On April 2nd at the Wyndham Hotel in Pittsburgh, PA, Creative Director Chris "Klaata" Klug was in a little room with a little buffet of snack bars sitting at a little table having a little chat with this reporter and four other players.

I'd like to note that any dates mentioned in this are absolutely not concrete. Not because he says so but because I say so. Do not take dates mentioned as hard fact. After all, look at what happened last time with 'hard fact' dates for features mere days before The Move was announced. Also, I have no tape recorder so there won't be any direct quotes.

When I arrived the first topic discussed was The Move and how it affected the team as a whole. Along with that discussion was the interesting view forum posters have. It has to be firmly planted that forums and such are a loud minority, and they can be brutal.

The Move was complex, moving 60-80 people, relocating them, their families, their possessions, and their work. Every single person has his or her own story. A couple examples include a programmer who, on Wednesday, got the news about The Move. The day after word, Thursday, he closed on his custom-built home in Las Vegas. He decided not to make the move.

Another example is a dev who came to Vegas with his wife working on the loose ends at their first home. Just days before she finished tying up those loose ends and joined him in Vegas, they got the news they're moving.

It was a way to share how the view that "the developers should've finished in three days" is rather misled. The Move was a big disruption to the work schedule, and that generally speaking, once the announcement was made on January 29th to approximately two weeks ago (the middle of March), there wasn't any work done. It's very difficult to think about work when one's worried about where they'll sleep.

Chris also talked about how E&B is considered a marginal success. It pays for itself, projections of growth and the business plan are more realistic, and with that declaration the future of the game is much less blurry. The change came about from the first story step since beta and EA had to realize that yes, a story does get player reaction. Literally overnight, the story step caused the forum’s longest thread ever to appear.

Another topic was the general mindset of Electronic Arts and the developer team. The terminology "patch" generally means in one's mind changes that fix things. Part of Chris' overall agenda is to get away from the mentality of patches and more to episodes, or chapters and verses. Current mentality is that if content gets "pushed off the plate" then at least the bug fixes will get in.

There's an architecture flaw that Chris hopes to address as part of his agenda. E&B, architecturally, is not designed to be "broadcast media." He gave this example: imagine the normal TV news broadcasting station. They broadcast twice a day, at 6 PM and 11 PM. So, during the day from 10 AM to midnight, there's always a team of reporters, anchors, technicians at the news studio. When a plane crashes up in the mountains, the anchor can put on a fresh blouse and she's live in moments.

Now, imagine if that news channel only did one broadcast a month. To cover that plane crash would be a huge undertaking, to call in the reporters to get on the scene, to call in the camera crew, to call in the anchor from her ski trip up in those mountains, etc. For this reason, patches are once a month. The lead programmer pulls a full 24-hour shift every patch day. The game is updated manually, and the entire process is time consuming. This is something Chris wants to change, to make E&B true entertainment instead of a shipped product.

The process of changing one thing, such as a dialogue tree, has to go through a long process. This is why currently, story changes only happen once a month because that's only as often they can happen. It's also the reason the patching schedule is so rigorous, it takes a big issue for an emergency patch to be put in because the programmer has to be called in, QA has to be called in, etc. Chris noted that the number of times he's read about something that happened in game on the forums and wished he could make changes reflecting it that night exceed the numbers of fingers he has.