What about VR physical interaction? Is full physics-based VR interaction (grabbing, lifting, throwing objects and NPCs) part of the long-term vision?

I would say it's part of the long-term vision, but how we get there is a whole conversation happening right now. As the community is aware, VR is super new. Super new for us. It's just gone out in 4.5. Sylvan's done a phenomenal job on his own to get that working, OpenXR, awesome, right? But no controller support, right? And it's like the first thing you want to do, because already it's incredible when you go into it. I'll just talk about sitting in a cockpit, which is cool enough, right? You're sitting in the cockpit with your mouse and keyboard like this, right? But you see the character inside the cockpit is holding the joystick, holding the throttle. And you lean and stuff with the VR and it sees you moving and your character's moving inside the room. And all of a sudden you're moving the mouse and the keyboard and it doesn't feel right. You want to have controllers or you want to have your own actual joysticks or whatnot. But the immersion it gives you, and the things you notice in VR that you don't notice when you're just playing on a screen, it begs the need to grab it, to interact with it, to see hands, to move it around. Now, technology-wise, it's not an impossibly hard problem, and it's kind of solved in some cases, in some games. There's a great VR game, it's not that obscure, a lot of people that are into VR know it: Boneworks. Boneworks has completely done this. Their characters can look crazy weird sometimes, especially in multiplayer, when you are doing these kind of things. So a lot of these things, just like FOIP, will come down to not our capacity, but our tolerance for wackiness, right? Because again, as soon as you're driving the hands, because you could absolutely do this now, you could drive the wrists, the joints anyways that you would need to of the given hands, and you could drive them around. Think of what that would look like right now, right? A guy's running through the 'verse like... So there's a lot of stuff to solve, right? To make this so that it makes sense. Because we are totally unified in first person and third person, it's all the same thing. So we can't just show you one thing in first person, like your hand tracking, and it works and it looks amazing. That's kind of how Half-Life: Alyx works, which is an incredible VR experience. That is a bar to achieve just by itself. People will see you in third person doing these kind of things. So that's going to be a tricky thing. So it is something that we want Sylvan to be involved with. We want to start talking to design about it, try to work out how this is gonna work, because it's also not just about supporting one set of controllers. It's about supporting all the sets of controllers that are gonna do it. We've already had a tricky enough time supporting the gamepad, let alone these extraneous devices on top of it. So I think the interaction, it's impossible to say no, because you want it so bad when you are doing VR.

It's one of those things where, and I promise everybody, there will be a time where we'll have Sylvan in this chair and we'll do a whole thing about VR. We're going to let it continue to mature a little bit more and know a bit more about where we're going before we subject him to such things. But if you've spent any serious amount of time with Chris Roberts, you said our tolerance for silliness and whatnot, it's never going to be just okay. It's never going to be, oh, that's enough and we can just sit there. We're gonna push, and we're gonna keep pushing. Occasionally, chat, there'll always be somebody in chat talking about how are they still figuring this thing out in the year of our Lord 2026 and whatnot. And that's because this project doesn't end. If we all have our way, we are making this game and continuing this game well beyond 1.0, well beyond 2.0, 3.0, just going on. It's like any other MMO. WoW is still going 20-some-odd years later. That's our aspiration. So when we talk about these things, the end goal is not 1.0 and you stop. And that's why sometimes the tense that we speak in can seem like we're already looking at and planning the thing that comes next, and the thing that comes next, and the thing that comes next. So at this point, it would be foolish to say no, it would never get to a point where you can grab things and interact with things.

But think about it. We have diegetic screens, we have diegetic UI, we have the cockpit. Of course, of course we need to do it at some point. But when, who, what? We don't have a VR team, right? So the timings and details, I just can't give. But to your point, which is so good, we have to look that far ahead because we have to make decisions now that we don't regret later. It's happened a lot, right, where we go, no, no, no, 1.0 is just gonna be this, so we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this, it's gonna be great. And then that changes, and we're like, shit, now I'm wrong. I say it this way internally sometimes to people: you will eventually be made to be wrong at some point. Just try to project yourself as far as you can so you're not.

It's the number of times we've hit something because of a decision that was made two years, three years, four years, five years ago. And it was made back then with the best of intentions, with all of the knowledge and experience and foresight that we could have had back then. And then you just go, oh, well, we could either accept that, or we can rework the inventory for the third time or the fourth time. And we don't accept it. If we can make something better, we're going to make something better.

And we're not going to sell it short. That's what Chris says. I'm with him. I get it. Does it suck to eat that sometimes? Yeah, it does. But in the end, it does work out. And you've got to trust that.