What I'm not happy about is that Larian failed in properly communicating the "missing" features before the release. They did so for the missing day/night cycles but not for the other stuff (AI personalities, more companions, mega dungeon).
I will concur with this statement. While I'm not exactly miffed about it like some others, I do recognize this nevertheless. My best estimation is that they simply overworked themselves to finish the game, and some details (like the dungeon and the companions) simply fell by the wayside when it came time to update the KS backers.
It's not an ideal situation, by any means, but it is understandable. Their primary focus was finishing the game, and so they didn't give as much thought to informing us about the changes they were making. Hopefully, future endeavors that involve KS will be handled more smoothly. Perhaps Swen can hire/assign a KS project manager to maintain the communication properly.
Well, I can understand Larian. They even probably were silent on purpose. It's marketing. But also we gamers and the internet are to blame. Why is that so?
Just think about Larian announced shortly before release that features X and Y didn't make it to the final release. What would have been the effects and results of such a statement? There would have been the high risk of some serious complaining, whining and flamebaiting on the internet. No developer who is dependent on word-of-mouth can actually want to have a shitstorm at release, from both people on forums and press who write about that "missing stuff" right before release. It's the behaviour of us gamers nowadays, our unability to cope with such situations with reason. Also nobody who wants to sell a product tries to get some negative press right at release. From a purely theoretical perspective it would have been "nice" to have a clear and honest public statement of Larian about the missing stuff. But from a practical perspective it was probably better to not doing so. Even as a gamer I can enjoy a game more without thinking about negative elements while playing. It's a different if I play a game with positive or negative thoughts in mind. There is a big difference in an experience in which I think "Wow, that's a cool feature." and an experience in which I think "Hm, this feature is missing." We humans are easily conquered by our feelings and we gamers tend to negativity literally without limits. That's the reason for shitstorms on the internet or such ridiculous exaggerations like the "graphics discussion" in Watch_Dogs which let to hundreds of zero points reviews on metacritic. Honestly, i can't blame any developer for trying to prevent such damaging situations. Sometimes it's better to be a bit less transparent, not because you want to hide something but because the effects are probably far worse than the actual issue deserves.
It honors Larian that they at least try to deliver on their promises (or rather "goals" as the wording stretch goal implies) after release and that they talked about the issues on forums. They even openly admitted that they couldn't deliver on the day/night goal. It's very easy to criticise if you don't have to lose anything, if your life and job and future isn't at stake. But Larian depend on the success of D:OS so of course they try to offer both a great product and they try to prevent negative press. Most big publishers would never even talk about cut features though. Let's just be happy for a second that Larian is not like that. Sure, they want to earn their daily bread with D:OS but they also want to do the right thing - at least that's my opinion.
