John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We've said this a few times, but as you said, it's always someone's first show. When it comes to the backlog ships, quite a few years ago, we decided that we're not just going to release ships that don't have their gameplay loop, or their main gameplay loop. And for a lot of those older backlog ships, they rely on features or gameplay loops that just simply aren't in the game or won't be in the game within the period of time it's going to take to make that vehicle. I can't remember how many backlog ships we did this year, but I know the backlog has gone down because of it. We've not added to it. It's net decreased. So when you look at the ones that are left, there is a sizable proportion of those that fall into that camp of, they require a feature or gameplay loop. And we don't want to start and go through a whole vehicle, get to the end and not be able to release it. We'd rather use that time and resources to do other things. So the backlog pool of ships to pull from is relatively slim. So that has to be balanced against: we've got 11 patches this year, we want to have a ship in every patch, we've got Fleet Week and IAE, which we need to have a lot of ships in. So it's always a back and forth of shiny new content, upgrading older content with gold standards, and then delivering backlogged ships.