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We would very much love to do more of these! The Art Team has found them absolutely invaluable to the process and getting to build something this significant with all of you has been a blast. Plus, we all need more Mod Iroh in our life right?
The reason we've been radio silent on the project for a while now is a technical issue that emerged in the full production phase that didn't rear it's head in the proof of concept tests.
What we've found is the various components that make up a head (ie. head, hair, beards/lower face, hats, helmet etc) were not built in one standard format over the past 20 years. This wasn't present for any of the content used for the Proof of Concept testing. When we went to test implementing this across all our content, we've found a lot of issues related to this that need resolving before we can bring this into the game.
Given that technical challenge wasn't caught at proof of concept, that means a lot of additional QA/dev work that wasn't scoped for in our current production plans. That doesn't mean it's off the table, but it does mean a longer wait between updates as we find the opportunities to work on it around all the major updates for the game.
We will hopefully be talking about it again soon, but no date to provide just yet. In the meantime, we are looking to see if we can potentially pull together an Art Team Steam in the near future to provide some insights into other projects that have been progressing alongside this too!