No, it is not picking up pace in any regard. He use to go at the pace of a tortoise. Something that at least gave a glimmer of hope that the story would have gone somewhere by this point but it hasn't. Now he's down to the pace of a snail and has been for almost 2 years roughly. If you don't realize the difference, then consider that a tortoise goes 1 mile per hour and a snail takes 5 days 12 hours to go a mile. This is nothing new with his circular release updates. The teasers are always enough to fool a few people here and lots over on patreon. The sad fact is, his releases have gotten progressively slower, as many have gone over this before. Some in great detail in terms of time frame it's going to take this dev to get anywhere worthwhile with the story in the next 5 years and that odds are good a decade will have gone by before this is anywhere near completion. Hell, most doubt it won't really be anywhere even by then.
There will be no sexual stuff in this update. Sensual perhaps but that's his thing as he has proven time and again.
Not yet, he might talk about changing things but the changes end up extending development time with less content released. So, we can either determine at this point he is either lying or is having way too much difficulty running a game with a story that has the scope of which would take a full development team to manage properly in a reasonable time like many other devs have done to achieve their goals.
He's only taking out redundant branches because many people have already expressed it's part of what is inhibiting him from progressing anywhere sensible. Some of us believe he did that deliberately considering how he dismissed any attempt to offer advice that he should have focused on the main story he was telling and saved the side stories for later as additional content to be added or as separate games as some other devs have done to keep their sub numbers up. He could have kept a few going rather than constantly adding more in, thus why as i stated, some of us believe he was doing it deliberately just to extend development time for the sake of money.
Considering how he started out in his first year, yep, that is precisely what people were expecting to happen after this many years of it being developed. That isn't an unreasonable expectation either. He's the one who shot himself in the proverbial foot when he kept increasing the length of development per update all the while claiming it would be the exact opposite to finish things at a quicker pace. He did this repeatedly and people kept calling him out for it. At least on here anyway. It took awhile before that started to happen over on his patreon.
Considering how things have been going, it will likely get worse. Hopefully that is an incorrect assessment but so far, nothing has changed for the better.
People here see quite a bit, it's a theme that constantly plays out with numerous devs from new ones to old ones. Heck, just look at how many constantly claim having a disease/illness that prevents them from completing their work that ultimately leads to a myriad of VNs being abandoned. That trash heap is a monument to lies and deception if you go sifting through that list and believe me, it's a long one.
Most websites outside of patreon are going to be more of a "wild west" in terms of how they provide criticism. A good majority of which, especially on here, should be taken from a constructive point of view. L&P has proven he doesn't handle criticism well, least of all constructive criticism. If he alters the game too much that it causes his development time to extend even further, a steam release is going to be a death blow that might very well make him abandon it outright considering how savage those neanderthals can be with criticism over there.
