DeanNoriko
Member
- Aug 20, 2022
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I agree, I have said it before but as much as we guys hate on him, he is reliable. He is certainly no George R.R. Martin of the degenerate visual novels, to put it that wayAs much as we all rag on Selebus; The man does deliver, most often on time, and they all seem to have roughly the same amount(Or more!) of content. So many people abandon their games, even when being paid for it. He clearly treats this as his full time job, which I appreciate. Some content creators make it to the point where they can quit their main job...and don't move to making their creative content as their full time job.
If we assume that he wrote the 55k words from the last update, till now...that's the length of the average science fiction novel. Every month. For years.
I'm an author; that shit is hard! At the height of my popularity, I was lucky to manage 15k words a month. I wasn't being paid nearly as much, never enough to replace my full time job, but even then I don't think I could have pulled another 40k words to save my life. That's simply ALOT of writing.
For added context:
Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: 46k words
Fahrenheit 451: 46k words
Slaughterhouse-Five: 50k words
The Martian: 105k words
The guy is simply VERY productive, and I do appreciate that. If I have to wait a month for my next fix, I need it to be worth it.
The comparison with other (actual) novels is interesting, but of course you can't really compare these works to something like this.
I just recently re-read Slaughterhouse Five and the truth is that it is not the longest book in the world (but as you mentioned, many famous book are of that length), however, they still manage to tell a whole story. They are concise, the authors carefully choose which topics to cover and how deep to go into the story.
Funnily enough, exactly in this book the author openly states that he intended a much longer book more closely following the war, but ended up just writing his experiences into a sci-fi novel that left out a lot, intentionally.
What I'm trying to say is that a classic book that is published and sold in book stores goes through a completely different completion process. It gets rewritten, changed completely, revised by an editor, restructured, etc. until the finished product is (ideally) in perfect shape.
A typical VN can't do that. Maybe Sel would want to (though I have my doubts), maybe the product would be amazing if he just sat down 5 years and trimmed the whole plot down to a single story from start to finish. But that doesn't pay his bills.
The way these types of games work is that you publish update after update. And if the author does decide to change it halfway through (which occasionally happens, you might know some example) the customers provide a shitstorm and his financial backing is in danger. So obviously most people just stick by it and ride it through. Some even blatantly milk it. Don't hate the player, hate the game, I guess.
Which, again, also highlights how much better he is at delivering good and rich content on a regular basis compared to many, many other developers.
Tl:dr: Yes it's impressive, but to some extent, it's just the nature of the medium.
