After checking the last post on patreon -in my opinion very disrespectful - at this point it's all a joke and for me it's the last month I'm financially supporting this project.
It's disrespectful to ask people for 38.5$ to access a poll 1 week away from the end of the month before the release and to those who supported 5 months of excuses and subpar teasers.
He spends 6 months not delivering anything except for some mild teasers + the last teaser that was just a bullshit teaser for a whole month (April) of patronage. Constantly changing the deadline from a 3 month update to an april update, then may and finally june release date.
Says he can't deliver a dylan/sophia teaser because of patreon.
Fast forward one month, apparently delivering a teaser for dylan/sophia is ok.
And guess what? Its a 38.5$ poll (anyone remember the whoops teaser? yeah not worth it)
Couple that with not posting anything significant in April and it's real classy pushing patrons supporting you for 6 months with 0 in return, to pledge to the higher tier right before the month ends (and not an update month!) only to vote on a poll.
For those interested and thinking about supporting: Why am I stopping support on this project and what will I tell anyone that asks me if he deserves support?
I always said I would stop supporting this as soon as I thought the dev wasn't working on this as I thought he was so:
There's one big pro: Render quality. It's great. Story isn't bad at all, good balance and good in-game pace.
Now, for the development:
- Updates getting more time to get done for less content
- 6 months for a third of a day
- 5.5 renders per day done on average (getting worse per update)
- Less scenes per year as we move forward
- More and more excuses from the dev (every update has an excuse to get delayed)
- Patron goals mean 0 to this dev.
- Every way of speeding up development get's tossed to the bin, every way of slowing it down gets considered.
- Incapable of sticking to a plan
- Development just unravells 50% (or more) more than expected all the time
- Wont hire/ask for help even on stuff that cant be leaked (with excuses that don't make any sense)
- Doesn't want a person who knows less than him because it will get in the way
- Doesn't want a person who knows the same as him as "its just another him"
- Can't handover translation despite suposedly having the script written for ages now
- Clearly there's no script until it gets to the P&T stage
- Constant exaggerations to magnify his work:
- There's no script beforehand hence why every update gets 50-100% more renders and no translation is possible in the CS/R stage. Why lie about this?
- Expressions arent " meticously made by hand" they're made by marketplace presets such as Z MIE Packs // VGC Packs //SE02 // GR etc. (hence why the MC doesn't even look like herself in some renders ( just check the renders in the prison)) Does it get tweaked here and there? Of course, as everyone does it. Are they made from scratch "meticously by hand"? Come on. MC had 20 different faces by now, that doesn't happen if you're tweaking facial features by hand because it won't go overboard. Again, why say they are done "meticously buy hand"? Get a grip.
- Dforce is used sometimes and only on clothes, not everywhere like he mentions like there's some huge big simulation going on. And this is why you see clipping of models on furniture etc from time to time, which again, its normal(and no one cares about it), but don't come here tell us how everything is dforced simulated and that perfectionist obsessed talk and what not.
- Are we suposed to believe he just went ahead and post processed exactly 100 (10%) renders everyday for the past 10 days?
- It does look more like lightroom than photoshop and if that's the case, lightroom is a basically preset factory, basically once they're set and worked on, it's done quickly as you can group the scene by lightset and you can't change preset per lightset, else it'll look off. If that's the case, 100 renders is lazy work.
At this point, based on this, my (and others') possible theories are:
- He doesn't work on this as much as he says he does hence why he tries to make it sound the hardest thing ever and not accepting help from anyone.
- He works as much time he says he does but he's the slowest most unorganized dev in this space (I doubt it, renders have too much quality for him not to know what he's doing).
- He works on this as much time he says he does and he wraps it up in half the time he says he does and just stretches it out to see where he can bring patrons without too much work.
I think it's nr 1 so my pledge is paused next month. I'll return if I ever see this getting developed at a good pace or if I see the dev actually trying to make development faster and being honest with its patrons. The money means nothing to me, but I'm not supporting something that I think the dev isn't fully commited to or as commited as he says he is.
I'll be downloading it like everyone here and playing because I like the story and the renders but until the Dev starts actually working on it or taking steps to address the fact he would need to develop this until 2045 at the current pace, my financial support ends here.
