Hello
dkhoda20, I do agree with what
Enigmanic said. We are a small indie team and stripping the game from the open world would cause us to lose one of our key features.
The thing about an open-world game is that it needs a bigger foundation, it needs the combat, the dialogue, and UI and all the other small systems working before we can write new quests and fill the world with content. If you start working on an engine like Game Maker, all that is already done for you, but that's not the route we're taking. We're building all the RPG mechanics from the ground up in Unreal 4 (soon Unreal 5).
We have the foundation more or less done in terms of the skeleton, now what we need is to refactor the code and tweak things here and there to make them run and feel better when the player is in our world. Once that process is done, the stress and load of work will be far less and we'll be moving from this back-end process we're doing now to add story and cutscenes, which is when the game will have a boom of content.
The game right now is already better than what we had in the legacy version in terms of stability, give us another semester and you'll see the full capability of what our team can do. We have written down a plan for the whole of 2024 and we'll be posting it within the next week on our Patreon and also here. This will clarify what we have on the horizon and how we are going to use our small budget to pull everything off.