Yeah. When-when you design a game that isn't totally linear, you know, that has - that has player-directed exploration, that has optional content, you just have to sign up for the fact that not everybody is going to see everything. But you know, once you're okay with that, it is a tool for prioritizing what is accessible by all players, versus only some players, versus very few players. And yeah, when you're - when you're making like an open world RPG, like Fallout 3 or something, you have to know like I'm making a side mission that you don't have to play to get to the end of the game. People aren't going to play it, you know, and so it can't contain critical information to your understanding of the world or the story or-or whatever. And you know, I really appreciated - I think this was actually probably an inspiration now that I think about it, in Fallout 3 specifically. The main quest at the beginning was to find your dad. And normally, you have to go to the city and then go to this other place, and go on like a long quest line to - spoilers - finally discover that there's a vault with like a secret entrance in a gas station, that you go down in the vault and find him. And I was a player where I got out of the vault and I was like I'm just going to do side missions and find stuff. And so I was just exploring the world, and I found this random gas station, and I went into the back of it, and I found a button that wasn't labeled and I pressed it, and I went down an elevator. And there was Dad, and they didn't block it off. They didn't say you have to have the secret password that you can only get from the quest before this one. They were like if you're an explorer and you could be a human being that would find this button in the real world, and you find it out of order, you just skipped half of our - our main quest line. And I'm talking about it now because that's so much more memorable and rewarding to me than it would have been to be forced to go through all of this - this core content. And I think that's the point, is that there's kind of an intangible recognition of the value of the variability between each player's experience, you know, and-and saying the fact that one player might experience this and another might not is really important, and it makes that individual player's experience feel more valuable because they're like this belongs to me. I only saw this because I chose to see it. And then also, it leads to discussions of like, "Did you see this?" "No, I didn't." You know, and-and more kind of a sharing I think of individual experiences between players can happen.
