Can anyone give me a rundown of whats happened? I played V.0.34 from this forum a while back and didnt realize it was a very old version. What happened, why does it seem like every is against it now. Anyone can either link me to another comment or give me a quick tldr?
TLDR is still going to be a bit long since there's a lot here, but bear with me.
<= 0.34: Helius is producing fun porn, everyone is more or less happy as progress is fairly consistent and pricing seems like it will be fair. Towards the end there's a mention of harem mode, always online multiplayer. People are wary, but open to it as long as Gallery remains. Releases stop as Helius starts to work on Harem mode.
During this period the devs talk about Nutaku, and make fun of it for wanting their game to be a free to play gacha as part of an investment. Claim this offer is denied. Helius brings up a mystery 15 million dollar investment, no mention of who and claims it was turned down after some backlash.
Anyway, the game is now a free to play gacha, but it's not mentioned to backers quite yet.
During this period they also start selling costumes for characters, including Galatea. Will be relevant later. They also decide steam will be the release venue, despite steam censoring many games and them claiming the game won't ever be censored.
A few days before the release of the beta you can still see Developers like Itsamiya making fun of the idea the game would be free to play gacha. A few days later at release, it's revealed that it actually is that, despite them laughing at the idea just recently. Damage control is them saying this was communicated for years, and people are banned if they quote past devs or even mention the gacha in anything but a positive light. The grind and busniess model come out a few days later, and its bad. Not buying anything means it will take close to a year to unlock all animations on launch, assuming you play 1-2 hours a day everyday and don't go for extras like other costumes. And assuming you don't get too many duplicates, which you can get. Business model is also super scummy. Also gallery is dead and single player will have its own storefront and contain no adult content.
Also the DRM is terrible. More patreon backers are banned by EAC than pirates before EAC is cracked. The back end for the servers is terrible and unstable. The game took a huge hit graphically and the few new animations added have sync issues, holes, and generally don't work. UniversalConquistador spoofs the back end in less than a month. The game development is likely paused again to address these DRM issues and spaghetti code servers. Also the "multiplayer" elements are clearly shown to be bull, as there's basically minimal interaction between players and it's clear there was no plan for any actual interaction or something to justify the "multiplayer" moniker as it's essentially a bunch of people playing the single player scene viewer in a room together.
Even now, at 0.47 the game doesn't run for most people if there's more than a couple people in your server.
It also turns out there was (obviously) censorship for steam, and 0.34 had more animations than the first beta since the more non con ones are removed. The horse and Galatea are both delayed. With Galatea it's unlikely she'll get in as Helius has explicitly mentioned her as both a loli and a child. This is bad since many people donated for her and also pre-purchased her costumes. Galatea fans are a core part of his remaining supporters so now we're in a situation where Helius has to put a child character into his game on steam or risk angering a huge chunk of his remaining supporters and potentially deal with a lot of refunds.
This is super sparse and I'd recommend reading back a least several pages, but should give you a general idea.
