3.18 is almost at the door. It's been six-plus months of trial and tribulation. Would you do it again?
TL;DRThey would do it again, though with some decisions changed; they call it a very difficult release but say it was worth it, and they are applying its lessons to server meshing.
In a second. I would do it again. I would do it differently in some cases.
It's the same for me. There's a few decisions we would have maybe changed.
I think because Guillaume didn't go through 3.0... 3.0 was a slog. But what came out at the end of it, I think, was something special. And obviously, we've built on that since then. So I think, again, with this, this is a slog. But what we've talked about in the beginning, we've learned a lot of things of, oh, no, we shouldn't have done that, or, oh, we should change this, or no, we did this really, really well. So there'll be production changes, development changes on this, but I think for this, it's just a means to an end. 3.0, it's not necessarily like a birth, but 3.0 was a little bit of teenage years, early teenage years. This is later teenage years. We're going through this growing process and going through these changes. So it's just how do we learn and how do we deal with it?
I wasn't there for 3.0, but for 3.18, I can say I've been in difficult situations and shipped difficult AAA games and whatnot. And I can say that the amount of complexity this release demonstrated and the amount of effort that the team had to put through was one of the more difficult ones I've seen in my career. I know it's been a while and the players are all waiting patiently. The silver lining in all this is that it's going to be worth it. Everything we're seeing from the players who are actually interacting with 3.18, it unlocks a whole lot of new gameplay situations. And I sincerely believe that in the future, in three, four, five years from now, we're going to see the release of 3.18 as an inflection point in Star Citizen's reality and what it delivered to the players. So it's been very difficult, and we would 100% do some things differently. And we're actually right now looking at server meshing and figuring out how we're changing some things and making sure that some of the errors from the past are not happening. So we're actually taking this into account, but it's definitely worth it.