Greetings from a long time Larian fan (albeit new to their forums). This is in regards to schedules and time cycles being cut off. I know this has been "covered", but i had to post my view on it.
1. You got almost one million euro. You received MORE than what you asked, for what you said YOU wanted. No questions asked. Did any refunds occur when content paid for, and in advance, was left out?
2. There was a game called Morrowind. Huge brand behind it, huge follower base. It too had the same issue. Know what they did? Let me remind you. They shipped it. They survived the "horrified masses finding their game unable to end" just fine. Fine enough in fact to spurn more and more of that series. Make it listed in top of all times in fact.
3. Said game had a very simple solution. You killed a unique NPC that was essential to the main chain? You got a warning, phrased in a lore friendly manner, stating you were about to get to a progress block. Maybe the next few minutes, maybe next month, but you game would -never- finish. You reloaded a previous save, or you moved on. It was called choice. Better in with insurmountable obstacles, than out. Those damned rails.
I know your reasoning as posted at least in the forums. But i am sorry to say i found it lacking. Very disappointed.
I've seen this happen all the time. Features that the developers thought they could make, promisse they'll work and then near the end of the development cycle they have to cancel it.
It's something that you realy need to be engaged in the gamming industry in order to fully understand and it's definately not a couple of forum posts that will make people understand...
It happens all the time when you are on the frontier between wanting to boost entusiasm on your product and being realist and boring and then not as hype is created. Sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith and promisse stuff based on a feeling and rough calculations and predictions. It's just how the entertainment computer software works.
Even giants with dozens of millions dollars bugets do it, it's not a matter of trying to deceive people, it's just as development progresses A LOT of things change, A LOT of itinerations fail and have to be started all over, a lot of things just don't work as expected before.
I understand your frustrations if that particular thing was something you really wanted, but as for me i personally think if the day/night cycle was in, the amount of QQ in this forums about the game being wayyyy toooooo harddddd annnndddd borrringggg because you need to wait for NPCs to be in the right time at the right place for you to start/end quests would be "deafening".
Can't please everyone i guess. I personally think it's fine that stretch goal is not in, if they replace it with other stuff, and they already did that with many things already in the beta that was not even in the initial game plans.
