Apologies for triple-posting but whatever, it's late and I couldn't cram any more quotes into one post without offending my aesthetic sensibilities. My fault for not replying to the thread more than once a week, really.
Yeah I mean, when the difference between 98 and 99.9 % production value is half a year or so then maybe the wait isn't worth it?
I can understand your concern, but I don't think it's necessarily accurate. Like the other posters have said, the "production value" is everything from significant graphical upgrades to expanded gameplay, and entirely new or completely rebuilt mechanics to support that, ultimately a whole lot of added complexity. Even if it were just a scene-for-scene and render-for-render graphical update it would be a significant undertaking; the production itself, then making sure everything was implemented correctly, making sure the timing is still correct and adjusting anything that needs it, making sure flags still trigger properly. The fact that we're getting so much extra content on top of that just adds so much more work. And that's just in the implementation - now you have to test everything, make sure bugs are squashed, flags are triggering correctly (more work than it sounds), that everything plays right and that everything is up to par quality-wise.
That's just the technical stuff. Then you have to test that it actually plays well, because all of the extra content and mechanics you've added have just increased the different decision paths you have to take into account by a huge degree; you have to make sure that the player isn't hopelessly confused or arbitrarily railroaded, that everything makes sense (or at least as much sense as it should at the time!
), that the pacing or tone isn't inconsistent because the new content was written at a different time and has to be integrated into what's already there. In fact, Notty received feedback on a similar point from an early tester - the amount of options you had once the game opened up was a bit overwhelming, because you went from the opening chapter with relatively straightforward branching to having something like two dozen different options you could pick.
Testing is important, because you could have one bug on one very specific path that doesn't get picked up, but it's going to negatively affect the game - somebody's going to pick that path, whether it's because they're trying to see everything or that's just what they picked naturally. Not to say that I or anyone else should expect a totally bug-free game, of course people have to understand, but equally it's important to make sure as much as possible is fixed before release since even a relatively small issue can affect someone's experience with the game to a significant degree.
Personally, I have a tremendous respect for Notty (and our glorious testers, may they live forever) for taking such a strong approach to testing the game. It seems the prevailing attitude among a lot of developers these days is that bugs are inevitable, so they just push the updates out as quickly as seems reasonable and assume that bugs will be identified by the community and fixed after the fact. I can understand why a lot of developers, particularly smaller ones and newer ones, take that approach but it's not good for development.
Finally, this isn't a game that Notty is iterating on by adding a few h-scenes a month. I can understand your concern when you see so many promising games and developers fall into the hole of never releasing because of persistent problems or lack of focus or being improperly focused or whatever. But this is a game that's being rebuilt from the ground up; if it's going to be included it has to be done now. Notty isn't going to release a bare-bones or half-filled version of Chapter 2 and then come back and fill in the missing scenes later, I know it's taking a lot of time, but that's because it's a lot of work.
Wow, this post really got away from me. I don't want it to sound like I'm making a personal criticism of you or anything; I'm just, as always, trying to add some perspective. It's just like my opinion, man. Hopefully it made at least some sort of sense.
tl;dr yes it's taking a long time but I think it's a reasonable amount of time given the work that's actually being done. Your opinion may be different
(and therefore incorrect)
