Let's put this in context from the player perspective, how this will manifest for the player, starting with Squadron 42. Because you're now focused on Squadron before the PU, features get into Squadron more directly, and it allows you to focus on taking them from T0 to T1 to T2 all the way to complete for Squadron. It should be a huge boon for Squadron production and help us make Squadron not just a better game, but actually, frankly, get Squadron out the door[?]
TL;DRYes, getting Squadron 42 out sooner is a main intention, and features reaching the Persistent Universe should be more complete and have content, though some tiering may remain.
Absolutely. Get there sooner is one of the main intentions.
The other effect of this is, because we are now taking these features beyond tier zero, we're taking them to T1, T2, T3, all the way to 100% and then handing them over to the PU, it means that situations like you explained with body dragging, where a T0 feature comes out and you're like, well, that's all right, but there's really nothing to do with it. Or here's some trolleys, like, well, that's all right, but I can't load and unload cargo with it, whatever. It means that when the features make their way to the Persistent Universe, they should be more complete. They should have more content with which they can interact and affect. It means a better experience for the PU overall when these features get added.
Exactly. And I think that basically hits the nail on the head. The one nuanced thing I want to make sure that everybody's aware of is that, depending on the scope of the feature... so for example, let's take actor status, because actor status is a really good example. Actor status is an absolutely monumental feature. It covers a huge range of statuses and healing gameplay and Death of a Spaceman and cybernetics, and there's a huge amount. Within there, we still may take a proportion of that and call that actor status T0, but we take all of that up to what we'd expect to be hopefully final and then move to the next one. So we still might have tiering, but not in the true agile development tiering sense. Generally, a tier zero is like what we talked about, body dragging, which is a very self-contained mechanic. That would be, we've released that, but we know that we want to do direct improvements to that. Whereas actor status T0... well, actor status T0 actually was hypothermia, eating and drinking. We don't want to make changes to those. We just want to add more stuff. So in this scenario, we're adding a T1. We're not going back and making those different or improving them, which is generally what you would do in agile development. This is we're adding more stuff. So now we're adding healing and we're adding injuries. And then T2 is like tiredness and hygiene and all the other stuff. So when somebody might say, oh, well, this is a tier zero, but we talked about having final features, there's a nuanced mechanic. And that's why I'm saying we're talking at a high level, as a global. There's always going to be exceptions to the rule. And there's always going to be scenarios where we are just using that terminology to make sense for the tracking. But really, you could call those totally different features, for example. You could call actor status a tier zero: that's hunger and thirst and temperature mechanics. And then T1 is, this is healing and injuries. They're totally separate. But just because we've called them actor status T0 and actor status T1... so it's a nuanced thing. But, yeah, the TL;DR is hopefully Squadron will come sooner and you'll get better features in the PU.