Stormcrow Interview

Thanks Rill for sharing this link. It seems obvious, that James Niesewand pretty much loves the game (Illyriad) he and others invented.
But:
Illyriad Games is a small company with limited personal and financial ressources (e.g. Gm Luna seems to be Gm in both games now - does she newly have 4 hands and 24 hour working day to deal with all petitions, forum posts and the other stuff she is working on?).
They are working on that new project AoA now, which will lead to neglecting Illyriad development in any case. Ok, that's an economical and maybe tactical descision, and its up to Illyriad Games to do so.
As far as I am concerned:
I would love to see the money spent in Illyriad being used for upkeep and development of Illyriad, as I don't care about AoA a tiny bit. For sure some of the inventions being done to develop AoA might have positive synergy effects on Illyriad (like pathfinding algorithm). But that is something, that is not more than an announcement yet (as it was over the last years).
There have been a lot of mouth - watering proposals, announcements and plans for Illyriad, especially for long - term players important to stay involved in Illyriad (eg. interactive factions with an own AI). Nothing (obvious) happened concerning that except for announcements 1,3 years ago and earlier. Last update in dev blog was 16.08.2013.
All I wish is more transparency with regulary updates: What is the state of the art? What are plans? What is the timeline? What are they working at? Does it need additional funding (yeah, I might be willing to pay for that, if funding is not sufficient, as I already do in other backer projects of Indygames as well).
And what is more: an ongoing constructive and  honest dialogue with Illyriad clients, who pay for the game (mostly), maybe evaluations: what are your ideas for that game? What do you wish most? What could and should be improved?
Most of all critical threads don't get answered by Devs. Why?
Ok, it might be a smart policy not to announce things, if you can't stay on schedule anyway, as people (paying clients) potentially gonna be disappointed. But there has to be kind of an engagement with clients and opinions, suggestions, criticism, to give clients the feeling of being taken serious. Announcing things and disappearing from the screen afterwards doesn't make me feel that comfortable.
To be more concrete: What happened to all those ideas with webGL, new building models, new mysteries and researches, pathfinding, roads, waterways, owning alliance territory, faction AI, magic, open field warfare, TBL? Will they ever be released? Or existing bugs like counterclaiming? How does AoA development affect the development and maintenance of Illyriad? How will Illyriad Games deal with their limited personal and financial ressources to cope with two ongoing projects? What is the roadmap?
Don't misunderstand me. I love this game and have no personal issues with its dev team, I am just voting for more dialogue and transparency! And facts, no announcements and declarations of will, which just keep me happy for a limited time!

Transparency and dialogue!


Edited by Yeesha D'ni - 20 Mar 2014 at 15:10