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Does the roadmap cover everything, or only the big things?

TL;DRNo, the roadmap intentionally doesn't show everything, only features they're confident they can release, though it includes some ambitious ones, and uncertain R&D ideas are left off.

Eric Kieron DavisStudio Director and U.S. Production Lead

That's an interesting question. I'm pretty sure you can click that little caveats button and get that answer. But you want us to say it? We could say it too. I think, like I mentioned before, the goal with the roadmap is to show as much of it as we possibly can that makes sense for what we're trying to release for each upcoming release. No, it does not show everything, as we explained in the caveats. And like I said, I think even in the ATV and then just a moment ago, it depends on where the features are at. It depends on where the asset's at. It depends on how much R&D is left. The tough thing, and anyone that's worked on a creative project where there is prototyping or R&D necessary knows this, whether it's a game, or whether you're prototyping a new way to do something online, or you're prototyping a new way to tell a story, it doesn't matter. There's so many unknowns that, other than saying, can we do it in six weeks, there's no other more management or production you can do on it, because you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. But the moment you know, that's when we can really, right? Like once we've discovered the pipeline for ships, we can keep going back to that. Even though we've tweaked things over the years, we know what that is. We know when we bring a new ship artist in what they're going to do. There's so few unknowns. So no, it doesn't have everything. It has a good chunk of stuff, but it intentionally doesn't have everything.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

That we feel confident that we can include in these releases.

Dennis CrowSenior Producer

I think that's the big key. It's the stuff that we feel confident we can get out, and there are definitely things on there that are ambitious beyond what most other people would be comfortable sending out. That's why some of the other ones that came out weren't necessarily that way. But you can also think of, imagine that there's a feature that we weren't as confident with, but really could be cool if it would work. It's almost like a very R&D project where it's like, it's a 1 out of 10 chance this is going to work. But if it does, oh my god, it's great. But that kind of project, if you analyze it too much and you try to break it all down, it can kind of die. Sometimes ideas are fragile. So I think the roadmap is a really great suite of features that we feel pretty confident we can get out. I'd say very confident we can get out. There's definitely stretch stuff on there. There's definitely ambitious stuff. But you wouldn't want every brand new idea to be subject to that level of scrutiny, because it wouldn't be best for the game in the long term.

Reverse the Verse›LIVE - Production and the RSI Roadmap·
Published on this date.2 Mar 2018