All good, thank you!
In terms of where I'm most nervous about us doing things well... it's hard to say, really. The biggest worry is always making sure that things gel together and turn out to be more than the sum of their parts, rather than less. If we nail four great subsystems but have a weak fifth one and plus it all doesn't really fit together well or is too confusing when taken in aggregate... well, then we've still really screwed up.
Regarding art, I'm not worried about it at all because that ship has sailed. We're well into production on that, and I think the style is gorgeous. I think a lot of people will really like it, although I'm 100% certain that some people will hate it to various degrees, some with a passion. Such is life. I personally think this is the best-looking game that we've ever done, and I can't ask for more than that.
Diplomacy is certainly a loaded gun that usually has a tendency to backfire on the bearer, though, I will say that. Based on actually talking to folks and reading about their interests and their complaints with other games in the genre has inspired me in some different directions than I originally had for the diplomatic aspects. So that's been a positive thing, and in some ways took some pressure off because now I have an idea that I'm truly excited about with that part of the game, and which I think is a novel way to handle this in general. Here again some people will inevitably be disappointed because they are going to imagine a system that is "just like game X that I love, but with 3000% more content and a pony," and there's not much I can do about that.
Early expectations are something I used to stress about more than I used to. The fact is, most of our customers won't have heard about the game prior to it launching, so for them they'll just judge it on its merits. For a lot of the rest of our customers, they'll hear about it, and then mostly forget about what their expectations were, then rediscover it. For the others, their expectations may be heightened now, and that's a risky thing for me, but there's not much I can do about it. Either way it doesn't change what my job is, because it's not like I'd slack off if people weren't watching now -- they're going to see it eventually one way or the other.
