the Steam achievement.
This isn't to say I don't love bondage art or bondage photoshoots. They can both be amazing. But if I want to see either, I'm going and I'm looking at them, not playing a video game. A video game is a game, and so a bondage game should, to my preferences, simulate the experience of either being in bondage or putting another character in bondage, as much as a video game and developer want and can do such a thing with a video game.
I like CYOA games. I like branching paths in game stories. I like it when losing actually means you *lose* and real consequences happen, and it adds stakes and risk to playing. As someone who likes to attempt to 'get through this many levels without dying' type challenges in SFW games, it feels like a spicy kinky version of what I already know and like.
> Because it's "or-either" situation: either the player's character is reveling in bodily pleasures - or actually... well... progressing in the game.
It's not though. Because 'progress' in a NSFW game isn't always, and actually often is *not* the same as 'progress' in a SFW game. In fact a lot of NSFW games are most closely related to open-world games which prioritize experimentation and side quests in the sense that your character getting into situations that are markedly inconvenient, impractical and far outside any conventional idea of 'progressing' in a mission or hero's journey. If that were not the case, then you just have a regular video game with NSFW art and dialogue added in as an aesthetic flavor with no real gameplay changes.
Some people like aesthetics only in an otherwise typical video game, and others like NSFW content to meaningfully change gameplay in any of many different possible ways.
If you are a person who wants your NSFW video game to play just like a SFW equivalent for its genre except it has [insert sexy content here] added in as aesthetic decoration, you won't like games that use NSFW content to change and derail the way video games usually play. If on the other hand you are gameplay-centric with the NSFW content you like, like me, you'll love when games do that.
Neither is invalid or bad game design. Any more than racing games are bad game design because 'all you do is drive around a looping track over and over' (I don't tend to play racing games because I find most of them boring unless I have friends in the same room).
If person doesn't like a thing, then to them that thing will seem 'pointless'. But it's not to somebody else.
Kinky Dungeon has had these player-as-captive elements for so long now, it's clearly part of the intended vision for the game that people like and generally think is well designed *for them*. If other people don't like it, that means other people don't like it...and they're free to go play something else. That's why game genres exist. That's why Steam has tags.
As an aforementioned working person I assume that the small-ish time I can set aside for video games will sometimes lead to disappointment because whatever I play isn't my thing. And that's ok with me. Kinky Dungeon, with all of the elements seen as boring or pointless here in this thread, is not such a case for me, and many others.
I can't comment on the Discord drama because I don't spend time on the server and I have no knowledge or awareness of this "weird band of ragtags" you speak of or what sort of insult this is supposed to be.
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Criticisms about how well a game manages to fit into its vision for what it wants to be I totally understand. I don't understand why a game's vision not being to a particular person's liking somehow translates to that vision being objectively bad and in need or change or removed, when a whole list of other players completely disagree and love the vision that game has.
I return again to my point from before. Games with bondage consequences for players who lose, which isn't pre-scripted, and is actually immersively restrictive and confining to the player's character and gives lasting consequences and a branching path for the game and story...are extremely rare. And there's a whole niche of players who love them and have almost nothing to choose from. So why in the world would we want to take one of these rare games and change it and get rid of that content and morph it into just another of a million NSFW games out there, such that *this* niche of players no longer has player-as-sub content that they like, all to grow the already-large library of games already available to everyone else? It doesn't make any sense to me.