Hi ename144, given the fact that the upcoming update is supposed to only be the exhibition and was supposed to be included in the last update, I gather it should be a short update, right ? Given what you know, when would you guess the update to be released on a 2-month window ?
That's not an easy question to answer as this is a fairly unprecedented situation. TD and GIL have stated their desire to get Chapter 4 Update 7 out in a four months dev cycle (which would be around Valentine's Day) so I presume they're making a concerted effort to keep the update lean and mean. Even so, it's not clear exactly how much work there is to be done - much less how to translate that into a chartable metric. Chapter 2 Update 2 was the first week's Exhibition, and had 1906 static images. Granted, that was the entire evening whereas Chapter 4 Update 7 is just the stage portion, but there were no animations back then and I assume we'll still have a bit more branching this time. So let's use that as a benchmark for our wild guesses.
The last dev diary said 435 statics have been completed so we'd have about 1471 to go. At their present overall average pace (somewhere around 50 statics/week), that would take about 29 weeks to complete. Of course the current average is well below what they're capable of; they averaged ~75 statics/week during development of Ch4Up6, and can easily hit peaks of 120+ for shorter periods. So they could plausibly crank out all the statics in as little as 11 weeks - and that's ignoring the possibility that the update might not need that many.
If we stick to a 1400 number, all this would give us a rough ballpark of 11-29 weeks (plus a couple weeks for wrap up and testing). That's not a particularly useful estimate, and it's notably on the longer side: 10 weeks from last dev diary would be February 22, 2026. But what that says to me is that this update is likely to go over the desired deadline. In order to hit the desired 4 month cycle, the devs will need either to hit their stride pretty soon and maintain it throughout the cycle, or will need to keep the total content in the update very streamlined. Neither of those are impossible by any means, but with the holidays taking a little of everyone's time and with the increased complexity of the game at this point, I think it's more likely that the schedule will err on the longer side.
Now just to be clear, this is not me throwing shade at our devs. TD and GIL are awesome! I believe they are doing their level best to get this update out ASAP, and it's entirely possible they will succeed. But looking at where we are at the moment and trying to guess what they have in mind for the chapter finale, my personal feeling is that the compromises necessary to keep the update to a four month cycle will ultimately prove a little too high a price to pay, so our devs will err on the side of giving us the best material they can even if it takes a little longer. If you want to put a date on it, maybe sometime in mid-March as a rough release date.
But that's just a wild guess. We just don't have enough info at this time to bring the error bars down to a reasonable level. Personally, I don't think it's worth worrying too much about the deadline: as long as the quality is there (and that has never been a problem in this game), the devs can take as long as they need in my book. But obviously we'd all be happy to get the update sooner, and it may turn out that the stage portion of the Exhibition takes a lot less artwork than I'm expecting. We'll just have to keep our fingers crossed and see what happens.
