marmaduke ;
I think it is fair to judge it as bad at this point. Why?
1. They say on their Patreon page that they are industry veterans. Industry veterans don't make mistakes like these in an RPG. Its like they are industry veterans in a different field, such as RTSs (like Jay Wilson was), and are now attempting a RPG with no experience in making RPGs or playing them (like when Jay Wilson lead the D3 team and made one of the worst ARPG in history). The poor interfaces, counter-intuitive controls (I have to continually look up keybindings, as they always seem to change them each release), a lack of actual rpg elements, a boring narrative and lack of direction. Honestly, they should have learned, at the very least, from their demo quest, when designing out this new questline with Max, but they keep repeating mistakes, rather than learning anything.
2. Their vertical slice was supposed to take 6 months to complete, with a much smaller development team size. Its been 2 years now with a development team about twice the size, and its still not complete. If it takes them 3 years to complete a vertical slice, that is only supposed to be like 1/6th of the game world, how long will it take to complete the entire game world? A decade? Two?
3. Many of their systems have been criticized for years and they haven't done anything to fix them. Swimming is still crap. Climbing is nearly impossible to do. Flight mechanics could use work, especially landings. They have like 6+ different kinds of sex systems (pick one already). They have non-universal skeletons for their meshes (which is a pretty basic idea that any RPG making team would understand), which means that clothes and even animations don't work on similarly sized individuals. The first quest they did, they still haven't fixed the typos or expanded on it. There is no point to exploration. There is no ingame lore, and the lore we do have, outside of the game, seems to contradict itself. Gunplay is pretty barebones, with no ammo counter (a basic staple of any rpg or fps), so we have to guess how much ammo we have. Archery is pretty barebones. Melee is pretty barebones. The list goes on and on and on.
Honestly, creating a solid RPG is something development teams in excess of 100+ people struggle with. If they focused on purely sexual elements, great vistas, and exploration, and got rid of the rpg systems and turned it into a 3rd person platformer/puzzle solver, then it would likely be a lot better a game, and a lot easier for them to achieve.
