We've got a Herald, we've got an MSR; where are the data running missions?asked by Nine Toes

And the answer is when a gameplay team creates data running as a gameplay system, as a loop, then you guys can create missions.

Yeah, because on that we could fake it, but what's the point in that? We might as well wait and give you the real, true, intended experience.

We might invent things that the real owner of that feature doesn't necessarily want it to be. So we do two things: we basically mess with expectations of players, and we also waste work on us. Annoy people who are also developers. And then in the end result, we have to backpedal all of our work and redo it once they've done the feature. And then we also have egg on our face. So it's a pretty bad way of working.

One of the terms we use internally is downstream. You're not as downstream as audio is. Audio has to wait for everybody to do their stuff before they can get in there, because before they make the sound of a ship, they need to see the profile, how big it is, how aggressive it looks, how janky or how slick and smooth it looks, and they build a profile that matches that. You guys are somewhere in the middle, but still downstream of a lot of other teams, downstream of at least the gameplay design teams.

I mean, we still make stuff ourselves, and sometimes we own those things, like the law system. Or even the spawn closets are part of our team, which is why it ends up in a lot of missions. It's why it works perfectly.