you need to understand that many people who are negatively vocal right now are people who have been waiting years and spent money on a project that constantly gets delayed. I have spent 100$ + on support for this game(i have stopped by now as you say, but it won't change that i have already effectively wasted money)
If you feel your money's been wasted, you can ask for a full refund, full stop. So can anyone else. People literally cannot complain about "their money being wasted" or "being scammed out of money" because we straight up give full refunds.
Understand this, this hole is one that HentaiWriter and their team dug themselves. They made a project well beyond their experience to handle and it shows in how poor the management has been.
TBH, I have yet to see a single person in this thread complaining about "poor management" actually understand what that term means.
There is no manager in the world that could have made the game come out faster than it has, without cutting even more content or releasing the game incomplete. And as we refuse to cut anymore content than we already have, and we refuse to release the game incomplete, it's not poor management, it's sticking to our guns to deliver what we promised, as best as we're able.
Modern gaming has unfortunately created a mentality of "releasing games as soon as possible and then finishing them over the next few years", which is both terrible for the consumer and only realistically possible with AAA games that have $250,000,000+ marketing budget (not an exaggeration) to remind consumers 5 years down the road that the game is NOW finally complete.
I'm still interested in the game and will likely still buy it for this november release.
If you backed us for more than $20, why would you buy it? You've already got a copy coming.
Also i want to temper people's expectations here. People fawing over the word count of 300.000 need to realize this: this number is nothing to an rpg. To put into perspective:
Witcher 3- 450.000
Fallout: New vegas - 1 million
Disco elysium- 1 million
Planetscape: torment - 850.000
Dragon age 1 - 760.000
Skyrim - 1 million
Original sin 2 - 1 million
Don't be impressed by the word count, be impressed that they as a 3 man team will try to connect it together. The first mass effect had 300.000 words too, which was overseen by 130 people to make sure everything flows together. So we still have potential for a good rpg here.
Not personally attacking you with this; just giving more clarity to the realism of this list and how things are skewed on it and how people might also have a skewed perspective on the workload for our game, and myself specifically.
I do appreciate that you're still looking forward to the game, but to clear up the perspective here in terms of workload;
First off, every game on that list had a lot of writers.
- Witcher 3 - Already based off of an existing book series which saves a TON of time with worldbuilding and design and backstories, and yet still had
15 writers
- Fallout: New Vegas - 8 writers
- Disco Elysium - 8 writers
- Planetscape: Torment - Can't find an exact count, but again used existing materials, so wasn't from scratch
- Dragon Age 1 - Used existing materials, 8 writers
- Skyrim - 8 writers
- Original Sin 2 - 6 writers
So with the exception of Planetscape, let's see the actual average numbers for words per writer;
Witcher 3 - 30,000 words per person
Fallout: New vegas - 125,000 words per person
Disco elysium - 125,000 words per person
Dragon age 1 - 95,000 words per person
Skyrim - 125,000 words per person
Original sin 2 - 166,666 words per person
So going by that list, I still singlehandedly did more than double the writing than any single given writer on any of those six games, as I'm the only writer/editor/etc. for the game.
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Additionally,
all they had to do was write. I had to do the additional tasks during development, by myself, alongside writing;
- Managing the main and extended teams
- Making the map designs & layouts
- Setting up & plugging in events for cutscenes, choosing how to use audio/visual effects, etc.
- Gameplay continuity and Story continuity
- Connecting all the cutscenes together & coming up with what events should get Ideals
- Making individual, tailored design documents for assets from the artist, programmer, audio engineer, musician, voice actors, and translators
- Processing, separating, and editing the best takes of the voicework from voice actors, line by line
- Answering questions and organizing poll data for feedback
- Making visual effects from time to time
- Patreon reward updates & organization of backer reward requests
- Marketing & networking & PR across many, many sites and platforms and companies
- Paying out everyone
- Checking up on & researching legal matters and hiring people for that, dealing with contracts with companies
And of course, I share equal responsibility on game design with Triangulate (artist) and Frouge (programmer), and up until the last two years or so, all bugtesting was done by us three as well.
On most AAA games, each of these lines would be handled by a different person, if not multiple people.
So I would say that I'm handling a lot compared to what would usually be asked of a single person on an AAA game.
Note, of course, that I'm not saying that doing all of this or writing as much as I did by myself = I'm a better writer/game dev/etc. than the games you listed; I'm just listing pure numbers/workloads.
