Progress meter
Any kind of meter detailing how progress is going would be cool (we are now in stage 2/5) etc. No time specifics, just something to keep us all up to date and keep our interest peaked (how many bugs have been found, how many bugs have been stomped out, that kind of thing). /J
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I'm pretty sure it hasn't, but the beta-stage is there to find the more hidden bugs..
In the alpha stage they fix every bug they can find on their own (i.e. bugs like: I go towards
house X and then I'm suddenly a Solar).
So, if they are mostly done wit SoD than they *could* tell about bugs they crushed.
Admittetly, you would need to have non-spoilerish & amusing bugs and that would be the tricky
part ^^
Most progress info would contain spoilers/additional info so.. unless they have some intressting
anecdotes from development (or some backgrounds stuff) that is mostly spoiler-free I doubt they
can tell us much without getting lynched by the ppl in charge of PR ^^
Long story short: Tell us amusing bugs/anecdotes/background info =P
Because everytime there's a meter, people start wondering why it doesn't improve each week, then each half a week and then each day.
IWDEE didn't have any and the release was soft. I expect something similar for SoD.
I'm willing to wait as long as it takes to make it good
Say a week goes by without the progress bar moving, people will start to think work is not being done or somebody forgot to update the forum post, but it could just be a very big bug/feature is being fixed/added that takes a week to finish. That kind of 'stagnant' progress bar is not something you would want shown to the public since it can easily be misinterpreted as 'no work is being done' and the game hype goes away instead of being built.
I used to work at a 400+ person game developer, but these days I work in a small game dev team. Any one of us on a project could probably give you a rough idea of how we are progressing with it. Certainly enough to say "we have implemented all main gameplay features to first pass/second pass/final/polished, art is X% done to first pass/second pass/final/polished spec and we are able to complete the A/B/All optional path(s) through the game" or similar message each week or two (or some other interval smaller than multiple months/year/years). If we couldn't do that, people wouldn't pay us money. People who pay money to game devs like to have progress reports. It's not rocket surgery.
It's nice to have no pressure to come up with a release date and stick to it. I'd much prefer a working polished game, but that doesn't mean zero updates on progress either.
When working for a publisher or other third party, often your hands are tied and you can't say anything at all at penalty of losing your job at the least, or legal action at worst.
When working as a free agent using crowdfunding (which is what beamdog is these days, even if not using kickstarter et al) then some form of project status updates are almost "expected" as it were.