@Echo6Echo wrote:
@edgecrusherO0 wrote:
Communication and transparency are anathema for DICE, or at least DICE leadership.
There are a lot of things DICE could be doing to restore goodwill and earn back the trust they've shattered over the years, especially with 2042. I look forward to them continuing to do absolutely none of them while continuing their current behavior/strategy instead, as they think that everything is still fine.
DICE as a studio seems incapable of growing, improving, or learning.
I tend to agree, but again I think this is EA. I get that the point of developing a game comes from some passion to do a good thing and be able to make a living doing it. Then it starts to get good and a developer "buys out" a portion of your product or company. Now THEY start calling the shots and leaving you little room to do anything but complain that it won't work. And if you do it loud enough, they just fire you and get someone who'll toe the line for the money and forget the passion to make a good product. At the end of the day, the developer will always push toward what's going to make the most money and any "enjoyment" you get out of it will be squashed in the name of the all mighty dollar.
It's not EA, EA doesn't usually bother with that granular level of control.
This is simply DICE, and it's the same way DICE has historically acted when they had good enough games that they didn't need to really do much with community. Now they don't, and they're way outta their depth.
Their current strategy closely mirrors the usual "STUFF IS STILL ON FIRE!" strategy of closing down communications, keeping everything very limited to prevent risk, and hoping that by ignoring the problems they at least won't fan the flames. Which is true to a certain extent, but it's the lazy, cowards way of handling this kind of ongoing situation.
Given the reporting on how little EA was responsible for the disasters with Anthem and ME:A (both of which were overwhelmingly the fault of internal leadership at BW and, if anything, EA failing to engage in sufficient oversight and management which is uh...a weird thing to write) I'm very disinclined to believe that many, or any of 2042's problems are mostly to blame on EA. At most EA forced the launch date, but that's possibly as much EA's fault as it was internal BW's fault for - much like ME:A and Anthem - spending tons of time accomplishing nothing as internal leadership struggled to find direction and was weighed down by internal drama.
It's just frustrating because being more transparent with their community is within DICE's power. Engaging honestly, and regularly, and actually sharing information is within their power. Apologizing to the community directly for the terrible launch and first 6+ months of the game is within their power. And usually, when big studios show some humility and willingness to admit mistakes and failures, players respond fairly positively.
But I guess this is all strategy that either DICE leads have never considered, would require too much actual work for them, they simply don't care, or everything is an ever bigger internal dumpster fire than we believe even right now which is arguably the worst-case scenario. But why should we think it's anything other than the worst-case scenario if DICE are not communicating and not giving us any reason to believe otherwise?
