In one calendar year, yeah one update, but in actuality it is two updates in a span of a year.
Well yeah, but the reason it is said that way is to put into perspective how long 9 months is. It's easy to say "at least it's not 12 months", but when you put it into perspective comparing it to years which had up to 3 releases in a year, it shows how much development has slowed down.
He has done four episodes ( soon to be 5) plus Interlude since 2020.
Yeah, I mean like I said in the above part, this kinda proves my point. Between 2020 and 2021 DPC released
FIVE episodes. If you extend that from 2020 to this moment in 2023 (almost a year and a half longer), that number becomes seven episodes, INCLUDING the Interlude, which has less renders than Episode 1 and shorter animations than Episode 3. The fact that there have been 7 episodes since 2020 isn't a testament to how consistent the release cycle has been, its a testament to how much faster episodes 4-8 took to develop.
So a 7-9 month cycle is likely to be the norm
Judging by the fact that DPC keeps saying each chapter will be shorter than the last and then taking longer or the same each time, my prediction is more like 9+. If he can't get this episode below 9 months, I don't really see him doing it for future episodes where the story has spread out even further. Even with the minigames being completed, DPC always has a new quest that takes up a ton of development time and makes it way longer than he predicted. Not hating, just being realistic.
Wouldn't want him to rush it to release once every 3 months, or so, as that'll just drag down the product.
I can agree on that, and even more than that it is DPC's project so he can do it however he wants, but I think it's reasonable to say that development has been slower than it was in the past. I'm not asking for it to be 3 month releases, but Episode 7 and 8 had record high renders per week of development, however Episode 9 kinda nosedived after that and Episode 10 doesn't look much better. I think there's a lot of reasons for the longer development times that don't necessarily correlate to a better product.
The split pathing has probably had a significant impact on development time, and some people will argue "but split pathing has led to more replayability which results in episodes having more hours of content", but I don't really agree with that argument. People will say "the new episode has 25 hours of content", but it more like 5 hours of new content on your first playthrough, then 5 hours of playing the next playthrough for 30 minutes to an hour of new content, then repeat 3 more times.
Then there's DPC's recent attraction to more, bigger free roams which probably aren't the easiest thing to develop (and again just pad the consecutive playthroughs), as well as more, longer animations which are a notorious bottleneck for development. The one thing I think probably also contributes to the longer development time that kinda does correlate to a better product is the minigames he's making, but many people don't even like those. I could give or take them but I do think they improve the product by breaking up the action. However, I'd give up all of these things to just have a 5-6 month development cycle similar to episode 7 and 8, which weren't bad episodes in any way shape or form.
Of course, like I said before, this is DPC's project and he enjoys challenging himself with long animations and complex free roams, so my response to that is "oh well, it is what it is". I don't hate DPC, but I won't pretend like the new development process hasn't been objectively slower than the past, even considering the "improvements" to the product.
