Why weren't those new salvage outposts, the junkyards, on the roadmap?
TL;DRThe roadmap is not a list of everything in development, only what is expected each quarter, and exploratory or uncertain work is kept off it until more is known, sometimes as a surprise.
I think it's a good opportunity just to remind folks that not everything is on the roadmap.
No, and I can guarantee you that there's stuff that's scheduled for 3.7 that we're working on right now that, personally, I would like to keep hidden from the roadmap. We'll see if that happens.
It gets lost sometimes. The roadmap is not a table of contents of everything that's being worked on. It's an indicator of things that we expect or intend to release each quarter, but there are many things that are exploratory. There are many things that are a little more R&D, and we don't know if they're going to work. We don't know if we even want them. We don't know how long it's going to take. So when we're in that kind of nebulous area, we keep them off the roadmap until we know more about them. And we try to be as responsible as we can with the information that we give the community, and with the timetable that we give the community. We don't always succeed, but it doesn't stop us from trying each and every month.
Well, and even with, let's say internally we have an FPS team, we have FPS AI, we have ship AI, and we have what we consider social AI. Each quarter, that team is working on multiple things. However, on the roadmap, for the most part, we only show one for each kind of thing. But we work on multiple things. And so the way that we view it is, OK, we feel like this is the biggest one that should probably go on the roadmap. But there's a lot of other things that are being worked on and focused on by that team to actually solve. And that goes across all of our different feature teams or content teams.
And sometimes, like you said at the very beginning, sometimes we just like the surprise.
Yeah, there's good parts about being as open as we are, and then there's bad parts about being as open as we are, which is that a lot of times, at least from my standpoint, there's things that need trial and error and need iteration. A lot of times with other game development, that happens all behind closed doors. But the good thing is that we get to play it, we get to see how people react to it, we get to iterate off of it, versus basically holding everything back and then saying, OK, this is what we put together, and then people either like it or they don't. Getting that feedback a lot earlier helps shape it to what it needs to be, but at least I like to surprise the people a little bit. It's fun.