I want to be optimistic, I've been supporting KoD nearly from the beginning. But these are the facts:
- Nomo really is a fantastic artist. He deserves credit there, he's one of the best 2D artists I've seen. (..and I've been following erotic art and animation as well as adult games since at least 2014.)
- Sierra Lee is one of the best erotic writers on the planet. She could be writing fantasy erotic novels and make a killing.
- Despite the game containing no animations and the fact that the protagonists were girls from LoL, Sierra's writing and Nomo's art made Noxian Nights the wonderful game it is.
- Kingdom of Deception started out strong but Sierra Lee left due to "creative differences". The game never recovered. The current writer is simply not even close to SL's league. The main story arc has crawled along at a snail's pace and the character development has been weak. Furthermore, the dialog is weak and immersion-breaking. Too often, characters fail to speak like people in a medieval setting. Instead, they talk like regular people here in the real world in the modern day.
- The devs spend too much time trying to add erotic content and have done almost nothing to advance the story in over a year while most of the side-story arcs have stalled.
In closing, I have lost faith in this project. It is clear now the devs have no idea where to go with the story. There's plenty of erotic content out there, this game isn't worth following nor are updates worth waiting for until the devs get their acts together and find a decent writer.
The decision to slow down the story came just as much from the players as from the devs. At the time a lot of people agreed on this forum too. Somewhere around 0.6 or 0.7 the devs talked about how they wanted to add in new assets into the game and more scenes so they would focus on that instead of the story for the next 3 updates since this was what almost everyone asked them for at that point. Out of this we got the human towns, the groping, the sexy interactions, the art for tentacle monster and minotaurs and lots of set ups for the future.
The only part we didn't know was that it would take so long. After that 0.11 started to move the story forward again, but since the scenes in the story itself focused exclusively on Vehlis most people here didn't even notice that it was the main story and not another side quest.
So shifting the focus from the story was planned. The lower quality / reusable scenes were planned. Returning to the story in 0.11 was planned. Despite everything, this game is moving along the plans that the devs made and the players agreed.
The problem in this regard was the execution and the real world time. 0.7 was the last main story focused update where the orc boss disappeared, with a public release of 2019 january 6 (for patron is was 2018 dec), and the next story patch being 0.11 in the end of 2020 december, that's a massive 2 years of slowdown. Now 0.12 might contain a good amount of story set up, as it was mentioned back in april, but with this added 8, it's been almost 32 months for 2 story patches.
Because of this i do not agree with those who say that the game has gone off tracks or that the devs have no idea about how to go forward, but they do need to improve their execution. I support the reusable art, especially in this improved form and the repeatable scenes, but the story needs to move forward and it has to include good scenes with Sabia naturally. That is not an easy task, but it is necessary.
