Like @Wannabe_Human said, its what sells.
Though I completely understand where your coming from. I’m experiencing a fantasy burnout specifically with medieval fantasy, it’s overdone and I never liked it ( I apologize ahead of time for those that do like it).
Too many WIPs with the same old fantasy formula
Yes and no. Wayhaven is the most popular series and doesn’t fall into that category, The Passenger is very highly anticipated (and even cosmic horror among other things) and Sherlock Holmes is one of the most popular WIPs currently.
So it looks like it can actually pay off to do your own thing and take a risk. But I’m of course not denying that the fantasy settings are overall extremly popular, next to the superhero genre.
Based on what The Passenger and Event Horizon have managed, I don’t think it’s hard at all. If anything, you being so much more in the story seems to actually be quite helpful, adding a level of uncomfortable intimacy that cosmic horror benefits greatly from.
Well, you could argue that romance supersedes all genres in terms of popularity. Haven’t heard of the Passenger. I’ll check it out!
Absolutely agree. Too many games have the same tired premise; I’d go so far as to say genre, even. It’s practically 90% medieval fantasy in some way.
As for comments on specific game threads, I’d say it’s fine to give your opinion or criticisms, even if they’re not praising the game necessarily (obviously without being a dick about it).
I mean I absolutely agree that you should share your criticisms of a WIP with the author. It could help them improve. But in Ghosts case (just with their specific comment) the complaint would seem to be “I don’t like the genre/plot and think it’s overused” which is something the author could only correct by abandoning their current project and writing something else completely. Which would, of course, not be very feasible for them.
I’ve got nothing against the opinion itself or them sharing it here, of course, but I don’t think it would be a useful or nice thing to direct at a specific writer or their WIP.
Yeah, if I were writing something only to suddenly be told “I don’t like [genre], I think it’s tired and overused,” I’m probably just going to flatly disregard that remark and pretend I never saw it. It’s a fine topic of discussion, don’t get me wrong, but you’re off your nut if you think I’m going to dedicate the time out of my life to completely overhauling a project that’s already going to take me an indeterminate amount of time to complete in the first place, simply because someone isn’t thrilled about the genre I’m writing for.
Be the change you want to see in the world
I don’t think anyone has ever mentioned it before, but does anyone else find it annoying when ROs have two genders but they present traditionally for both? Like ROs who magically get longer hair, leaner body types, softer features or an appreciation of makeup when they’re female; and short hair, buffer body types, harder features and looser personal grooming.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing - my own gender identity is basically “I don’t care but I was assigned something so might as well perform it,” so if I was a gender-choice RO then I would probably fit this trope. But I somewhat doubt that 99% of the population is this way, and that’s what it seems like given the games on the forum.
I’ve been trying to go against this trend by heavily carrying traditionally gendered traits across different RO genders in my WIP, but it’s one of those perpetually delayed projects that I doubt will actually have a thread here any time soon.
Just my opinion, but I think one reason for this is because romance tends to focus on characters instead of being a stat raiser where you have to micromanage every one of your MC’s actions to focus on stats rather than on what the character wants to do or what makes sense for them. I think that, for those who self-insert, it’s probably easier to just “go along” with things and do what the game requires. For those who RP, that doesn’t always work out so well. Plus, it gets boring. I’m there for RPing in the world and getting to know the NPCs, not to max out a single skill so my character doesn’t die a horrible death. And I prefer NPC interaction that actually means something, instead of “you meet character A, talk to them once or twice, bang the third time you see them, and are magically in love with them at the end of the game.” Nope, I have no idea who the hell this character is, and my MC has talked to them three times in the course of the game, usually about meaningless shit. There’s nothing there.
I mean, playing that kind of thing (to me) is like reading a book where the MC spends the whole time in the gym, lifting weights and talking to no one unless it furthers their desire to build muscle. Sure, it makes for a muscled character, but I don’t know who the MC is and I don’t really care, either. So, once I figure out that’s the purpose of the book (a couple of chapters), I’m done. I’d rather go back and play Skyrim, where I make my character sneak around to learn to sneak. That kind of thing (for me) is better presented in a visual game, not one that I read. If I read it, the characters better damned well grab me, no matter what the setting is, or I just don’t give a damn.
Well stated.
No. What does bug me about the flippable characters is that it seems the male characters always seem to be more submissive and shy in their behavior, blushing and flustering (even when they’re grown ass adults) and I hate it. It’s why I couldn’t get through The Golden Rose–as great as the writing is, I tend to play straight females in these games and Hadrian makes my skin crawl as a RO.
Extremely so, but that’s because I really like gender-nonconforming characters, so having all ROs adhere to the gender norms, presentation-wise, is frustrating, when I’m just sitting there like ‘Oh, I’d be so much more interested in both versions of you, if your descriptions were switched…’
Same, I don’t like when that happens either. I can understand height (and maybe hair length, but this is personal preference), but when a post about a game describes the ROs and gives two different descriptions for the male and female version, it tends to put me off.
I’d like to see people play with this tbh. Maybe both versions will have long hair, or heck, give the long hair to the male and the short, cropped hair to the female version. It would be interesting to see authors consciously think about how much their character tends to conform to their gender.
Not really but I’m much more into the idea of the player choosing characters based on gender and getting a different character. It would increase replayability and I’m one of those annoying people who when asked to choose between male and female versions has to decide based on aesthetics or toss a coin because either works.
I do think there’s some validity to it though, people’s habits tend to be influenced by gender and to have a character act 100% the same way as a man when they did as a woman seems odd.
I mean I’m always for more options when it’s not an unreasonable burden on the author but what’s the alternative here? It would be hard to do it any other way without having the player confused because they’d have no point of reference for their choice there.
To clarify for everyone here, I’m absolutely not saying that gender shouldn’t have any influence on presentation. Societally assigned gender does have a huge impact on how we act, and it might be interesting to explore how that affects characters’ personalities beyond just surface-level appearance.
I’d just really like to see me train gender-skewed traits being treated as gender-skewed, not gender-determined.
The alternative is for characters to keep similar gender presentations regardless of gender. Masculine characters would remain masculine, feminine characters would remain feminine, regardless of whether they were men or women. And the point of reference would be gender; for me, for example, there’s a big difference in attractiveness between a masc woman and a masc man.
I can imagine this being difficult in some settings; if a character is a conformist in a contemporary or historical setting, it makes sense for them to present in a gender conforming way regardless of gender, and in a historical setting especially there’s likely some degree to which they have to do so for safety reasons. In sci-fi and fantasy though, there’s no reason for a gender-flippable RO not to retain the same characteristics across versions of the character.
That kinda take away from the choice.
But you’d never know what you’d get with your choice since you generally choose when you meet them, before you learned much.
I don’t see how it does take away from the choice. When I say “I want to romance women in this game,” my choice gives me women; there’s no reason it should (and I would prefer if it didn’t) exclude masculine women from that choice.
The thing is, with so many ROs having their presentation change so they are always gender-conformist, it just seems like a default, instead of something that was thought about, and determined to be part of their character.
What I want is variety.
Have some flippable ROs be masc male/ fem female, because that’s who they just are, or the culture they were raised in.
And then have some be fem male / masc female, because no matter their gender, they are non-conforming. And others that are masc male/ masc female, because they are a masculine person, or fem male/ fem female, because they are a feminine person.
In general, it very much annoys me when things are assumed by the game because of selected gender, both a little with ROs (because it tends to skew hetero-normative), but especially when it’s my player character.
Don’t tell me my character is ‘handsome’ because he’s a guy and ‘beautiful’ because she’s a woman.