TBH, anyone who thinks SBS is not aware of the problem of community losing faith is lying to themselves.
That is the reason they put a date to things when they have not entered the testing phase of said deliverable. And yes, it bites them back when they can't meet it, which is what happened in the past few months
With that said, with your experience in 3D modelling and animations, how would lighting a fire under your ass impact your work?
Btw, this is their latest info on the maps
The true problem isn't SBS is slacking off / un productive. The problem was 6 million is not enough for the company to afford our desired development speed (partly due to the complexity of the game , management problem? possibly).
As Gunnlang said, the original plan was not to complete the game with pure crowd funding money, but to use it for development and proof to investors that SBS's vision have a strong market. Unfortunately, back in 2017, all attempt of securing publishers / investors was met by the request of adding loot box / cash grab mechanics to the game.
Staying true to the original vision, SBS has turned down all those offer. Is SBS still negotiating with investors to buy into the company's vision? I believe so, but I have no proof. I am pretty sure Caspian has a very strong stance on keeping 100% autonomy since we need to avoid all sort of interference for the story of CoE to progress over the 10 year span. Yes, I still believe in SBS.
Now, what have they been doing over the past few months, why is DSS not ready despite SBS originally said it can be out in Dec-18?
All we can do here is speculate :
With the shinies (in past months) showing combats and adventuring stuff, I am guessing they have been focusing on things related to that, instead of D&SS. Which is why they have only ran into problems in their simulation / alogrithim recently.
Let's be honest here, I have no clue on how programming / duties of programmers interact. So I have no clue if the whole team can ever be 100% focus on D&SS. Maybe even if SBS gave full force in pushing D&SS , still only 60% of the staff can be contributing to its progress. That is up to Caspian to answer.
And here, we come to the heart of the question. Why would SBS focus working on non - D&SS stuff in the past few months when they had announced D&SS could have happened in Dec-18? WTF?
No one has yet to answer this question. All we can do is speculate:
I guess it is because of something we as the community are unaware of. If SBS had always wished for more funding with help from investors, it must convince the more risk avoiding investors in the financial market. (Cuz those who are willing to take the risk of CoE are just scumbags wishing for cash grab)
What would you need to convince the risk avoiding investors? You need to proof you are capable of the tasks you are selling them. Which means it is something that we as the community has always been asking for---- a deliverable.
A deliverable like Pre-Elyria, can help the company's 2 most pressing problems at the moment:
1) the community losing faith
2) A lack of funding
So... what come out of it? i guess SBS's internal plan was to show us something this KS anniversary, but they ran into roadblocks, so they shift gear and went all in to D&SS. And of course, they also ran into roadblocks.
Not sure if SBS will ever come out to explain everything, maybe only after PreElyria is out? That's my 2 cents on the current situation. As for now, all we can do is wait / pray / donate.