Making sandbox games can be an ungrateful job

[Bloc]

I never said "create your own forum" so stop putting words in my mouth. Also if you know what ad hominem is then stop using it

I didn't say you say that. You quoted my reply to another person and said that I'm doing ad hominem. Show me where I did that. I'm literally asking where I did that?

why are you so keen on telling me I shouldn't express my opinion on them?

Because you are attacking them with this thread and they are not attacking you. If you say "You all have no idea how sandbox games are like,stop crying" then you are trying to shut them down by claiming those people have no idea about sandbox games although you have no fricking clue who knows what, Mr. Ad Hominiem. Also you want to see how this triggers trolls to randomly attack people without argument? Scroll down and see the next post right before this quoted one.
If they say "Game sucks, I hate Bannerlord" this has nothing to do with you and there is nothing you should say about that to them personally. You can say "Oh game is not bad do this and this it might be fun" is not same as "You don't know how hard Sandbox is you ungrateful ignorant"
Do you enjoy the game? Cool. Go and tell in patch notes that this is the time of your life. No one objects that. But don't intervene people who are saying otherwise because that is their own feeling and it's not even remotely related to you.

In most cases it's not, it's just a rage vent for people to let out their frustrations and they offer nothing constructive that the developers can build on.

I'm assuming you never did any software development or worked in the game industry before? If you did feel free to correct me. If not, in most cases it is helpful.
Seeing negative criticism on your forum is way better than seeing nothing but `+1`s and claps but still seeing a huge dropoff in the userbase. Because in first case you have at least a way to extract more information on demand or analyze the common raised concerns even though they are salty. But in last case, you are out of luck and you have to shoot blindly to get your users back. Read several posts above if you want an example.

the game being in EA doesn't necessarily take peoples right to complain. You can still say that "Bannerlord sucks, Warband was better" regardless of it's state. If that's how you feel, you can say it. This is really a way of giving feedback. But lets say 800 people out of 1000 said the exact sentence. What would you think as a producer? You would feel like Warband has something that Bannerlord doesn't, right? Even that depthless sentence can be that's a step forward as you can see.

 

[froggyluv]

Yeah OP if you wanna enjoy yourself and tell others about it -how dare you do that here - developers HATE that (I know because apparently i was one)! Go into another subforum with all your happy unicorns and rainbows and let the real Men stay here to lament with weepy estrogen!
/sarcasm

And apparently there is no wide spectrum between praise, constructive criticism and endless whining

 

[ste636]

---

I was going to ignore this but no, It's hilarious to see there are still some people that are advising others what to do as if they know what they are talking about or authority to shut down people.

First of all, let's start with this:
Are those "whining" people insulting anyone? Are they cursing? Are they violating any forum rules? No. Did they pay for this game? Do they have all right to say/express however they feel in the forum? Yes. So they can say whatever they like.
When you claim people are "whining" it is simply triggering toxic behaviour in the forum. Also, people don't have to provide constructive criticism. They don't have to feel okay with this EA mess. They don't have to test the game and feel "oh okay" with every bug as if they are QA. You don't like what people say? Scroll down and continue.

I won't go into your irrelevant comparison with CoD, because it's pointless. But let's take another example, let's talk about Warband. First Mount&Blade game released in 2008. Warband released in 2010. After 2 years. 2 years of development. They were both sandboxes, they were both same game mechanics. Warband was superior to first M&B. Warband was their first Multiplayer experience, they didn't even had know-how. Yet, it was way better than Bannerlord's current state when it first came out. Was it perfect? Oh no, it was bad. But it was better than Bannerlord as first state. Bannerlord took 8+ years of development. Eight years. People have all right to say What the hell when you make people wait for 8+ years and showcase lots of stuff beforehand in your blogs, which wasn't included in the release or polished ( by polishing, I mean like, it feels like literally no QA tested smithing for example )

When a bunch of untrained modders starts to tweak your game, fixes your issues, polishes your features within same time range where you, as a company, add really weird unnecessary features, then people have all right to complain and "whine". Because it basically shows that you are either ignoring people's complains or you are not putting the effort that you should put into your own game. I mean Bannerlord doesn't have banners in the game officially for god's sake, stop using EA or Sandbox-complexity to defend this weirdness.

Even Taleworlds is not defending themselves about this. Taleworlds is a company and they have an internal roadmap. Doesn't matter if we like it or not. They have it and they are following it. You can effect that only with expressing your concerns about the game. You can say it's full of crap. This is a feedback for them as well. If they feel like why you are saying that, they can ask more information. And that's what Arda and others are trying to do nowadays. But if everyone all the sudden stops giving feedback or "whining" they can assume everything is alright. Because apparently they though in this way before releasing this half-product.
Regardless to that, numbers are crystal clear. Stats are going down. And they are aware of that now. And that's why they wanted to fix their codebase so that adding or fixing new stuff won't become more and more problematic after each patch.

If you still feel like you want to defend that claim, good luck with explaining already lost 238,898 players how hard to make a sandbox game because it's not call of duty

Totally agree with you....

 

[AxiosXiphos]

it is possible for some people to enjoy the game and others not to enjoy the game as it currently stands - both of these things are possible and completely fine - so long as both provide valid criticism and feedback on what needs to be improved. These groups need not argue.

The problem is maybe 1/4 of forum threads fall into further categories of "this game can do no wrong" or "F**k TW" and provide no valid reasoning or feedback. These are the threads which cause issues and flame wars.

Regarding the thread - I do agree sandbox games are harder to make which is why there is a decade between elder scrolls games ( at least) but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot more work to be done on bannerlord.

 

[Younes]

it is possible for some people to enjoy the game and others not to enjoy the game as it currently stands - both of these things are possible and completely fine - so long as both provide valid criticism and feedback on what needs to be improved. These groups need not argue.

The problem is maybe 1/4 of forum threads fall into further categories of "this game can do no wrong" or "F**k TW" and provide no valid reasoning or feedback. These are the threads which cause issues and flame wars.

Regarding the thread - I do agree sandbox games are harder to make which is why there is a decade between elder scrolls games ( at least) but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot more work to be done on bannerlord.

I wouldn't consider skyrim a sandbox honestly, i would more put it into the open world genre.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Regarding the thread - I do agree sandbox games are harder to make which is why there is a decade between elder scrolls games ( at least)

That's because Bethesda is completely incompetent, not because open world nonlinear games are necessarily harder to make.

 

[Ettenrocal]

I wouldn't consider skyrim a sandbox honestly, i would more put it into the open world genre.

Indeed!

That's because Bethesda is completely incompetent, not because open world nonlinear games are necessarily harder to make.

Pretty true

 

[badman]

I think you mean "a thankless job". The people buying the game could be ungrateful. The job itself is not ungrateful.