TL;DR: Would the game be more fun if it had open world quests?

Hello all! Just wanted to let you know I've been working hard and will be releasing on the 10th unless some sort of emergency occurs. This post is about something I've been thinking about for a real long time, even before I started working on the game. It's about my philosophy on the game's priorities. 

On surveys, I get a lot of feedback from users who want me to focus on more content, and I can understand why: the reason you play a lewd game is primarily for the lewd content. That's also why "more pictures" is a major request. I completely agree with these players, and I'll get there. Allow me to humble brag as a form of reassurance: my previous game is over 415k words. That's the size of 4+ novels, and I think I pumped that out in 1.5 years.

That being said, it's debatable whether my first game is even a game at all. Most of it is like a novel where you get to pick the order of the chapters. That's an unfair oversimplification, but my point is, it focused on content instead of game mechanics. 

I want Monster Girl Farmer to be different: I want it to be fun. A lot of survey responses say it already is, but for me, it's just not there yet. Some of this is a lack of balancing, but my gut tells me, even if it were balanced, it wouldn't be as fun as I want it to be. 

Like in my first game, I think the overarching problem is a lack of player agency. I am aware that player agency does not equal fun -- it's merely a component. And there is a sweet spot; too little or too much can be a bad thing. That being said, I think the game currently has too little. 

What is player agency, anyway? When you google it, one of the first links breaks it down into three points. Here's my perspective on how these points apply to Monster Girl Farmer:

1. The player has control over their own character's decisions. 

I have the illusion of this in some places, and there are some mutually exclusive paths you can choose in the lewd scenes. You can avoid any lewd scene you aren't into. Some people mentioned they don't like the main character's personality, but I'm okay with that; I plan for them to have a story arc anyway. You won't be the same person at the start of the game as you will be at the end. Here, I think I'd give myself a C+ (relative to where I'd like to be). In my mind, the major issue is there simply isn't enough choices to make.

2. Those decisions have consequences within the game world. 

Picking your gender at the beginning has a big affect, but otherwise, there's a lot to be desired. I'd give myself a D/D-/F rating on this one. I'll elaborate below.

3. The player has enough information to anticipate what those consequences might be before making them. 

I think one survey response said they didn't know what they were getting into for  Olivia's lewd scene, but I haven't heard any other complaints. On this, I think I'd give myself an A on both of my games.

The encounter system that's already in place was built to improve point 2. I think it shows potential, and so do a lot of others. And that's without even spending time tweaking or balancing it. I don't see any reason to get rid of it, but even if I could bring it to its max potential, I don't think it's enough to turn my D/D-/F rating into an A. 

What I'd really like to add are quests. Think about those non-generated quests you get in open world RPGs like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and The Witcher. I want textbased versions of those in Monster Girl Farmer. 

But the complexity always seemed insurmountable for a one-man shop. Sure, it's straightforward to add one quest, but once you have two that involve the same character, you've got to think about how the quests interact together: what happens if you complete quest B before quest A? What happens if you are halfway through quest A then you start quest B? What happens if you start quest A, complete quest B, and never go back to complete quest A? 

That's just two quests, but it's already hard to think about. I think companies like Bethesda deal with this by not having the problem in the first place. By and large, their quests are independent from each other. The NPC of one quest usually doesn't know anything about the state of the other quests. An exception to this rule is the guilds. In them, the quests affect each other, but you have to do them in order. It's just another way of avoiding the problem: it prevents you from doing quest B before quest A.

So how do you deal with this when you have returning characters and you want to give the player the opportunity to complete some quests in any order of their choosing? I've been thinking about this for months. Maybe it's not possible? That's the conclusion I came to over and over again.

But!

I recently found this game design video that could help. It gets technical, but suffice it to say, it gives me a way of having interacting quests that can be completed in any order. It's quite clever really, and it confirms my suspicion that this was a really hard problem to solve. They completed five games before they figured it out. 

For what it's worth, it is not hard to implement their idea. In fact, I built the whole thing from start to finish yesterday, and I didn't even spend the whole day working on it. Of course, it doesn't change anything at the moment because I haven't spent any time writing quests. And that brings me to my question: Do you think the game would be more fun if it had open world quests?

PS: If you'd like to discuss this with me (I'd prefer that because polls don't contain nuance), please let me know! Message me on discord or comment below.