My guess is that they don't want to give false promises. every feature that is planned or worked on could be removed at any time of development. We witnessed this many times in the past (past blogs before early access - for example, putting your own gang in the city feature was shown, but probably removed from the game after time). Thus, they are afraid to give info about anything that has no very high possibility to be in the game.
They have a different perspective and way to develop their game and communicate with players. Could be wrong or right, it is what it is. I do not see any point in pushing them to give more info. You will not get that info unless they can according to their policy. Sorry for the bad English.
I understand the
damned if you do, damned if you don't. Truthfully as much as prospective plans can rally the community, they can also be used against the developers as "You said you were gonna do X, and you didn't! YOU SUCK!!!"
I believe most people who have been on this earth for a good amount of time will understand not everything comes to fruition. So roadmaps are nice, but not always accurate.
BUT
If you can't communicate to your playerbase what you plan to do
for the upcoming patch - literally the thing you/your team is actively working on, means two things:
1. You have no regard for the playerbase
Now this sort of mindset is fine when a game is very early in development, because you don't even know what your community is, other then what you hope it to be. But if you've released your game, and literally taken people's money, and you feel no obligation to communicate - that's really going to turn people against you. And you may think to yourself; whatever I got what I wanted. Yeah well don't be surprised when Mount & Blade III under performs or is a total flop. Or your DLC for Bannerlord only sells 10K copies...
For the cogs this attitude is fine, you hope they care about their work and are doing their best, but maybe it is just a job. But the head honchos should care. Even if they don't really care about you, or I, or the game itself; they should still have some regard for their career and the $$$.
2. You have no confidence in the product
This is not good, but it does happen. Sometimes things don't work out, and you got to call your losses. But you can't hide from failure.
Problem is TW has had nearly 2 years of selling the game as "Early Access" now to either admit/realize they don't have what it takes to make things work, step it up/innovate to reach said goal, or at the very least dial back the scope of the project to something they can accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. (In which case you should absolutely communicate such plans to your audience)
Now yes many games go through "development hell", but more often then not that's due to funding or staffing issues. Occasionally there will be bad code, or a feature that is just really difficult to implement or get working. But literal games have been fully developed in the amount of time this game has been in Early Access. But we also know full well the core of this game was functional around 2016, so honestly the current state of this game is rather inexcusable in 2022.
IDK TW can do whatever it wants I guess. But so can we. Honestly I'm amazed 20,000 users are still actively playing this game. Seems like a good waste of loyal fan base.
You know what just lie to me. Tell me the big feature of 1.7.2 is Elephant Mounts. At least let me fool myself that is the case for this March/April.
Please? Pretty please?
