Is there some aspect of this that we want to make sure folks understand before I let you go?

I guess for me, it's been more a labor of love. I did the initial pitch of this two years ago. So for me, this is something that I've been wanting to see for quite a while.

Now, that's not to say that this took two years of continuous work. This has to go into the schedule and into the resource pool.

Yeah, and there's certain fundamental things that we wanted in place first before we would do it. It's just that there's other higher priorities or there's other things, but this allowed us to align. Everything comes in line and we understand that, okay, certain features... because for example, the hints and the training, that was on the actor team, but they had other priorities that they needed to do. And so this allowed us to go through and get it done. But the initial thought process of it and the initial document that I wrote was, yeah, about two years ago.

I mention that because there's a misapprehension that all aspects of a game are worked on continuously at the same time in conjunction, and stuff like this. They hear, oh, you're working on this, whatever it is, in one month, and it's been eight months, so they've been working on it for eight months, and that's not true. Teams get pulled off. There are dependencies that come up. We need new tech to be developed before we can continue our work. There's any number of reasons. People depart the project. New people join the project with new ideas, and we rethink, oh, well, that's a better idea than what we were doing. There's no end to the reasons why development bobs and weaves. And so that's why I always say the only constant in game development is change.

Yeah, from James's standpoint, I think you started on this, what, three, four months ago?

Yeah, late last year.

So he was the one that did the initial mission and then called out to MFT, saying, hey, we need this, we need this, we need this. And then it'd be myself and Phil and Jonathan from a production standpoint going around chasing up people, saying, okay, we need this feature. When is this coming online? There was some new tech that had to be created for a mission that starts basically when the player initiates into the world. There were certain fundamental things that were not there, and then there were definitely some gotcha moments when we were going through and we were like, oh, we missed this, or oh, we need this. And with a lot of these things, for the most part, the way that we do our feedback or our playtests, we do a lot of those via PTU and Evocati playing, and so it's the hardcore of the hardcore. But we knew that for this feature, those people wouldn't be doing that or needing that. So we did internal playtests and we watched them.