And after a… brief pause… back to our regularly scheduled programming!
Hello Netrunners, it’s been a busy period for NSG Production. Despite going quiet for a while on these production updates, we’ve been busy at work in the background facilitating delivery of the Liberation Cycle’s first set, The Automata Initiative. With that completed we’ve now turned our attention fully to delivering set 2.
We have consulted with the teams involved in production, and our new projection for the release of Set 2 of the Liberation Cycle is late Q1 2024.
While this does mean that we won’t release two sets this year, this is a deliberate choice. When we released the second set of the Borealis Cycle in December last year, we encountered a number of issues with delivering cards to players due to printers taking their holiday breaks and seasonal delays with the postal system. This meant that most players weren’t opening Parhelion until well into January. Releasing it in the new year instead would have lessened the gap between spoiler season and cards hitting the table, so we have opted to avoid a December release this time.
The new projection is also a response to some unanticipated slowdowns in the production of the Liberation Cycle. Adapting to our new production methodology, staff turnover, and development challenges all worked in tandem to delay our original release of The Automata Initiative and is hitting us hard for Set 2. This has prompted us to schedule a little later into Q1 than originally estimated but we will continue to persevere to deliver in a timely fashion. (Side note: you can help accomplish this by volunteering to work with us as discussed in a recent article.)
Milestones:
Since work has begun on Set 2 we have hit the following milestones
- 66% of cards have been mechanically concept locked, a key starting gun for the Narrative team to continue to assign names, art and general theme to individual cards.
- 12% of our cards have candidate names selected. This moves us along the road to full thematic lock.
- Final development of cards (full numbers and mechanics) is around 44% completed.
Progress on some of these cards was achieved earlier in the cycle’s production. The split of the cycle into sets 1 and 2 meant that some cards that were further along on thematic development were pushed to set 2 in order to benefit from more playtesting. This means that parts of set 2 were quite far along at the outset, and will make the latter stages of production smoother.
Here’s our latest Gantt chart, with the usual caveat that the dates are only projections and are subject to change.
New Gantt chart style as well, we’ve moved over to Airtable!
So, in summary: work on the set continues well, and we look forward to sharing more updates as the set’s development progresses.
That’s all from us for this month, see you next month for the next update and, until then: Always Be Running!
