So what we're really talking about is medium-term, so what does proper persistence look like [with 3.8 and the full long-term persistence plan, the iCache]?

I would say that it's getting us away from the traditional concept of saving in a game where I have to explicitly save something at a particular point, and this is just becoming more realistic to where wherever you leave items, wherever you place items, they stay in perpetuity unless some other player, perhaps...

Or the system we decide to... There's too many cups in a location, and we know that'll be a problem when we stream it back in, so we clean up a few before we stream them.

I thought you were going to talk about a janitor coming around and cleaning up my cups.

Well, it depends on what you're talking about. It's like you would expect realistically if you left a cup on a table in a place, it's like, yes, that's going to be gone the next day. And there will be mechanisms for all of these, so if you're actually there to witness it, then at some point there is going to be a janitor, he's going to come in and he's going to grab that cup and put it over in the sink, et cetera, et cetera.

But the difference beyond 3.8, the iCache system that we're talking about is not only saving it essentially in memory or off in the local cache database, but to a back-end cloud database, so that if you came back a month later, it can be retrieved from the database, and then when you come to that area, the state is the same. I think the really cool thing with long-term persistence is that that allows us to almost shape the world with this persistence. As a player, I could make a homestead on a planet, build myself a little outpost or a hut or deploy some defenses or place that there, go back, come back, and my home's still there as long as someone else...

Right, and to be clear, it's not just the you thing. It's like, well, if you build that homestead in the middle of nowhere and someone happens to stumble upon it, then they can interact with it, they can raze it to the ground, they can customize it, they can have them and their friends move in. It's like, you don't really know what the state's going to be when you leave things out in these public places.

It's completely emergent behavior that's kind of like what you would see...

In the real world, really. These are all actually very simple things to leverage this long-term persistent functionality.

Yeah, and it sounds so simple, but the emergence of it is incredible.

That's exactly it, but that's what we do so often, which is we build in the low-level, the fundamental mechanics, and then you get all of this complex functionality that just naturally results.

I think the key is our planets are fully realized. Every single square inch is realized on them. There's a vast amount of real estate and it's great. I mean, we're going to be working hard and we build tools to populate this stuff and put outposts, but if the players themselves can also be doing their stuff and creating outposts or bases, then this whole world becomes alive and breathing.