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What is an immediate red flag for you guys?
- Thread starter Levant
- Start date
if they shill out a Patreon when they literally just dropped the story.
Lol I never fully interacted with the community before but I've heard this name a couple of times already to know this name is apparently bad news.
Certain authors, bad grammar, too long of paragraphs and pages (and I love bigger works but I can usually tell when someone is keeping too much in or trying to bloat their work), flat writing, bad plot, too many WIPs, the IF is heavily inspired by folktales and mythology and takes place "during them", bad description for their IF, author who frequently posts too many asks, patreons with too many monthly posts, them having a patreon from the start, authors who answer hundreds of asks even before releasing a demo, and paranormal fantasy with vampires, werewolves or both.
I'm sure I'm missing more.
(Some of these flags are yellow but they still sometimes make me avoid games entirely)
I'm sure I'm missing more.
(Some of these flags are yellow but they still sometimes make me avoid games entirely)
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I love bigger works too in fact, I actively search for em. But I admit most of them have too much "Filling" and less choices lol. If I see "1 million word count" I expect half of those being actual consequences, choices that matter, recalls that make a choice you barely remember doing in the past coming back etc.
As for the vampire stuff? I like it lol, COG Masquerade ones have great writing for the most part especially night road, but outside of the official stuff most paranormal choice games follow a very teen, very twilight, very Percy Jackson writing or whatever so I agree.
Historical IFs that I'm supposed to take seriously but have glaring inaccuracies for the time and IFs that remind me of romance fantasy, paranormal romance, mafia romance and or any of most romance books being released right now.
I should've stated why I find paranormal fantasy IFs to be a red flag. It's when they are or remind me of paranormal romances. While I have liked some works within this genre it gets stale fast and there aren't really any innovations because it's all based on works from the 90s and 2000s.
I get what u mean lol, what was the name, "Unnatural" I think? That one reads a lot like what you are describing as a red flag of yours, reads like a fanfic of some media of that time frame. I don't mind urban fantasy, but there has to be some sort of flavor in it that isn't just "Vampires and Werewolves are real btw" and most games being published read as that, or are too melodramatic in it's drama.
I dunno if it's too niche or unknown outside of the TTRPG folks, but I appreciate when it's instead something like "Shadowrun" instead, where it's just clearly so batshi crazy in the why supernaturals are around this cyberpunk world, that it circles from trying to much and circles back to "Thats Cool Af tho"
Short prologues and mini-updates where the author posts like 1.5k words at a time. It shows that the author is impulsive and posts for instant gratification, and they're usually unreliable in the long-term.
Superhero stories that have far too many power choices. The authors tend to get overwhelmed as the story unfolds and they need so many different ways for the MC to solve a problem that they either miss obvious ways powers would make it easier for some, or the choices don't actually matter.
Character creator menus where far there's too many appearance options. The author usually buries themselves under promises of making flavour text matter, only to realise too much flavour makes the game too branchy to keep up with, but readers still want it and the plot suffers.
When characters introduce themselves by name and pronouns. It's less of a red flag, and more of a warning that the story is going to be incredibly boring and overly gentle with your feelings. It's especially egregious when it's based in a historical or grimdark setting.
Every RO has a poly option. A lot of authors seem to miss the mark with this one and are more focused on the RO's having history and chemistry with one another so it feels natural for them to all be together, however the MC tends to just feel like a third-wheel.
Superhero stories that have far too many power choices. The authors tend to get overwhelmed as the story unfolds and they need so many different ways for the MC to solve a problem that they either miss obvious ways powers would make it easier for some, or the choices don't actually matter.
Character creator menus where far there's too many appearance options. The author usually buries themselves under promises of making flavour text matter, only to realise too much flavour makes the game too branchy to keep up with, but readers still want it and the plot suffers.
When characters introduce themselves by name and pronouns. It's less of a red flag, and more of a warning that the story is going to be incredibly boring and overly gentle with your feelings. It's especially egregious when it's based in a historical or grimdark setting.
