I'm sure they do. There's just a general fear of the new and comfort with what you know that makes people want to stay with their old familiar choices. I wouldn't be surprised, honestly, if Renpy wasn't really an option when they started out, and they just never really seriously considered...
I imagine that's in there to add a bit more to the story than just a generic several girls fall in love with the protag and live happily ever after. Those kind of games can be good, but authors tend to struggle on where to take them and when to end them.
I'm sure it's more of the author being very familiar with RPGM and not wanting to switch to a new engine. Happens all the time in all sorts of game dev.
There's two aspects of slow burn, though - the story could be a slow romance, and that's fine, but if that slow romance is spread out over several real-life years, it starts to feel too slow.
Creative work is always challenging. Especially starting out, your expectations will always be way higher than your ability, but you've just kinda gotta keep pushing on, because you'll never get better without putting in the effort.
Personally, I write all the time, but that writing never...
Still sucks the lack of forward progression because of it, though. It's the challenge of game makers who are learning as they go, or maybe just perfectionists.
It does contribute to a bit of scope creep, though, where an update could have been substantially meatier if the paths weren't actually full different stories. Add to that the constant temptation to add new characters and things can quickly become glacial.
I wonder if part of the reason for the remake is that the writers of DoM had painted themselves into such a weird corner that they couldn't figure out even a rushed ending to what they had written.
This has suddenly just turned into the Radiant hate thread lol
I think that most games that are highly rated are often somewhat disappointing though, if just because people tend to push their love for a game or a specific LI into so many aspects of things they talk about. Often the most hyped...
This is kind of one of the giants in the space at the moment, to be honest. I don't 100% know that it's unimpeachable, but considering its from a developer who has showed they can actually finish a game, it probably deserves to be as high up as it is.
If I read the notes right, they're not scenes that are being removed, but scenes that can only happen once, and if you choose one option, they're skipped and you can't see them on that playthrough - think of them as "What if" scenes, I guess.
Some of the people who did the mod for this are trying to do their own game in this style. It'll be interesting to see if they can avoid some of the biggest pitfalls this one fell into.
There is a decent amount of content (there is/was a mod that adds even more, too), though I would say the content quickly feels pretty... empty? It suffers from work being applied to one character, and then a lot of it just copy/pasted to other characters.
I so want say Bloodborne, as the aesthetic is very much a style I love, but Elden Ring is such a good game, and the Coop mod makes it an actual game I get to play with my friends properly, which is usually the best thing for me in any game.