All of this loot has to be physicalized. Does this make your job easier or harder?

Yes, it makes it a lot harder for sure. There are different layers to the physicalization as well. Just saying it takes up space, that means even within an inventory, we are measuring the dimensions of the item and the volume that it will take up, so that you can't fit a super long thing in a really small box even if its volume would technically fit. So that gives more work for me to do in terms of the maths internally. But then there are more level design and system design perspectives on this as well, which Luke might be able to say more about, of how we choose between when we're going to present the item to you physically in the world or when we're going to present you with a loot box that you have to look inside.

You asked, does it make it harder? I think it makes it harder for everyone, even the players, but especially the devs. Because we have been physicalizing certain items. It's always the items that are particularly rare or useful. If we want to draw your attention to something, we'll put it in the world. We do that in an eye-catching way within the level. So in Align and Mine we placed vault weapons in gun racks. Recently those got lit consistently to really show off what's inside there. And again, the radiation suit is now available on a mannequin. And we'll be using that quite often, I think, from now on, and going back through and placing it. But the other reason, other than technical reasons, we don't want physicalized loot everywhere is because loot boxes solve all the downsides of that. You can group items together, and they're in an easily recognizable package, a big red box, whatever. Physicalized items, you can easily mistake those for static props on tables and maybe miss them. It massively speeds up the jobs of level designers and artists to place these things around. Imagine placing individual pieces all over tables, making sure you've got room for them. And then it makes my job easier, because if anything changes in loot, we don't have to go back through every level and delete individual bits and pieces. I just change what's going to spawn in the box that's there. And then finally, it just hides the respawning of bits and pieces. Nothing pops in on tables. We refresh in the box.

It's a difficult thing to balance because, as Luke says, it does make our life harder and it can sometimes make the players' life harder, but it can also make the experience better. When we're designing things like Stormbreaker and Align and Mine, you think back to playing games when I was a kid. A loot room should feel like a loot room, right? Instead of me just seeing a bunch of red boxes and knowing it's a chance of rare loot, I want to see the gold stacked up on a table. I want to walk in and I want to see a vault shotgun or a vault sniper rifle in a case in front of me, because it gives two things. It gives affordance to players, because when they look through the window, they see the reward that they want and they know the door's locked. Aside from you all clipping through environments, the normal flow would be that you then have to go and figure out how to get through that door, usually without breaking physics. So it's kind of a toss-up between the two. So what we try to do is choose what we think could be something that we'd want the player to latch onto visually and think, I want to achieve that, I want to get that. And that's why in some places we have the vault weaponry visible, so people can see it and get into it. And we have a few armor mannequins that are the same. I can see it, I want it, how do I get to it?