Every RO has a poly option. A lot of authors seem to miss the mark with this one and are more focused on the RO's having history and chemistry with one another so it feels natural for them to all be together, however the MC tends to just feel like a third-wheel.
The appearance point you made genuinely made me realize that less than 1℅ of stories ever touch on that fact lol. Yeah my character is short, has hair and a beard, but it's never mentioned or even acknowledge somehow in the story, only really shows on the stats page.
As for the pronoun part? Yeah I get that too, theres a Itchio interactive fiction game that did just that, and in my opinion it just breaks the flow so much, why not just refer to the chars with their respective pronouns in the text already so you instinctively catch it?
2 of my favorite WIPs barely post and when they do it's tiny amounts of content. I guess it's better than pages and pages of bad writing? But yes I'll probably look out for that in the future because I don't like it either.
For real. It's the best way to deal with it because the reader can just slip into the story and the author isn't so stressed writing seven thousand different variables.
Then you get the authors who create insane character creations--meant to influence the writing--that include everything right up to cup size and special features before they disappear for a year or more. The Sherlock game is one of them where the author had an awesome character creation but they're lagging heavily in moving the plot along. Or the final boss of bloated CC's, "cvlutogames" who is stuck in rewrite hell. The only one I've seen truly pull it off while retaining updates and the plot progression is One Knight Stand, but that game will take a thousand years to finish all it's promised installments at the rate the author is going.
Is it though? For me it just makes it a slog to go through the entire game again just to read two or three new pages. That doesn't mean bad writing is better! But it's like comparing bad apples to bad oranges, on one hand bad writing is hard to get through but micro-updates feel like they should be kept aside and posted with more later. I will say that if you can just forget about it long enough and come back in six months time when there's now 20k worth of updates then it's a nice gift.
It depends on the genre, but one of my biggest universal red flags is an IF having too much character customization, not sure why but it usually tells me that an IF will have no actual substance. Another one is if there's little to no focus on the character you play, why would I want to be sidelined for the entirety of the story lmao.
This one bothers me a lot, especially if the story is focused on romance in the first place. It's fine if the game isn't focused on romance because getting with the RO really shouldn't be that big of a deal so there's no real need to flesh out your ROs if they're not going to be super important to the story, but for romance centered games it becomes a problem because too many characters means that almost none of them are going to be fleshed out and it'll be like dating a cardboard cutout.
Despite not being very romance centered, the Keeper series is very guilty of this. All of the ROs only have slightly varying events in their storylines, which in turn makes them come off as extremely boring and shallow. While I enjoyed the books, I had a hard time getting attached to any of the characters because of this, and probably won't feel too bad if any of them end up dying in the future.
Gender-locked fem.
No, this isn't mysoginy.
It's just that I've noticed a majority of these kind of stories are...you know...booktok inspired.
Especially if it looks like inspired in asian themed stuff (like Korea)
But there are good ones too. It's just the majority. Majority.
Another is that if they release it's mostly just short stuff, then all of a sudden, nadah, they disappear, just like that. No more updates.
No, this isn't mysoginy.
It's just that I've noticed a majority of these kind of stories are...you know...booktok inspired.
Especially if it looks like inspired in asian themed stuff (like Korea)
But there are good ones too. It's just the majority. Majority.
Another is that if they release it's mostly just short stuff, then all of a sudden, nadah, they disappear, just like that. No more updates.
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People get accused of misogyny all the time for disliking those games but they're not written well and people do not have to like them. I'm a woman and I think most of them are written poorly and are examples of bad romance books. Then when you go to the author's blogs, personal blogs, or even their fans blogs they of course actually read the books I was thinking of.
The only gender locked fem games I've found and have personally played that aren't written badly are Scapegoated and Guenevere.
I'm considering reading Etreinte and this one other IF that is maybe about dragons? But I cannot speak for those two because I haven't played them yet.
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