How challenging is it to write for procedural or branching mission chains?

Oh, very, very hard. That's one of the big challenges that we face in Squadron 42 and the PU content: covering a broader situation. It's always a balancing act. You can think of thousands of things that might happen, but you can't write that many lines and expect them to get recorded and implemented, and do it for multiple voices. So then you try to categorize them together. So, oh, when the player does this kind of thing, these four lines would be appropriate responses to it. And then the more branching you have, you have to decide whether you're going to allow different outcomes or whether it's going to feed back into itself, so that you can guarantee that players will wind up back at the same place. And then we start getting more into the procedural snippets, which we've been exploring a lot more with the 3.0 development: taking pieces of character and dialogue that can work in a system where our manager system is telling what is going to happen next. Like, we are creating a piece of cargo that needs to be taken here; when that mission is created, what are the lines that cover you being informed about it, and the puzzle pieces that go into creating that. It has been a real fun challenge and hopefully we will get to show that stuff off more coming up.