Re: Renfield
Things I haven't really seen in a 3d environment (or much in 2d even) is when enemies just have sexual attacks in general
Fairy Fighting is an excellent example which illustrates
why you don't see these things.
Enemy-initiated attacks are a nice feature
if it involves a sexual fetish that the player finds appealing
and it coincides with the player's desire for titillation. Under any other circumstances (e.g. it's a vore scene which grosses out the player, or if the player is simply trying to beat the stage because the
next encounter really turns them on) then it's an unwelcome loss-of-control which detracts from player engagement.
The main balancing problem is
duration - a five-second attack animation is unreasonably long in a fast-paced action game, but it's also much too short for sexual gratification.
Repetition is a risk - even the coolest attack will start to look silly when you've seen it twelve times (e.g. Mortal Kombat). The final problem is
perspective - 3dRPG control and camera systems tend to be designed for combat with multiple opponents at ranges of 1m to 20m. When you put characters in direct contact (e.g. groping) then a first-person camera will have issues with clipping and foreshortening (assuming that the player character model is even
drawn, which it usually isn't). Similarly, a third-person camera will tend to occlude the attacker behind the player character - and even if it somehow doesn't, the "sexy action" will tend to occupy only 15-20% of the available screen space (because we're using a wide FOV so that the player can effectively deal with multiple attackers).
Text-based games avoid the perspective problem entirely. They can also avoid the duration and repetition problems easily: the enemy performs a sexual attack and the authors pastes in seventeen paragraphs of text. Within 1.5s the player will get the gist of it. If they're feeling horny (or if they're curious about the characters and mechanics involved) then they can read through the whole thing. If they're not interested (or if they're already read this particular scene), then they press a single key and they're back in the action. Maybe they'll be suffering from a debuff or special limitation on their
character's combat abilities, but the
player hasn't been forced to sit through an unwanted cutscene/animation.
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My suggestion would be to incorporate sexual
effects into combat, but keep the sexual
acts as a post-combat thing. You might have a few special weapons or magic spells:
- Leather Whip - fast attack speed. Inflicts minor HP damage and moderate Pride damage.
- Burning Lust - slow-moving magic projectile with a long cast time. Inflicts minor Fire damage and heavy Inhibition damage.
Ideally, these would be available to the PC and well as NPCs. They'd be integrated into the normal combat mechanics - you could block a whip-attack with your shield, or evade the magic projectile with circle-strafing or a quick dodge-roll. These effects would also be eligible for mitigation and amplification. Completing a quest for the Church might grant you Armor of Purity (resistance to sexual attacks) or you might choose a special Perk ("Demonic Pact" or whatever) which makes you vulnerable to sexual attacks but greatly boosts your resistance to elemental damage.
The player would need to be able to track these effects. At first you could just put a "status bar" onscreen (each whip blow depletes the Pride bar; when the Pride bar is empty, your character falls to the ground and the NPC will mock you and/or initiate a sex scene). Ideally, you'd eventually get rid of the HUD stuff (because it's messy) and convey this information via in-game elements - facial expression, posture and movement animations, changes in speech patterns, etc. But that's a
very ambitious goal, especially when you start thinking about non-human enemies: what's the visual difference between "regular troll" and "horny troll"?
I would restrict sexual elements in combat to
mechanical effects rather than direct
sexual contact (e.g. groping). The main reason is that sexual contact requires synchronized animations, which removes control from the player and disrupts the flow of gameplay (and, with poor scripting or multiple attackers, can quickly turn into permanent-stunlock). The secondary reason is that it makes assumptions about anatomy - if your character perform a "grope attack" on a 4m tall troll, you'll just be massaging its kneecaps.
You can still have "sexy moves" in combat, but use them for non-synchronized attacks. For example: your character casts the Burning Lust spell by "charging up" for a few seconds and then performing a mighty pelvic thrust in the direction of the target (which emits a "fireball" projectile in the chosen direction).