Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems Designer

It's hard to say, and it depends on a weapon-to-weapon basis, really. Something like I was talking about before, building out the weapon families that we've got now. For example, the Behring shotgun that we're making at the moment: we've really well established the Behring manufacturer. We know what they're about. We know what they're going to do. They're quite straightforward in the way the fire modes work and stuff. There's little overhead in terms of code and playtesting that we have to do to actually get that right and then make adjustments as we go. That one's a bit more straightforward. I wouldn't like to put an actual time on there. I would maybe say they're generally ones that we can quite comfortably get out within a quarter if we need to. Whereas something like the Electron weapons that we brought recently requires a lot of forethought before that quarter starts if we want to get it out for that release, where we have to actually go through several iterations of concepts. It's a new manufacturer, so we have to talk with the concept guys about the manufacturer's style and how it feeds into the weapon and everything. And then we have to get it in game and test it. And because Electron's quite complex in the way that it works and interacts, we have to work out how that's going to work, work with the coders to actually get it in, and then test it to see if it actually plays well. So I would say that that requires more forethought before we actually try and make the push to get it out there.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's a lot of similarities there between the weapon pipeline and what folks already know about the ship pipeline, which we've talked about for several years now. Obviously a smaller ship will generally go faster than a larger ship, but also a ship from an established manufacturer where you've got the style guide: the more you know about that manufacturer, the more you can take from other things that have been created and kitbash, and you start at an advantage ahead of where you would with something like the Atzkav, which we had never had a weapon from before. So it was like, okay, you have to define all these new things. So yeah, some real strong similarities. It works the same way with the character team and armors. If it's an armor manufacturer that they're familiar with, they've got seven examples from that manufacturer, it's very easy to iterate on an eighth, whereas if you're starting a brand new manufacturer and determining a brand new style for it, that process can take much longer to find that thing that you're looking for.