I want to talk about the character customization. We just released our public roadmap, and people have seen that character customization is slated for 3.1. You talked a bit earlier about how sometimes something is done on the development side, but the implementation side is still waiting. I think the character customizer probably falls as a pretty good example.
TL;DRThe first character customizer is meant to offer just basic options like head, hair, eyes and colors; the assets were ready, but the interface wasn't good enough, so a cross-discipline feature team now works on it.
Yeah. And that one, of course, the expectations of the customizer right out of the gate are pretty direct. And if you look again, to go to Forrest's point, looking at what everybody else is doing is a really important part of this. You look at games like Black Desert Online, or you look at games like Destiny, and everybody approaches them a little bit differently. And as we want to do this, very much out of the gate, we just want some form of customization. Just select a head, select some hair, select some eyes, and set the colors.
For the first part.
For the first part, then call that a day. But even at that, let's say, limited customization experience, you can still make mistakes on the way there. And some mistakes would be an interface that isn't as intuitive as you would like, even for that kind of thing, as well as making sure that whatever system is developed is a totally scalable thing. And as I talked about a little bit before, because of all the different studios and different levels of communication from various teams, it can happen that a thing will be developed and it's not exactly what Chris was expecting or Todd was expecting or I was expecting. So basically it's gone to a full feature team now, which is a cross-discipline team of programmers and UI engineers and artists and everybody all together working on that. So they're progressing pretty nicely on it. But what's interesting is Gaige had already done the entirety of the asset setup months ago. I had done a show a little while ago, we do a lot of shows, and we had talked about that coming out very soon, and it was definitely a goal for 3.0, but it wasn't where we wanted it. And not, again, because the actual assets and things weren't ready. It was more the interface just wasn't where we're demanding the interface has to be for doing that. But yeah, Gaige, back in, I think it was October or November, really went through them all.
Actually, it's interesting about the customizer too, because we've always had our own version within the office called the Loadout Editor. But it's just not something that you'd want to give to people, because it's not a very friendly interface at all. So the hardest part was making it a nice interface for the user while also accommodating scalability for the massive amount of assets that we have. Because we have it on our end, but it's very difficult, and we build onto it constantly. So just dishing that out wouldn't be great early on. Like I said, didn't want to rush it. But an interesting part about that is it comes in a few stages. We always have our first step of character artists. They make everything on their end in models. Then we have our implementation phase, which we've been doing in the back end for a long time now. And then there's the UI phase.
UI is always there at the end.
Yeah, and it's one of those things, because it's the visual element, it's something that is very picked on. So it goes through a lot of stages.