John, with this kind of cadence, from a team's perspective, how does this impact the vehicle [team]?

Aside from obviously giving us more time, by doing it as a six-month or longer block, you strip out those multiple planning and, not testing, but preparing for releases. If you're doing the feature in a quarter, you lose time for planning for that quarter and for testing that quarter. You string them together, you can strip that middle bit out and spend that on development instead. And it helps move away from developing features as a checklist of features, like 'we want to do X and Y in the game'. If you do it in this very specific order, knowing these caveats, you can do it, but that doesn't make it a fun and exciting experience. And we've got a huge amount of features in the game that, if we tweak and polish those, will just work together so much more nicely, and then the whole overall experience becomes a lot better.

When we put new features in now, we don't have the time and things break and it's frustrating; we want to get away from that. Now when we deliver, my huge drive is to make sure that from now on, every time we deliver, it is better than the last quarter you had. We felt like the last quarter or two, because we pushed some stuff in, it wasn't quite as good as we'd like.

And some of this comes from the community, some of it comes even from the developers internally. A lot of times we do a lot of postmortems, we do a lot of feedback gathering, and we ourselves know these things, but how can we make the experience good for the developers, for the community, but then also get the game to where we feel like it should be?

Like I talked about earlier, you're moving away from just ticking off a feature and saying technically it's done, that feature works, but you have to work around it by doing this, this and that. It allows people to have more pride and just a great feeling about doing this thing: this is a feature that I've worked on for six months and it works great, so now I'm happy for people to play it. Rather than: I was told I had to do this feature, and this is what was provided in the time, and I know it's not... this is all I could do at the time, we wanted it out.

And a lot of that is about getting stuff in. There'll be a lot of different cool stuff: getting the economy working properly, getting a bunch of missions working properly, getting the AI working properly, getting lots of locations on the planets with all the different feature sets we have for creating. We've got this wonderful planetary tech, which allows us to basically just create everything on the fly, and the locations on the fly. Get all that stuff working. If we get that stuff working, then we have an amazing gameplay experience, and then we can provide features and content and gameplay for years to come to really make this incredible universe we're doing.