Devs....

[[S.A.S]sephchan]

How tf could you be working on this for 10+ years?
What were you doing exactly?

[SaintsEagle]

same question. The game looks like an exact reskin of the first part. It feels like the game was made in 4 months.

[Wisp]

Cross-posting from another topic:

I've been following this for a while, but my memory is a bit foggy. I think I can try to explain the timeline for people wondering how this took as long as it did. Nothing nefarious happened behind the scenes. Plenty of indie games take a decade to release through complicating factors - look at Owl Boy, CrossCode, or Secrets of Grindea.

2013 - Sequel is announced with a preorder page.

2014 - Dean Dodrill (Dust: An Elysian Tail) out due to not being able to commit to a multi-year schedule, replaced by Blake Reynolds and Vladimir Gerasimov, who made those fun gifs of all the units and turtle tank you might remember. They were involved for several years (at least until 2016) before leaving with no mention of their departure I could find.

2016 - The first leg of the process of making DQ2 has been to completely remake DQ1 in a new engine as a proof of concept for the engine and also to make DQ1 future-proof. DQ1 was made in Adobe Flash / Adobe AIR, which isn't going to cut it moving forward. You also can't sell a game made in this on consoles. Preorders in part paid for the existence of DQ1HD. While this is done the other people working on the game assemble artwork for the game. During this time period Lars also finds employment at Steam to pay bills, as he does not draw a salary from preorders for his work on DQ2 but rather coasts by on legacy sales of DQ1, heading the Steam Discoverability group to make it far easier for Steam to suggest you games you would be interested in. It's around this time he expresses regret for taking preorders and turns the preorder page off, due to the expectations that it sets. He also offers refunds to anyone who wants one. Realizing the old artwork style is no longer valid, he decides to work on programming the entire game first and then getting an artist to plug in artwork over the WIP assets towards the end of development.

2019? - Mauve is brought on to help with level design.

2022 - Early around this time James Cavin gets hired by Imangi Studios. All his work on DQ2's story essentially needs to be thrown out, Xalavier is brought in with Lars citing how many games he ships a year. Which seems ... good, if you want to get a story down. But (in my opinion) might result in a more shallow world and characters, if someone has a reputation for guaranteeing -something- serviceable can be put into place and shipped before tackling the next thing.

2023 - New art is revealed by Alexander Zelikin's team, including Katie Narsavage who worked on animations and did a fairly decent job trying to animate the character art, even if the animations are rather sparse. Not sure who did character art. Lars had always been wary about relying on a publisher that might compromise his ideals, but he personally knows the people at Armor Games from back in the day and is willing to do whatever it takes to guarantee this game finally comes out. He secures funding to allow himself to work on the game full time, for a dedicated team. Everything is finally going to plan to allow DQ2 to come out.

Late 2023 - Lars experiences a family tragedy and can no longer provide for his family off a game development gig. He expects this to be the end of the game. Mauve refuses to let that happen, steps up to fill his shoes from level designer and carry the game to completion at great personal expense.

Early 2025 - Game releases after Mauve finishes soloing what he can across months of crunch to get the entire thing in a playable state.

tl;dr - Indie dev problems and low cash flow result in game being worked on on top of Lars's day job, people come and go because of commitments and opportunities elsewhere, things change, building an engine and futureproofing DQ1 in HD as a proof of concept take up a few of the early years.

Forgive me if I'm wrong on any details.

[TheKbob]

TL;DR: Over promised too early, life happened, and the game had so many different cooks that it became an everything stew with no real main chef to give it flavor.

Shame. But yeah, it's also a massive letdown.