The bit I cut out from the steam ad is the most questionable one:
and to maintain a healthy relationship with those who take the time to provide feedback and help us to improve.
I do agree that it would be nice to have more feedback from Larian. On one hand I understand: with such a large team, who is really in a know and in charge to safely share details with community without misrepresenting or overpromising? But it would be nice to get a clearer response or explanation on some of the topics.
I would go beyond calling it questionable, and call it plainly a failure. I mean, if anything north of 10-20% of the EA players think that Larian's level of communication is disappointingly-low, that their avoidance of discussing/acknowledging certain concerns is sad, and that overall they do not maintain a healthy relationship with the community, then I don't think one can say that Larian indeed maintains a healthy relationship with the community.
Sure, it would be
nice to have more feedback from Larian. But it would also be
useful and efficient : as many have explained before (including me), knowing what's definitely-staying, or still-under-consideration, could allow us to focus our feedback on where it can be useful. We would know what to expect, what not to waste our feedback-writing time on, and Larian would spend less energy filtering out our useless feedback.
I don't think that having someone dedicated to keeping in touch with the community presents unsurmountable challenges. There is no risk of over-promise if all that Larian says is "no, X is not going to change" or "hey, we see a lot of talk about Y, we're sorry you don't like it, but we like it as it is and it won't change", or "hey, we see a lot of talk about Z, we will think about it, but that's not our priority". And it would be real nice to have an acklowledgement that they see topic Z as an issue (or not an issue).
Likewise, they are not being too specific and over-promising if they say "in our vision, <this_description> is how players would approach the game". At the moment, their strong vision is something I can only deduce/reconstruct, partially, from some of the things they said, what they have put in the game so far, and how the game evolves.
Other companies have managed to handle EA communication way better. I don't think it's that big of a challenge. But it's clearly something you won't do well if you don't try. And it doesn't seem as if Larian has a lot of will to try.
On a side note, I would actually be very curious to know what rationale the PR/comm' team came up with for not engaging with the community, beyond the Patch Notes, once EA would start. Because, with so many players having complained about the communication since EA started and Larian having not budged on this, it must have been a pretty good rationale. I don't want to go too "meta", but it must have anticipated players complaining about low-communication, and the reasons must have held water with these factored in.
But hey, we'll never know. And it wouldn't make the game better either ...
