How has the process of the weapons and props changed over the years in terms of the requirements that are needed now but were not needed before?

I mean, I'll start on the weapon side. I think one of the things that has, not necessarily improved over the years, changed over the years, is that we try and invest a little bit more time in the concept phase, like Jake's already mentioned, to try and make sure that we're solving all the visual questions as early as possible and trying to get that concept nailed down from the start. It works out a lot better for the development team, the guys that are actually delivering the asset, if there's not changes in the direction during the process, if possible. There's always going to be challenges and things that you need to resolve when the concepts come in. You don't see the concepts in the player's hand. You're not running around with it. And until you get to that point, you don't know exactly. It can be the prettiest weapon in the world, and then you get it in the character's hands and you're like, it doesn't quite look how I expected it. And concept take care of that, and they do a lot of things with the character models and things. But I think until it's got into the animators', the designers', the weapons artists' hands to play with, it's kind of difficult to judge. And I think that's probably the other change that we've tried to make, at least more recently, is that we now try and front-load as much of the setup work as we can in the pipeline so that we're not taking an asset to a final asset and then it gets handed over to the other department. The makeup of the team has changed slightly, so we're working much closer with design and animation to make sure that as soon as the concept comes in, the artists, like David and Jake, try and get that in game as quickly as possible. It might look a bit rough, but it gets the idea in game and lets people play with it.

Yeah, we talk with the animators quite a lot now. I think that's probably the team we're the closest with in terms of how often we're talking with them. We'll get that blockout in, and then they'll be like, oh, this doesn't quite work, let's review this. I think with the shotgun in particular, the shoulder would have to stretch way forward. That wouldn't quite work. So we had to make that shotgun much stubbier. And overall, that changes the design, quite surprisingly. So yeah, that's really beneficial of the new pipeline that we've got and any changes that we've made.

I think metrics are probably one of the biggest changes for every content team, not just weapons and props. As the game progresses, metrics get refined, better defined.

Also the female rig that we added, that also caused a couple of issues that we had to rethink or go back to older assets and change them a little bit. So you have the grip a little bit more towards the character, so the arm doesn't stretch too far to the front. And I think just things like that, that we didn't think about earlier.

I mean, I think the key is as well, the process keeps changing as we go. Like Dave said, you have the female rig, that adds some more steps in the process. You add attachments, you've then got to make sure you do all the attachment checks as you go as part of the pipeline. And then for the future stuff like magazine stripping, we've now got to think about the process and how that changes going forward. So it's constantly evolving and updating based off how the game changes.

It's very much the same on the prop side of it, really. If you take, for example, usables, a lot of assets that were previously considered just dressing, you could consider, it's going to be carryable, it might have power, it might have certain features associated with it. There are instances where we've created these assets purely as an art content team, we've created them as dressing, and then we're having to retroactively, as new features come online, consider how those impact our existing assets. We're a lot more conscious of getting ahead of the curve now than we were five years ago when it comes to, okay, I'm creating a new asset, there aren't any existing ones, let's make a template for it, make sure it gets signed off by the relevant departments. We're creating a usable and there's an existing asset, let's corral our library of assets and review them, and if there are inconsistencies, make sure we're correcting those. Basically, also just considering how to make...

And also there's one of those elements, especially with the props, that you dress an environment and then you get a designer or someone running around that environment and they're like, it'd actually be really cool if this asset would do X, Y or Z, or I could do a mission here and we could have whatever functionality we might then need. And it's like, yeah, cool, I just thought it was a bin, but okay, if we need to add support for additional things. There are things that we could do if we had the time to do them. Everything can function, but it's about seeing what's the most important for missions and that sort of stuff. But a lot of it, like I say, you get from just getting in the environment, running around, being like, oh, this would be really cool, and then that gets added to the 'can we have this feature, please?'