Except it could have worked if Devious World had started out with only one or two characters. Like I said, if there were only a few characters to work on, with somewhat fixed fetishes driving the paths the progress on those characters would be a lot faster. Had there been a clear end point for their stories the dev could then have moved on to new characters, eventually expanding the game as far as they wanted.
I've also read that the dev has said that they write what interests them at the time, and props to them for sticking to that I guess, so this approach would probably not have worked with this dev, but a similar game made by a different dev could have worked the way I explained and it probably would have worked out a lot better in my opinion. Because the dev of DW introduced so many characters right at the start and shows all their possible paths in the game itself, people have been looking forward to seeing their favorite content since the start, yet some of those paths have never been touched beyond their small introduction.
To be fair though, I've unfortunately seen this happen to a lot of games over the years. Where the initial plan for the game looks really broad and detailed in theory, but it's usually just not possible to finish such games in an acceptable time frame. The dev starts to feel pressured to keep pumping out updates to meet their promises, the supporters start losing faith and will complain and demand more and more; it's a mess all around. That's why I feel it's better to start small and then slowly work your way outwards from there. Don't promise 20+ different paths and outcomes when you can feasibly only provide a maximum of 5 per year.
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