Alright so feral content is being worked on and is delaying the rest of the game because of commission? Interesting. I frankly will consider it a good enough excuse but I hope its a clear enough message not to take commissioned content thats gonna require hefty reworks to get operational.
The problem is that we've been down this road before. Back when Inno was still on Patreon, various side quests were attached to various support goals. The result was a complete halt to development of the main story. Like, it just dead-ended at the point where the MC gets to leave Dominion for around two years. All so the MC could date a couple of NPCs and
Inno recognised that this was a bad move and said she'd learned from the experience.
Seeing as she's now apparently doing exactly the same thing again, it appears she hasn't.
It probably would have been best for Inno to complete the game engine and systems (eg. combat, character progression. Perks, etc.) at the beginning of development. The game's main quest could then have been regularly released in chapters with space for a bit of side content as well. Once the main quest was complete, Inno could then add side content indefinitely, with only subscribers being able to vote on it. The game would thus become an income stream of indefinite duration with income independent of people paying to play the game itself.
That didn't happen.
Her best move
currently would be to smash out the main quest (alternating new content with bugfixes) so she's got an idea of what will be needed to support that and fix up the engine and game systems then (even if it takes porting the content over to a completely new engine and redoing the systems from scratch, which it probably would). Once the main quest is complete, Inno could then add side content indefinitely, with only subscribers being able to vote on it. The game would thus become an income stream of indefinite duration with income independent of people paying to play the game itself.
It looks like Inno is extremely reluctant to do this.
Inno appears wedded to the "development model" of sequestering herself away in her Discord hugbox, allowing herself to be constantly distracted by adding more things to an engine in need of total overhaul anyway and disappearing down rabbit-hole after rabbit-hole of
really niche side content.
Pretty much everyone here once shared your hope for this game.
But you can only watch a developer squander the potential of a great idea because someone posted a meme on Discord for so long before hope dwindles to idle interest.
I'd love to see genuine progress made towards a playable v1.0 of this game. I have zero "hope" that this will ever happen.