There is a non-zero probability of it being near the end of 2027.

As it stands right now, the very last of the narrative audio is in the process of being recorded now. Once Milly gets the Narrative C audio to me, which she is hoping to have done by this Friday, then we move onto the dubbing. Mercy has a lot of dubbing to get done, with Sequence A having 1 section, Sequence B having 4 sections, and Sequence C having 8 sections. But, assuming Milly doesn't have any more emergencies complicating things, with 25 weeks till January 1 2027, and 13 sections to record, that'd average 2 weeks between sections. That is possible.

On Sombra's side, Cinder is currently recording Sequence C section 5, already halfway done. She already has all of her narrative audio recorded and installed, so once she finishes these last 3 sections, that will be all of Sombra's audio recorded. All of Moira's audio and Zarya's audio has already been recorded and installed.

At that point, the only major elements left to be done is lip-syncing (of which most of the narrative audio is already lip-synced) and polishing the existing animation. And if you've seen any of the WIPs posted over the years, you already know that the current blocking animation is already pretty high-fidelity, meaning not that much polish is needed. Then there's Emphasis and Detail animation, both of which I have greatly streamlined through writing tools to help speed up the Micro Video productions.

From there, the biggest question-mark, and the biggest time sink, is going to be sound design. I intend to do the sound design myself, because as much as I love working with Tonedeaf, and he is absolutely unambiguously a far better audio engineer than I am, he also very reasonably charges a rate reflective of his skill. And as it is, I am already expecting to lose thousands of dollars on Overbreed Episode 1 - I entertain absolutely no illusions that it will generate enough one-time Patreon subscriptions to offset its production cost. Having him sound design the whole thing would easily double the production cost, given the sheer scale of the project.

And while I am a competent sound designer, I am not a good sound designer - and more relevant to this discussion, I am not a fast sound designer. I did the sound design for the 15-minute To Breed And Bond video (not the series that is currently in the middle of releasing its first chapter). And that took me around a month of solid work to sound design. With Overbreed Episode 1 being 4 times as long, we can reasonably expect the sound design to take at least 4 times as long, which means we're looking at 4 months of sound design work. Optimistically.

That's already a third of a year right there. On an optimistic path where I get all of the remaining audio in and installed before January 1, 2027, that then leaves 8 months to polish, lip-sync, Emphasize, and Detail all of the animation.

That's actually fairly reasonable. At that point, most of the time-consuming animation work will have been done. It's only the lip-sync that will be laborious, and I have been working to incrementally chip away at that as the audio comes in.

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions baked into this. The longer it takes for audio to come in, and the more time it takes me to sound design, the less time is left for finishing the animation and getting it ready to render. But even if I only had 4 months, I can foresee a reality where I get all of the animation work done in that time.

All of which is why I say there is a non-zero probability for a Christmas 2027 release.

The probability shoots up dramatically for a 2028 release. I'd be really surprised (and really frustrated) if 2028 comes and goes without a release. I am all but certain it will be done before Christmas 2028.

Similarly, I'd be really surprised if it's ready any earlier than Q4 2027.

So, I guess I can say that I am feeling pretty confident that it will be sometime between Q4 2027 and Q3 2028.