GGGB vs ORS: Gameplay (Patreon)

It's been a while since Good Girl Gone Bad was finished and Our Red String started development. Looking back on my first game and deeper into the second one, I can't help but compare them and see what lessons I can extract from thet.

The structure and gameplay mechanics in ORS are very similar to the ones in GGGB. The focus was to create an interactive story where the player can influence the plot through several narrative choices. I wanted him to feel he had the power to actually shape the story in a meaningful way, that his actions have a clear effect not only on the outcome of the plot but on the characters themselves.  And I wanted to trim all the fat from the experience: no stat grinding, no pointless roaming around and no cumbersome game play cycle. Just a streamlined and engaging story that moved forward and evolved with your choices.

GGGB was my first attempt at something like that and I had no real idea of what I was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to push the branching mechanics to the extreme and give the player as much sense of agency as possible. With that in mind I took the potential of a fairly bland starting point and pushed it in different directions, giving Ashley wildly different possibilities: she started as a fairly normal and innocent girl and could end up becoming a gang leader, dealing drugs and shooting people, and everything in between. The only real mechanic other than tracking the different choice variables was a simple Good vs Bad point system to help the player keep track of his standing, and those points interacted with the gameplay giving you access to special dialogue options and choices, similarly to Mass Effect.

ORS basically takes that system and builds upon it. Instead of a binary point system, now you have different stats and a complementary mechanic with Will points, implementing them to the gameplay in a more dynamic and intrinsic way. The backbone of the experience still is the choice-driven branching storyline, but this time, instead of pushing for the most outlandish variety possible, I wanted to explore choice and consequence on a deeper and more nuanced level. I’d say ORS is building up on what I learned with GGGB, a more mature and better structured version of what erotic VN storytelling is able to offer, but the motivation behind both games is practically the same.

What is your opinion on the matter? Do you think ORS improves on the gameplay compared to GGGB? And which approach do you enjoy more?