How's instancing going?

Very good, actually. We actually had a summit this week about instancing, about getting all of the levels set up to support it. So maybe I can do a quick recap on what we've discussed on instancing before. So we talked about server meshing, right? So instancing is basically an additional system on top of server meshing, which allows us to take an area of space and give it to a server in the mesh to manage, right? Doesn't matter which one. The geographical, the spatial position of this thing doesn't matter. So for example, when you go to your hangar right now, that is an instance. So what we're doing is we're taking this system and we're making a true instance manager with it. So we currently have the backend service completed for this. And so what that provides is the mechanism for creating an instance that is associated with you or your party, and having rules for how many players this instance is made for, enforcing player caps and party caps for that instance, managing the life cycle of the instance. So, go back to my WoW days, I mean, maybe that's dated now, but your Molten Core instance lives for 10 days, right? So the instance manager is in charge of doing that. So that system's in place now. And so the teams are currently working on how the entrance to the instance is going to work. Well, we know how it's going to work, but how it ties into the level. So level designers put in an entranceway. At what point are you crossing the boundary? What brings you to the instance? What brings you out? Transport is a requirement for instancing. So it just ties into all the discussion we just had. Transit cannot bring you to an instance, but transport can. So you can imagine an area of space that you walk into through an airlock or an elevator or a transit train. And when you come out, you're in the instance, but you don't even see the demarcations. Now you're inside the instance. You play inside the instance. You can gather items, inventories, whatever, boss fights, et cetera. And then you can exit through another transit link. And that's it. You're back in the world.

So if we do this right, you should never be aware that you're doing it. We might have to put some kind of indicator on there because of raid locks or whatever. There might have to be some UI stuff to tell you.

Some screens will show you like, oh, you can't enter this.

But from an experience standpoint, there's no load screen. There's no, hold on, please wait, we're transferring you. You're going to go, and suddenly the world around you is going to melt away and you will be in a section of the universe that is dedicated entirely to you and your party.

Exactly. To play it, right? And then we're also talking at the moment about how the instance manager responds to the mission system, because we might want to be able to change what level you're going into when you pass the threshold, or things like that. Or the access rights, right? So if you think back, man, I keep going back to WoW, but whatever. In the good old WoW days, you need to do Lower Blackrock Spire. At some point, someone has a key. That's the requirement that unlocks Upper Blackrock Spire. Well, we're thinking about mechanics in that vein that allow the mission system to lock or unlock access rights to an instance. And so all of this is currently being managed, but it's going really well. Most of the networking capabilities that we needed have been added already. So one of them is that currently when you go to your hangar instance, the way the server actually tracks that is we put a flag on your character that enables you to stream in your hangar and actually view your hangar when you go there. And we remove that flag when you leave it or when the hangar is removed. And so in the code up to now, we only have the ability for a single one of those on your character. So we can only give you access to one instance. But we need to be able to give you access to multiple instances, because we might have areas of transit that cross from one instance to another instance, things like that. We're going a bit deep with this. At the moment, those mechanics are ready, so the networking bit is done. So now we're really about crafting the first experience that we want to do with instancing.

And the first instanced content will be Siege of Orison Redux.

We announced that.

I can tell you, from being with the team this week working on instancing, everybody's super stoked. The energy is really high on how you enter it, how you exit it, what gameplay is going to be in it. There's also a big piece of this, which is that designers, in this case, can design an experience that is repeatable. Most of the content we've produced this year, there's a PvE experience for it, but it's fundamentally in a PvP zone. So this is giving them those tools to make something that's fun and repeatable as an experience. And I mean, the energy is really good.