Rants are always valid as long as it helps you feel better. I'm no patreon supporter nor believe in this future project but in this case, it seems that it makes sense. KoD was always Nomo & Sierra's project. Sierra left, giving Nomo full control. Nomo recruited more people to work on it but it seems, from what we gather, that they were never at the same level. Nomo had more creative control and power over KoD and once he vanished well... it put them all in a genuinely difficult position to hold.
The only thing that we could reproach Nomo for would be to have vanished and left KoD behind with no legitimate creator left to handle it. It's weird how they handle the "brand" Hreinn Games when you think about it. It doesn't feel like a real business or brand, more like just a Patreon account.
I agree with you. My frustration comes from the details and layers and since it helps me think, i'll try to collect them here.
1. I understand the reason behind the new project and a new MC. I might be a bit sarcastic about it, but it is probably their best course of action, all things considered.
2. Putting everything else aside for a moment, I can also empathize with Monsinne on a certain level. He was left in a shitty situation to handle a project on his own when his teammate disappeared. I'd guess we have all been in this scenario and it sucks.
3. He made a bad decision in a bad situation and i uphold all my criticism for the decision, but realistically speaking very few people can handle this kind of pressure well, so i don't condemn him as a person for it.
But
Nomo disappeared about 2 years ago and there is evidence all through the game that suggest Monsinne gaining more and more creative control even before that. Now, with 100% control in his hand he decides to outline the rough plot of the new game which is exactly what they said KoD was going to be, and at the same time he says that he has to break away from KoD due to the strain this situation had on him. But he doesn't come up with something new, he just reiterates KoD from 5 years ago? How can this be?
And just for a moment i invite everyone to imagine an alternative timeline where the gorilla still lives. The year is ~2020, the orc warchief was just kidnapped, 3 quest long patches are still released every 3-4 months and Nomo is still drawing his absolute best.
At this moment Monsinne writes what he apparently wanted to, a story about a woman who arrives in Avarton and establishes a brothel as a cover for spying and gathering information about Jasmine. But this woman is not Amelia, but rather Sabia. The next year and a half, about 5-6 patches are spent on Sabia getting to know everything she can find out about Jasmine and then gathering her allies to lay a trap for her and capturing her. This alerts Sabia's mother and she is no fool, she puts 2+2 together, but she can't just draw attention to the fact that she tried to kill her own daughter and didn't even succeed, so they have to handle things quietly. So Sabia's sister is sent out with a small but elite team to investigate. Now, Sabia has to do whatever she must to gather the best people she got to know so far.
All of this with full HQ artwork from Nomo, because they didn't switch focus to reusable assets, they didn't experiment for a year with modular pictures, they didn't try to introduce 2 new mechanics and they didn't make Sabia stupid enough to fall for Bris and Ornshakar for 2 years.
Jasmine is captured, we are facing Sabia's sister and it's still 2022. And we are not living in that timeline partially because Monsinne didn't write the story for Sabia, he now says he wants to write for Amelia.
i would 100% understand if he was exhausted, if he had a different story in mind for a while now and he wanted to work on it instead. But he outlines the same exact story in the same exact setting and renames the MC. Does he have no other ideas? Is he just trying to write his frustration out as i do in this post? What the hell is going on?
