I wonder why 95% of high-budget UE adult games end up being the most typical money milking machines with slow updates containing barely any tangible gameplay content.
It’s partly due to how the development of UE itself is going. To be honest, if they could’ve stuck with UE4, they probably would’ve completed the project by now. But instead, they’re now forced to work on both the UE5 version and try to bring it up to UE4’s standard in terms of content—while also preparing for the eventual switch to UE6. This takes a huge amount of resources. And no, they can’t just stay on UE4, for multiple reasons.
Also, in my opinion as someone who has worked with UE5—Unreal is a curse. On one hand, it’s accessible and intuitive with Blueprints. At the beginning of a project, it makes you think everything is possible and that it won’t be that hard. But on the other hand, creating anything remotely ambitious becomes a nightmare—both when trying to pull it off with Blueprints and when it comes to optimization.
Eventually, you realize that more complex mechanics need to be coded in C++, and integrating that with Blueprints can be tricky, to say the least. In most cases, the larger the project, the more time you spend trying to make new mechanics work with the existing ones—or you end up in a development limbo, where fixing one thing breaks a dozen others that were working before, just because of Unreal Engine’s quirks.
To be honest,
Carnal Instinct is probably the most ambitious NSFW UE project that has made significant progress. I’m frustrated too, since progress feels so slow, but I understand that many of the problems they encounter aren’t really their fault and require a lot of resources from such a small team. Comparing
Carnal Instinct to games like
Delta Zone really helps you appreciate how much they’ve already achieved.
They’re still fixing legacy DS1 and UE4 elements to ensure that any bugs or issues are clearly due to the engine transition—at least, that’s my understanding. My main concern with both the UE4 and UE5 versions is that they seem to be trying to implement everything at once, then expand on it later. That approach makes progress very slow. For example, pregnancy is already implemented, but since there are more urgent tasks, expanding on it isn’t a priority right now.
Just to be clear—you
can develop a project that way, by building out many features at once. For support-dependent projects, it’s almost a necessity since it draws a lot of interest from the community. But it does make development a slow and tedious process. One benefit, though, is that you can easily track community feedback and leave room for expansion. For instance, adding pregnancy after all the NPCs and quests are in place could make it much harder—or even impossible—to implement properly later. For example you will need to remake some voice lines or make new ones to accomodate for that, and what if your original voice actor is no longer avalible?