In an earlier
post, The Composer asked this question, related to what the devs of Bannerlord are doing (which includes replying to individual posts from players, at least in some specific threads) :
Am I right to assume that's a fair example of how people would generally want more of from Larian?
My short answer and opinion is +0.
In my view, this level of communication is un-necessary. Larian could use only statements in Community Updates, and still achieve the communication goals that I think would be useful and quite welcome at this point.
Different people feel differently, of course. But I don't consider that I deserve or that I am owed any communication via the forums, just because I bought the game at the more expensive Early Access price. I don't need a personal reply to the dozens of pages of feedback I have sent. I also don't need any news or teases to make the wait feel shorter (I really don't mind waiting). And I don't need new content to sustain my interest, as I have long stopped actually playing the game.
Yet I think that the current communication from Larian is very poor and counter-productive. It directly and indirectly generates forum noise, which makes the task of listening to feedback harder.
Communication to reduce the forum noise and increase the efficiency of feedback. To me this is the top reason why more communication is much needed. The same questions and requests keep recurring. But the less people keep asking for things Larian has already stated that they will or will not include in the game, the more new feedback becomes useful and easy to parse.
Frequently Asked Questions and Frequently Given Feedback. On the majority of Frequently Given Feedback, Larian hasn't said a word. If they have agreed with the frequent reports that X really doesn't work and should be revamped, they might as well say "we're working on it". If they haven't made up their mind about X, they can say "maybe", "not a priority". Or just "no".
In a few cases, Larian has pre-emptively answered anticipated questions. The Official FAQ informs us about things like
difficulty options,
rolling for stats, or the possibility to
change the class of companions. But that's a rather short list compared to what has been frequently asked since EA started.
Finally, on topics like having a
Real-Time With Pause option or
Day/Night Cycles, Larian's position is "known". They essentially said these
won't happen. But that information is only available in interviews, podcasts or live streams scattered across the internet. This is not proper communication. Having answers "somewhere" doesn't efficiently inform players. What Larian says in these third-party communication channels should be centralised on their website/forum.
Larian could easily use the actually-readable first parts of their Community Updates as a space to provide some official statements about the recurring questions and requests. And centralise these in an FAQ dedicated to genuinely-and-frequently asked questions about projected game content, features, etc.
Saying what is known issues, not implemented yet, work in progress, working as intended. On the Frequently Reported Problems, Larian could give us indications of what is a known issue, simply isn't implemented yet, is work in progress, or is actually working as intended.
A typical example is the
rest system. An early
interview of Nick Pechenin explained Larian's plans for the rest system (as of back then). I don't think Larian needs to keep hearing that the combat and exploration parts of the game are missing a limb without a rest system. I also don't think it would be difficult to communicate something along the line of "we didn't include that system in the EA build, because <reasons>. We may add it in a future EA update. But there'll be an actual rest system in the full release version".
Another example is the absence of
Spell Lists (any one can use any scroll and Wizards can learn any spell). There has apparently been conflicting communications to individual players about this. It doesn't sound overly complicated to say "this is WIP, we'll see what we settle on eventually".
Communication for a healthier community. Communication on the following would be very welcome, even if a bit less important, in my view, than statements on their plans and the received feedback.
Communicating about the near-zero communication. A bit meta, I know. Larian has communicated so little that they haven't bothered creating the correct expectations about the level of communication we will get from them.
I would be interested in hearing their rationale about why they chose this near-zero communication strategy (one does not simply spend 8 months communicating so little by complete accident, especially after reading so many complaints about this topic on the forums).
I'd also be curious to know if the current level of communication is what players should have expected from when they said that
dialogue with the community was important to them. Or if their communication plans were completely up-turned at some point. It's only my opinion, but I don't feel that what I read these days can be described as a healthy relationship with players.
Addressing the gap between the feedback given and how Larian talks about it. However minimal and rare Larian's communication is, it unfortunately tends to give the feeling of ignoring or misrepresenting the feedback sent by players.
On the one hand, Larian reacts to a few feedback topics, while most of the major topics are completely omitted.
In the
Destructoid interview for example, Larian mentions the players who want
faster updates, more content and the finished game, as well as
reactions to randomness. In this
IGN interview (and some others) Larian mentions the
agreeability of the companions. Sure, there has been requests and feedback on these topics. But I feel I have read a lot more posts about the
lack of communication (time for a megathread ?), or
the writing and the
Origin Characters, to name a few.
