I can't help but feel like a lot of people would be happier if you just checked in on the game once every 6-12 months.
As much as I enjoy this game, I'm not so hurting for stuff to play that I feel the need to constantly follow its development. I just check in once in a while to see how things are going. Maybe I'll load up the Scene Replay Mod to check out some of the new stuff if a scene seems particularly interesting. But in the end whether it is done next week or in 20 years just isn't that big of a deal.
We all wish the games was finished sooner but anyone who thinks the devs are doing nothing but kicking their feet up and collecting that fat patreon money should try
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. The game has improved a ton since then. In the game play, in the quality and quantity of the content, and in the artwork. Even though this is the version that got me into the game, when I look back on it now it seems practically unplayable compared to the current version. The people that pop up here occasionally saying something like "I played this game 5 year ago and no progress has been made" either they don't remember what the game was like back then or they haven't actually played the newer version.
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But to a lot of people the game still feels stagnate. And honestly, I do understand that feeling. In my mind there are 3 reasons that the game feels like it is treading water despite the vast improvements and several novels worth of additional content that has come out since then.
The first and probably biggest reason is the early Devs complete 95% of the main story line before they finished almost any of the side content. As things are right now the main story has been sitting in the same place for several years. And the main story has been 95% done all this time, all that's left is a bit of epilogue stuff to set up part 2. But when they rushed to the end, they vastly under estimated how much promised side content they had left to work on. So while we are getting a good amount of content, the main story of the game remains frozen in place.
Related to the first is the prevalence of side projects in early development. For a lot of the people involved this was their first game and first time working on a project like this, and there wasn't a lot of management or oversight. From what I can tell, a lot of the early devs were just working on whatever they felt like at the time or focusing on their own favorite characters, instead of working on the parts that would actually move the game toward completion. Earlier, I saw someone lamenting that the goblin recruitment arc was eating up a lot of time for a side project, after all we already have the orcs and they don't have nearly as much content as the goblins are getting. But the truth is that the goblin recruitment was actually planned to be part of the main story from the beginning, and it is the orc camp that was a side project. It's just that no one was working on the goblin for years to the point that even the climax of the game had to be written around the orc side content. So why was someone writing up an entirely superfluous yet extensive orc recruitment arc when no one had even written the main story's goblin recruitment arc yet? because no one was setting priorities and people were focusing on their own pet projects.
Finally, the last major contributor to the feeling of not progressing is the reworked content. Do to the fact that many of the early devs were new to both game development and writing, there was a very clear quality difference between a lot of the early created contend and the later developed content. There we also sections that didn't really feel like they fit with the rest of the game since the devs were often working so independently of each other. They had two different artist with vastly different styles making the art for the game, meaning half the scenes looked like they came from a totally different game. Personally, I'm more forgiving of this one because I feel like the reworked content is almost always a significant improvement.
edit: some spelling & grammar errors
