Maybe you people are a bit overacting on that topic.
Look, I just asked about small infos about the current state of multiplayer and stated that I can’t see a reason they are that silent about it. Nothing more. This was in no way a demand of anything.
I don’t want to create unjustified hype
I don’t want the devs to quit their work to please the desires of a little LE addict (me)
I did not want to start the discussion that arose now, either
It’s all fine. Don’t waste your time explaining to me why it’s better to not talk about a topic they made a blog post 2 years ago. You can’t convince me that there’s nothing to talk about.
But that’s ok. I can live with that. Barely, but still…
While the actual work on the netcodes and getting servers robust for MP will have very little useful things to update and communicate with the community on, I do think there are some valuable game designs conversations the dev could start to share with us even as they tell us from time to time that MP is progressing.
For example, what is the vision for MP in Last Epoch? How would enemies scale with larger parties? What are the type of MP content that devs think would be available for players? Are pick up parties meant to viable? How would we find players to play with? Would there be guild support structure? How similar/dissimilar would MP be compared to POE or D3?
These are questions I wish we could engage the devs on and help to shape the nature of MP in Last Epoch even as the devs are working to get the basics and netcode ready.
Lots of great questions in there. I think that we have probably been a little too tight lipped about it as of late. I think we can open up the dialogue a little more. Unfortunately we are going to put a slight delay on that just until we’re over the patch hump. Once we’re through that, we will take some time to get the community communication regarding multiplayer going better.
There was a little bit of talk kinda regarding it in the interview Boardman just put up.
Good, that’s what I thought. Writing a post about a thing (like their plans for MP) would totally not take away their time from doing something else (like releasing a big arse patch). Gotcha.
Damn straight! I’m pretty sure that working on a game (or any software / project) would go a lot more smoothly if you didn’t have to think about the customers (/end user).
In all seriousness, I am aware of the need to communicate with your customers (be they internal or external) in a “timely manner” about stuff (& having not done that & had it bite me in the arse).
My 2 cents that no one wanted: not that I’m a huge game development follower, but current examples of following what the user wants and constantly teasing him (Wolcen, Torchlight 3), after several core changes we receive some half finished full mess, looks to me like the vocal gamers have no idea what they want and it’s better work in silence.
Wolcen teased the first chapter. This was relatively free of bugs. After that the mess began.
If they had the whole game tested by people in EA, like LE does, they may have seen the flaws earlier.
The sense of going into EA is not only to get some cash. It’s also to get in touch with the players. EHG wants our feedback. Else they could’ve skipped EA, made a preorder and some shiny preview videos and develop in silence.
Also I’m with Llama8. I don’t see anybody asking for the bad quality Wolcen and TL3 had / have. Don’t think it’s intended.
I think there is a not significant correlation between a product quality and frequency / content of developers informing the community of their progress.
The two reasons why they do it:
a) keep the public interest alive (by reminding the players of progress and luring them with news),
b) getting feedback about their product.
The overhead of the communication (via forums and the like) on the production effort is negligible. Just count the number of posts with tens or hundreds of opinions and suggestions vs the number of dev’s replying to them (other than the non-commital ‘thanks, thse are great ideas, we’ll look into that’).
That is implied, yes. But it kind of depends on the feedback - if it’s all ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and ‘<3’, there is little you can improve from that info
I strongly believe the vast majority of people posting in these forums want (some more desperately than others) to improve the LE quality though, and they give useful feedback.
What the devs do with it is another story, and one mostly hidden from our sight (which is partly disappointing and partly a blessing).