The same goes in Community Updates. Companions now follow on Jumps, but there has been no acknowledgement that all the rest of the
party-controls system is
widely disliked. I don't recall Larian's communication discussing
parties of 6 adventurers,
High-Ground and Backstab, or how
Custom Characters will be handled.
These omissions create the impression that Larian has a short list of topics they are interested in gathering feedback about, and that all the rest is simply discarded. Naturally, some aspects of the game are a core part of their vision and won't change. While on some others topics, they're testing how things are received. But clear communication about this would not only reduce the feedback submitted on useless/hopeless topics, it would also be transparent and perhaps reduce the frustration and meta-feedback about the EA, not about BG3.
On the other hand Larian has also made some statements that were clearly not well-received and gave the feeling of mis-representing players feedback. One instance was the apparently long-awaited
flee combat button. The big offender was the
Bless comments in the
Wireframe interview. So when Swen then explains that they are to a large extent in sync with their audience, that's not the impression I get from the forums. More regular communication would give opportunities to clarify what was meant and clear the air.
Communication about their vision of Early Access. What type of Early Access are they doing ? Not every studio does Early Access the same way. One EA model is to release a fairly advanced version of the game, very playable, with most mechanisms and key features already in. Then the game is polished by increments, via patches, until the last patch makes it the release version.
Even leaving aside the obvious story aspects, it seems that this approach is not at all what Larian is doing. It rather seems that what we can play with is merely a version that was built at some point, for EA purposes. It now lives its life on a separate branch from the main build(s) that Larian is working on internally. And when EA ends, our version won't receive a final patch : it will be replaced by the full release version. Until then, far from every progress made gets pushed into the EA build.
If that's about right, I don't recall reading too much information from Larian suggesting that. And I'm not fully sure it's right, since the changes Larian has brought into EA so far look very much like incremental ones. Being transparent wouldn't hurt. It would make some discussions irrelevant and thus reduce feedback noise.
What kind of feeback is Larian seeking ? Larian explained in the Destructoid interview that there is good and bad feedback. I'd be happy to not post too much on what Larian doesn't care about or considers bad feedback, if only they stated what they're looking for.
In the Wireframe interview, it sounded as if we were told that one of the reasons for EA is that instead (or in complement?) of the studio's internal QA team, they have an army of players giving feedback. But in the Destructoid interview we are told that EA is not for QA testing and that Larian has their own army of play-testers. So are we supposed to report bugs and other technical things ? Or just express how we like or dislike various things ?
Larian also mentions that EA is there for testing systems. But seeing as it was mentioned in a
couple of
interviews, apparently Larian was particularly attentive to the
reception of the companions, which falls into writing more than systems. So do they care about feedback on the
writing for the evil path ?
Finally, when Larian says that all of the things that people are suggesting were already on the list of things that they had to do, and then adds that there are things that they hadn't thought of, I'm confused.
Rationale for what goes in EA and what doesn't. Since the start of EA, we've seen a number of changes. I would be curious to know what determines whether something is added to the EA version or not. The guideline we've had is that EA is for testing systems (which is very fine with me, I don't want to know the story).
But then I have difficulties understanding the changes. Some of them are clearly systems, or otherwise for other reasons. Why has a QoL improvement like the
portrait targeting made it to EA, while
hotkey for jump hasn't ? And why not testing the
rest system, or at least one version of it, since at least one such version was designed ?
Anyway, this has been a long post. The summary of it is that, in my opinion, more and better communication from Larian would be much beneficial, if Larian wants to improve feedback collection.
Larian may say they have chosen to do X, and this is very un-satisfying to people, in which case I completely understand that there will be continued requests for Larian to change their mind. Also, I'm aware that not everyone reads the freaking
manuals Community Updates. I'm not talking about bringing the level of already-answered questions and not-sought-for feedback to 0, just reducing their amount.
I'm certainly looking forward to the next Community Update. Hopefully we'll hear something useful about how textual feedback is used (and how player data are used too, since this hasn't been very encouraging so far, but that's another topic entirely), as well as what Larian's plans are on the the topics of frequently given feedback is. If they feel communicative, there's a wealth of questions
collected here.
