Theaters of War seems like a natural fit; the whole idea of it would make for an excellent experimental mode. Are we doing it? What's the plan here?

Yes, for my heart. Oh my goodness. I need this. I need this for my soul. I need this to go to the experimental mode, the exact map, Crossroads of Crime, that we had been developing and continue to develop and kept in decent enough shape that it can be wrapped up and it can be shipped. So we want to get that done and get that into an experimental mode. We want to get it done.

Yeah, I mean, Theaters of War is near and dear to my heart. Spent many years working on it. We playtested it every single week with the company. And it's one of those things I look back on, similar to my experience with the vehicle team: why aren't players involved? There are shortcomings of it. But with experimental modes, hopefully we can have that caveat. We can bring the player cap down. We want to target 50-plus or whatever it may be players. But for now, we're going to try 20 because the performance is more acceptable and so on and so forth. But yeah, we need to get it out there. It's been in the cooker for far too long. Players just need to experience it. We need to continue developing it. And part of stage one, laying the foundations, which we've been experiencing up till 3.20, is all about getting those critical refactors that were maybe holding some critical things back with Theaters of War and other things that we want to work on. And we simply needed to take that time, do those refactors, and then we can visit the big exciting things. Because otherwise, everyone wants to work on the big exciting things. That's a given. No one really wants to do these fundamental refactors of very low-end code that doesn't give immediate results. But now that we finally have done these things and they're coming to a close this year, we can unlock the potential of all the things that we want to do, and included in that is Theaters of War.

Yeah. And Duncan said it. And the way I said it was my appetite at this point for cuts and chops to make it so that we can get this so that it's shippable, so that we weren't just having everything that we wanted, and we weren't making any cuts, and we weren't going to move anything. No. We want to get this out to the players.

So I think there was a statement made maybe just two weeks ago, probably somewhere around June 28th: Theaters of War is being worked on. Our immediate focus is on improving these features and getting this new foundation for Arena Commander underway, then working on things like multi-crew spawning and all that stuff. But as for the ToW game mode itself, we want to bring it back to a playable state because you can't leave it too long. Things decay. You can't ignore it for too long. You don't want it to fall into disrepair and it just can't be used. So the team's going to return back and put some focus on that with the hope of returning it as an experimental mode sometime in the future. I'm not gonna say any period of time.