Ok, so how about we divert this into a conversation about the video itself.
It looks pretty well polished to me. Nice art assets, various views of the map.
Also complex...lots and lots of numbers everywhere. Which I'm not opposed to in this sort of game, mind you, though it did make it a bit hard to follow along with what he was talking about sometimes.
I do like the mechanics that he showed off, though. The various agents and the actions they can do looked interesting and very much in line with the sort of thing that we'd been promised way back when.
It has many of the same curious elements, like turns that process instantly. Like at 4:00 where he clicks forward two turns with two clicks and seemingly 0 processing time.
Considering nothing really happens in a single turn, and that optimization is the sort of thing you can throw yourself into if you're in denial about not having a proper plan, and that he's probably showing it on a pretty nice computer, if the turns didn't process very quickly that would be easy more of a red flag than that they do.
I thought the video showed great promise - it looks like exactly the kind of thing that I would love to play.
As a bonus, the graphics/art assets look really polished.
Now, that said - I'm glad I'm not a backer, because this game has been a total shitshow for - what is it? Years now?
However, when/if it ever emerges onto Steam, I will be purchasing it.
This is my perspective as well.
I dunno, it's still firmly within in the timeline of most Kickstarter games. Shit, I backed Rogue-U a couple years before this and it still ain't out yet either.
Decidedly fewer people shouting FRAUD at that game though.
The articles of concern are less to do with the time scale by itself and more to do with communication issues. Saying there will be a demo or a video at a certain time and then failing to deliver are way more damaging than saying nothing.
It'll be interesting to see if he can actually stick to a plan and do weekly updates for even one week.
Really this video just has soooo many moments of numbers adjusting, mouse touching a pop-up for 0.2 sec and there being something.
This is my problem too. It looks like this is the sixth video in a series, after going though expanding all the mechanics he's ready to actually show some gameplay. But it's not, it's the first one. Like putting aside if this is fraud or not, the video seems kinda crap because it's just throwing a bunch of contextless gibberish out. Too fast, too lacking in explanations of what mechanics do. Maybe there's background context somewhere, but I wasn't really able to find it for most of this video. Like he mentions a lot about how he wants madness and how of course madness is good but never describes wtf madness is?
I guess it'd be somewhat understandable if this was actually a real working game, he'd want to show as much of it as possible as fast as possible to get people to stop thinking he's a fraud. But yeah, for now, I'm going to have to hold any judgement about the game because I still have no idea how it works (other then vaguely sending agents to do "things" at "places")
The game definitely needs a tutorial built in that explains the mechanics better than he does. He mentioned something about gating mechanics, but I think so far he's using that too conservatively, and perhaps picking the wrong mechanics to gate. Hell, there's entire UI elements that ought to be gated.