It's always a question of what a developer can do best, "give what they want" or stick to their own plan. I've seen several games go completely wrong because the developers chose to give the "fans" too much choice.
except that it's precisely because the dev try to make it seems like he give players choices and freedom while trying to hide that he only do what he want that his game is such a failure DESPITE all the the potential it has. when it came out first I was like "wow, it seems like it's gonna be awesome"..... and now I have this bored sigh before spending 10 minutes on each update.
Let's be honnest one second here. This is not a sandbox. there is no freedom. It's all just here to look like it's the case.
Others game do that. But they're not as tedious, not as boring and more importantly, not a constant grinding. and those who are are judged as harshly, and at least they ususally provide more talks, more scenes, more of everything including choices and things to do in said "sandbox".
The game could and SHOULD be a vn with non meaningfull choices like tons of others here.
What exatly was the point of codding an enormous sandbox world to do nothing but eat, piss and shower? there was none except, maybe, trying to do something he never done.
The gameplay is completely irrelevant. in fact, he probably spend more time resolving the issues that his false open world brought him than actually developing his game.
Not to mention this weird obsession some dev have to make the renpy's interface worse just to mess with the players.
if at least he made HUGE updates every six month, the feeling would actually be better since we wouldn't download it just to do 10 minutes of grind... maybe thats why other games whith little progress get less critics.
I predicted before that he would probably continue to add new characters after to not progress the others girls and continue like that until he dropped the game because he probably didn't want to actually do anything serious. Or, even maybe couldn't do it from a technical point of view.
The future will tell if I was right or not, but until now, it didn't prove me wrong.
And its a damn shame.
edit : You might have understood it, but i'm a huge fan of the "if you don't want to give players choices, don't make it seems like its the case" kind of things.
I prefer to say it out loud so that there is no misunderstanding. and that's precisely why I support the idea that this game shoudln't have any kind of sandbox or grind since it doesn't have any choice.
And that's like, you know, just my opinion man.
