To be honest I don't even remember that much marketing. Maybe a couple of videos and then devblogs that were made only to meet the community's desperate demands of "we need to see more give us more". Then they fired the old community manager and hired a new one, because of community feedback. Then some devblogs were ok, while some were barely giving anything worth hyping for. What I do remember is a ton of people hyping up themselves though. It was just a fun harmless meme for the most part and for most people to hype up the game, but I guess some people took it too seriously. It wasn't really the developers that did it, but the community. So people need to take some responsibility when it comes to that and not be like: "well it's TW's fault we got hyped". That's some feminist mentality there and it never looks good on anyone, "it must always be somebody else's fault, I could never be to blame". I hyped myself up, nobody forced me to do this. Look at it through a different perspective. If we're so easily convinced by simple marketing strategies and devs/producers can control us so easily it's again, our fault (even by taleworlds, who are clearly incompetent devs throughout are they not? Or does the community now believe TWs are MASTERS of marketing now? Let's be real for a moment). Instead of swiping everything under the rug and do what's easy by blaming and flaming others, do something about it and smarten up for the next time instead, take it as a lesson. Don't blame others consistently, just learn and move on (there's a big chance that this kind of behavior also extrapolates to other areas of your life, and it's really not good for anyone). People go through a lot of crap and disappointments, that's life. But you learn and you move on. The worst thing is when you never learn and you go through the same crap and disappointments again. In this case it's just a matter of hyping yourself up vs keeping your expectations stone-cold low. It's also a matter of moving on. What I found through my numerous disappointments is that no matter how sure you are of a thing, it can always disappoint you. It's all inner stuff, not outer.
Now to be more objective. A developer's job is to sell a game, a product. Why do people get hyped for so many games? That Cyberjunk 77? I never for once felt hype for that, I thought it looked bad, but for some reason people were loving it. Consumers are usually not the smartest of the bunch... like sheep they spread hype worse than a virus can ever spread. If someone sells you a car and you buy it, then your car breaks down, do you blame the car salesman for trying to sell you the car? This is the moment where we need to have some self-accountability. If you never change, and if you don't hold other gamers accountable to change, this will keep repeating itself, an endless cycle of: "See marketing -> Get hyped -> spread the hype -> be disappointed). Instead of pulling torches at devs or other people in your life who failed your expectations (and there are a lot of such devs/people, and the main culprit to blame are expectations), pull that torch on yourself instead and ask yourself why'd you did that to yourself? Facing yourself and the truth is not ever comfortable, it's easier to just hate and blame another in any kind of situation, but that doesn't lead to any growth either. "She left me, she cheated on me, it's all her fault". But you chose her, you didn't see the signs, you believed. Now I don't want to say that people should go all emo and blame themselves for anything really, but I want to say that these kind of situations are so common in most areas of life, and we need to be willing to gain the maturity to also see our own fault in the situation and to not go all crazy in only one direction and see only the other person's fault.
About the game, I still believe Bannerlord was worth the money and the mods will provide huge replayability and content for everyone, including those severely disappointed. People keep comparing this base game with warband's mods instead of warband vanilla which really isn't fair at all. When they see warband they also see all their beloved mods, a decade worth of them. Sure, it would have made sense for devs to look into the more popular mods and see what they can learn from that, and they did, just not what and how much the community expected. One dev once compared prophesy of pendor (which had their own vision) with the extended native mod, which was all over the place. So what he personally learned is that a proper vision of their own is necessary to not create a product that is all over the place. Reality is subjective and we just cannot expect everyone to see it through our own eyes. So the answer is yes, expectations were too high, as they always are for the things we care about most. But we can learn to care for things and not expect so much of them, which is something we often forget. This would do us good and others.
Now to be more objective. A developer's job is to sell a game, a product. Why do people get hyped for so many games? That Cyberjunk 77? I never for once felt hype for that, I thought it looked bad, but for some reason people were loving it. Consumers are usually not the smartest of the bunch... like sheep they spread hype worse than a virus can ever spread. If someone sells you a car and you buy it, then your car breaks down, do you blame the car salesman for trying to sell you the car? This is the moment where we need to have some self-accountability. If you never change, and if you don't hold other gamers accountable to change, this will keep repeating itself, an endless cycle of: "See marketing -> Get hyped -> spread the hype -> be disappointed). Instead of pulling torches at devs or other people in your life who failed your expectations (and there are a lot of such devs/people, and the main culprit to blame are expectations), pull that torch on yourself instead and ask yourself why'd you did that to yourself? Facing yourself and the truth is not ever comfortable, it's easier to just hate and blame another in any kind of situation, but that doesn't lead to any growth either. "She left me, she cheated on me, it's all her fault". But you chose her, you didn't see the signs, you believed. Now I don't want to say that people should go all emo and blame themselves for anything really, but I want to say that these kind of situations are so common in most areas of life, and we need to be willing to gain the maturity to also see our own fault in the situation and to not go all crazy in only one direction and see only the other person's fault.
About the game, I still believe Bannerlord was worth the money and the mods will provide huge replayability and content for everyone, including those severely disappointed. People keep comparing this base game with warband's mods instead of warband vanilla which really isn't fair at all. When they see warband they also see all their beloved mods, a decade worth of them. Sure, it would have made sense for devs to look into the more popular mods and see what they can learn from that, and they did, just not what and how much the community expected. One dev once compared prophesy of pendor (which had their own vision) with the extended native mod, which was all over the place. So what he personally learned is that a proper vision of their own is necessary to not create a product that is all over the place. Reality is subjective and we just cannot expect everyone to see it through our own eyes. So the answer is yes, expectations were too high, as they always are for the things we care about most. But we can learn to care for things and not expect so much of them, which is something we often forget. This would do us good and others.
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