Arden wrote:Give them big enough budget and I am sure they could do that, alot of people seem to think these guys are like EA or something.
Actually it's because they aren't EA is why I think it would be a good idea. It would be labor intensive to start but would make pumping out content easier in the long run. People who do this as a hobby like the people who make Date Arienne and Brad's Erotic Week can put out fairly complex games. This is just that on a grander scale.
Ok here's an example. Imagine your game starts at a high school graduation house party (like Sex and Glory's House Party for example). You start the game with some points to divide up for character creation. Perhaps some of those points can be spent on traits for your character. You could buy a trait called Casanova, which means you had a lot of relationships in high school, or Criminal, which means you spent some time in Juvie, or Science Nerd and on and on. So throughout the house party, pretty much everything looks the same. The same girls are there, the same art assets, the same everything. The difference is that you can get different dialogue options and different hotspots unlock due to your skills and traits. So basically you're reusing the majority of your art assets for three different games. Then after the party you move into the city and can do a multitude of things. Same situation as the house party, the city consists of the same locations, the same girls, etc. but with different options due to previous dialogue selections and character trait and skill selections. You could end up meeting Serena from Living with Serena and eventually move in with her and play a similar storyline from that game, but then in a bar meet the swinging couple from Hot Wife 2. Or you could move in with Brittney from Living with Britney and meet that swinging couple there as well. Or you could choose to have a baby with one of the girls and a hot nanny moves in and boom, you're now playing Living With Temptation.
Anyway, this way you can add complexity and replayability by having different characters able to move to different games while using your art assets as efficiently as possible. People also replay the game with different traits after they're done one playthrough to see what they missed or what they can do with different stats. People stay subscribed longer because when the game has more sandbox qualities they will waste time to muck around and see what they can figure out. The subscriptions that would normally be just a month then gone stay for two or three months (or even longer, as another quality that sandbox games have is that players become attached to their characters because they feel they created them on their own). If the plan is on using a subscription model then this is the best way to take advantage of it. It gives the players as much to do as you can while being as efficient with your resources as possible.
Maybe Skyrim was a bad example to describe it. Perhaps "Maniac Mansion on Crack" would be a better comparison.