For the Regen Crisis, is the player going to be focused on helping address it, or will players also have the chance to investigate why it's happening in the first place?
TL;DRPlayers experience the Regen Crisis as it unfolds, and the speakers leave open whether concrete answers or solutions will come, while building story continuity through regular monthly patches.
It's more like they're experiencing a crisis firsthand, and... how to phrase this. We're going on a journey, and we really wanted the players to feel like they're part of this unfolding. And so whether there's going to be concrete answers or solutions at the end of this, we're going to leave it up, because you're checking in with us halfway through. So it's kind of a delicate position.
Not even halfway through. We barely got the first chapter of this out.
Well, and it's, again, that idea of, like Will said, that players are experiencing this as it's happening. So we're starting to lay a groundwork of story continuity, which is I think a really exciting thing that we haven't really been able to do much before. We've been having a lot of Simpsons cycles where the status quo gets reset, but now we're actually establishing that if someone starts playing the game in three months, their experience of things, when talking to somebody who's been playing it this entire time, is going to be a little different, because the people who've been playing this entire time go, oh, well, you should have seen it, and da-da-da, there was this regen tech and it used to work and now it doesn't work, and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, this year's focus on doing these regular patches, monthly patches, has really been interesting to us from a narrative perspective on how we can tell our story. Because previously we were doing the quarterly patches, and stories were unfolding over a much greater amount of time, and how the players experienced it was very different. But now we have a much more regular cadence, and so slowly doing these little crumbs as we go and building into something bigger and bigger.
We had four patches in four months: December, January, February, March. With Invictus being in the middle of May, there's a six-week gap instead of a four-week gap there. And then our plan is to continue on: May patch, June patch, July patch, August patch, September patch. So you'll see drops of this going throughout the year. So that's all part of this content-driven, less feature-driven directive for this year.