I assume that people look at it this way: they made AoD, it sold enough to pay for the next game (Colony Ship), if CS doesn't sell enough to pay for the next game, it failed and was a mistake. In reality AoD didn't sell all that well (which is why we didn't make AoD 2) and paid for 50% of Colony Ship's budget. Some of this shortfall was relatively 'easy' to fix - work longer hours and weekends for 7 years, how hard could it be? Others - not so much. In 2020 we had enough money only to pay the contractors and not the core team. We had to compromise at every step and constantly settle for less simply because we didn't have enough money and manpower. It wears you down more than anything else.
The tentative sequel will require a bigger team and a bigger budget. Nothing crazy but at least one extra designer to share the workload (more like to make it easier to breathe for the rest of us) and more contractors (art and 3D). Probably 25% more overall.
Colony Ship is doing better than AoD in nearly every aspect and metric. Stronger sales in EA, on launch, in the first 3 months, etc.
It will probably generate 60% of that increased budget, meaning we expect it to sell 40-50% more than AoD. The problem is, it won't be enough and neither KS not Patreon will make up for the difference. So we'll continue improving the game throughout 2024 and then we'll see. Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe we won't
Honestly, it makes perfect sense. AOD was already an extremely "thin" game, you could clearly tell that the game's content was pretty limited, even taking into account that it was designed with the idea that you would need multiple playthroughs to explore everything the game has to offer. Most of the game's environments were considerably barren, with not many characters to interact with and, more specifically, few activities to do. Which in a way even contributed to the atmosphere of the game - you really felt like you were in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a destroyed world with not much to offer.
And it's obvious that this was intentional. After all, with a small team, you simply don't have the manpower to put a lot of content into the game, and especially quality content. AOD wouldn't be a better game if VD had hired two or three amateur writers to include fetch quests or random encounters throughout the maps. Not only would it be weak and unnecessary content, but it would also break the entire balance of the game that was designed based on how limited your access to the experience in each location is. VD did what he could within the limitations of what was possible to do and the goals he was trying to achieve.
CS, on the other hand, is clearly a more ambitious game. Moving to the Unreal Engine, which is not only a market standard, but allows for better visual quality and also certainly allows for the hiring of many more people who have experience with it. A setting and story that, from the beginning, left open the possibility of a sequel and even what it would be like. If AOD was a first step where the team was learning as they went, CS would be the opportunity where VD could use all the experience accumulated in previous games to finally present the complete version of what he always wanted to do.
But rarely are there times when the real world allows you to do things the way you want, and I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for him (and the team) to have to give up ideas, make compromises, and reduce the scope of what you intended to do to something that is possible to do. It's still better than trying to offer too much to end up being bad at everything you tried to do, but I imagine it must be discouraging to see how much you had to abandon your original vision at the end of the process. VD is not the first and will not be the last developer in which the game suffered considerably from the second act onwards.
At this point, I can understand the idea of "fuck it, either in the next game I can do something the way I intend, or it's not worth it."
