Age of Decadence has been in development for ten years by multiple persons for the most part and yet you never see people following VD from thread to thread asking him WHERE IS OUR GAME??? like a bunch of deranged psychos, even though he took pre-order money for longer than Clive.
You guys are just a bunch of entitled bullies.
You can't seriously compare a game that's being regularly updated on Steam Early Access and is now about 60-70% complete there with Grimoire, which only has one "superdemo" 5% or so of the full game size - about the same size this demo was back in 1997. You should improve your troll-fu, HHR-kun.
The superdemo is roughly 20-25% of the final game's size, and much bigger than the nineties demo. And the rest is nonsense, Grimoire has been 99% content complete for a very long time, it's just very very hard to debug the game due to the mind-boggling size and complexity of the product. Some 256 maps, tons of classes, events, NPCs, hidden secrets... there hasn't been an RPG coming close to that in years and years. And this is all by one man who does it in his spare time. Due to the nature of the software it just doesn't make sense to make an "early access" release, due to the amount of bugs, since one of them can render the game unplayable or unwinnable.
Give Cleve a break, I don't think any of us would even be remotely able to make a Wizardry VII on steroids like he does, with all that this involves. He can be guilty of underestimated how much time is needed to debug and polish a monster like this, but one look at what happened to the Kickstarter projects make it easy to see that everyone does this.
You can't just be apologetic over and over again.
I have paid not a single dollar for Grimoire, yet I am sure than those who paid and gave money based on broken premises feel rip off. Know what ? It's legitimate. There might be no real contract, sure, Indiegogo is actually all generosity and all, but so it is when you lend money to anyone under the promise that this person will pay it back. If that person doesn't, that makes him/her an asshole.
The same thing is happening with Grimoire. This is simply ridiculous. Cleve sounds like an intelligent man, and from the previous demos like a competent game designer. He's still a guy who can't hold to his promises, and who keeps on promising. He's pretty much like a Peter Molineux, except Molineux eventually delivers a game.
As for the debugging, no. Sorry, but no. If a game is 99% complete, it is 99% complete. If it's playable from beginning to end but the actual debugging would take 80% of the time, then no, it's only 20% complete. If it's 99% complete, that means with decent work the game is supposed to come out in a matter of days. Grimoire has been supposed to come out in a matter of days for 15 years now. Either he's procrastinating, slacking off, or just totally bullshitting everyone on the actual status of the game.
This is unacceptable behaviour. Competent game designer or not, complex good game or not.
