In my opinion the game is already kinda great, we have tools to make our own worlds and more animations and settings to work with than any other game out there.
My takeaway from the majority of most complaints in this thread is people simply don't know how much time and effort goes into a game of this scale. Then we factor in how small their team is and some expect a triple A style game to be out in a few years when it usually takes that long for a team of 100+ developers and millions of dollars from actual triple A studios.
But it's understandable as most people in the world lack critical thought and even more have the patience of an infant.
We can look at this dude who started with one other person years ago and actually put the money back into what they're doing and now run their own studio of people. Then you look at someone like Eromancer who hasn't finished a game in probably ever and moves title to title with pure oynx being their latest waste of time where it has taken them around 2-3 years to make 6-7 animations and 3ish mediocre levels with nearly every system still incomplete.
Studiofow is another great example, they got tons of crowd funding and even now all these years later, they still hardly have a game with mechanics and features that I would consider entry level skill for making. Then you look at their animations and see just how little effort they actually put in when you use an unlocker and see the horror show that the fixed camera angle cannot see. The only upside is the silly comedic value the story brings as everything else is incredibly subpar.
Even if wildlife team decided to not bother with the story, the game would still be a huge success for sandbox standards and it only gets better with each content update.
The problem is, you are specifically looking at the worst examples to justify why this game is still so unfinished af. You look at pure onyx, eromancer and studiofow.
But there are also a lot of hit indie games that are completed with a lower budget, smaller team and in a less timeframe.
Once, I've even made a list of games, and how long it took for devs to complete them just to prove how wrong this argument is, and the best reply I've gotten from this thread was, "I-Irrelevant list!!!". That list included all kinds of developers, from solo and tiny dev teams to AAA studios. Some had literally no budget(no patreon, no ea, nothing!) while some had to rewrite the fucking engine they use while game was still in development. But all the games on that list had something in common: they get completed waaaay before compared to this game's progress.
And you're assuming I don't know how long it takes to make a game. I'm not a developer but I don't need to be a developer to understand how long it might take. I can simply take a look at the games on steam and research how long it took for developers to complete it. Judging by the information I've gathered by using that method plus years of following gaming industry(I'm talking about pc and console, if it wasn't obvious), I came to this conclusion:
Games that go past 4 years of development time are usually either a "patreon porn game" kind or "cyberpunk 2077" kind of game. But ofcourse there are some exceptions to this rule, like rockstar's rdr2 but they are just that, exceptions.
Normal games go on steam and ea route if their devs want to earn money during development, because they know damn well their game in its current state is interesting enough to sell. Meanwhile "patreon porn game" kind developers stick to patreon, and they stay that way usually for several years because they know damn well their "game" will get review bombed to hell(if they put it on ea steam) for not even being a "game" or a decent one for that matter.
"Even if wildlife team decided to not bother with the story, the game would still be a huge success for sandbox standards and it only gets better with each content update."
I think you're heavily exaggrating this, I don't think majority of the people would even bother playing a sandbox porn game.
Let's be real, why do you think majority of people even play porn games? You have 3 answers, pick which is most logical to you.
A) To fap and feel good
B) To be creative
C) To play pong in it
If your answer is B or C, you're high.
If your answer is A, think for a second why would anyone bother playing a sandbox game where you have to work and even sometimes write code to create scenes when they can just play any other game that doesn't require so much work to get the scene they want?
sure it's not finished, but out of all the devs in this dumbass industry, AdeptusSteve and his team are actually working instead of slacking off, among others
Recently they are releasing updates faster than before or atleast it feels like that way to me, I won't deny that.
My point is this game should've been completed waaaaay before.
We should have a completed game, and they should be releasing dlc's right about now.
But instead all we have is sandbox and pretty much nothing else.