Chris Roberts · Founder, CEO and Project Director

Well, we're making a big push to get it into 3.3. We were looking at it in 3.2. I just personally felt like we weren't there. The AI side of things in general is also an issue on Squadron; it's gone slower than we'd want it to. It's partly because we've sort of re-engineered this big system, because we need something that's dynamic on a level that you wouldn't normally... because normally on a lot of games, your AI is pretty focused. It can be fairly scripted around sort of the trajectory you're taking through that story or those levels. But for us, we need it much more systemic. And we've got this dual kind of master: we've got the PU, which really needs to be systemic and has all these different things. And then we've got Squadron, where we want an incredible level of detail in what they're doing, both combat and the social passive side, so they really feel alive, and you're with this crew really feeling them as real characters and people. And so there's a complexity that comes with that, but getting it all trickling down to the final functioning, with fluid transitions and animations and all that sort of stuff, has taken longer. And also, even though we have a lot of people, it doesn't mean that we have 100 AI programmers. We have three AI engineers. We'd like to have more, so if there's any great AI engineers out there... We're actually looking at taking our gameplay guys and saying, you know what, you're working on AI. And there's a certain amount of, you've got to get the system and the infrastructure in place to get it done. So that's just sort of been moving a little slower than we wanted, both for the ship stuff... I think we may have fixed some of the stuff, there was some broken recently in the PTU, but I know I've seen it on an internal build that we've fixed them, to be more challenging anyway, but that's a longer term thing as well. And so, yeah, it just felt like the experience... we didn't want to put in an experience that was a bit too rough around the edges. So we want to spend a bit more time to make it a bit more fluid and a bit more polished. Ultimately, like everything on Star Citizen or Squadron, I want that to be as good as any... you look at The Last of Us Part II and you go, wow, they did an awesome job on their animation and the fluidity of it. And that's the kind of stuff we look at and say, yes, we need to be doing that in our game. And we will. But yeah, it's just taken a bit longer than we thought. We've put together a pretty focused strike team to make sure that we get it for 3.3, because it's also quite critical for the stuff that we need in Squadron. Optimistic about having it be in 3.3, but...