Once the Persistent Universe is live, how will the patching/updates work? Will the patching be a 'dump' one which just drops everything under the sun to your HDD or could it be more intelligent and patch essentials, instead loading new areas/changes to them as you explore them?asked by Shinnikins

Well I would say that our patcher / launcher technology right now is really still in it's infancy.

Yeah.

That's a very polite way of saying it![laughter]

We certainly want to continue developing it so that it is a smart patcher, and gives you the data you need - not just everything. I mean the fact is, if we just did a-... the game is huge right now and it's going to just continue to grow, so the data footprint is going to be massive by the time we get to the Persistent Universe. So we don't want everybody to have to download the whole game every time, but it's a work in progress, so it's something we're still building upon.

So, looking at other technology, like streaming, things like that..?

That's being handled by dev ops team in Austin, so they have a lot of plans to continue to upgrade and evolve the launcher and patcher, so that as we continue to add to the game it gets more streamlined.

That's Jeremy Maskers group?

Yep.

Yeah, I mean ideally I would love to see us have a system like a game I really love, which is World of Warcraft...

Ahh, I'm familiar with that.

I might've heard of it...

Yeah, I think it's a game that a few people know if it... yeah... But no I mean, I love the idea that it is so much more targeted and intelligent about the data that it's giving you.

Right, and if you go back in time in WOW's history, it didn't start that way.

Nooooo.

You know, it was pretty ugly in the early days, but with years of development time you find better processes, and we'll do the exact same thing. And fortunately we have a lot of experience in the company, who have been there and done that, and so we're not exactly starting from ground zero.