So at some point, when/who says (and we all really love Chris obviously) to Chris "please stop giving dates to the community!"?asked by Adrian Ip
TL;DRErin Roberts says Chris gives hopeful targets rather than hard deadlines, that delays come from roadblocks and shifting priorities, and that the company now schedules more carefully and shares its production schedule.
To be fair, Chris isn't really giving hard deadlines, he says we'd like to do XYZ and we would, we'd all love to give everything as soon as we can, but this is something that gets brought up repeatedly and this was why at the end of last year we really started opening up with our production schedule to the community.
I've done this all my life though and it's often, you know developers saying "oh yeah, we can do that!", it's not Chris making up dates, people want to give their best but then a roadblock appears, some contingent work isn't finished in time or sometimes priorities change. It's like last year when we delayed Star Marine and everyone reported that we'd killed it (W: We didn't! In fact we reported it was still coming!) but we needed to reprioritise for other things.
So now sure, now there are often frank conversations saying "OK, I know you think you can get X out in 2 days, but what happens if all of a sudden you need to fix bugs for a day or some blocker happens or how sure are you that the other team delivers you what you need when you need it?" etc.
As we mature as a company, things continue to improve. When I was doing the Lego games for 10 years, it was so easy. There was no tech change. It was literally, ok this time we're going to do Lego Batman, so reskin it all and put in 2 or 3 new gameplay features, bang, we could knock those out every 4 to 6 months. This is an order of magnitude more complex.