I'm kind of quite curious about the background events. Maybe in 5-6 years Sierra will care little enough that we will know what exactly happened. I was rechecking the 2017-18 era Patreon posts and their blog (another abandoned venue because I suppose the Discord hugbox is easier to maintain) and the amount of setup they were working forward was something.
Orcs flat-out felt like an initial phase and a setup, and we would have quickly started working the real target that was fucking up Sabia's sister and mother. Open world, politics and the like. Then we're reduced to "green meat is back on the menu, boys, but there's nothing else on the menu".
Also, maybe this kind thread can help. I could swear there were previews that got nuked by Hreinn: for example, I distinctly remember that one of the preview characters was some kind of monk/martial artist that got thrown out by her teachers and started wandering around because she was actively seducing their opponents. I could swear it was a preview on Hreinn's blog: did they nuke it or it's my dementia kicking in?
From the start KoD was advertised as a game with politics and deep choices. This type of game is a balancing act: if you leave the starting zone with the orcs completely, then the player effectively lost access to a lot of progress that was made. But if you stay at the starting zone forever, then the progression will be very difficult to see if it happens at all.
When Nomo spent 3-4 months drawing assets for the human towns, people were complaining about a lack of orcs and elves. When new characters were brought in like Kira, Avion and not-Katarina, then the complaints were all about missing the older NPCs.
Normally a dev team has two options to tackle this problem: planning and more artists.
The second one is easy. If we have 3 artists, then they can all draw for different zones at the same time. But this is and always has been Nomo's project and we are here for his high quality artwork too, so this isn't an option.
Otherwise they could plan and write the overall story well in advance to avoid getting lost between patches and to make sure that no NPC or progress is lost for good. But Hreinn has posted many times that they start planning the next patch after they finished the last one.
Even without personal experience in development i could tell that this approach has to change somewhere for this to work. I've been posting about this a lot here.
And yeah, a lot of old preparations were nuked when they cleared their patreon after it's new guidelines were introduced.
