Amazon and Smilegate RPG Detail Lost Ark Update Cadence and Partnership to Bring Updates Faster

mmorpg.com:

Details on the pace of balance changes and base build updates for Lost Ark is the subject of a new devblog detailing how Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games work on the Western build. The post focuses on base build updates and why the pace of updates is sometimes slowed down. 

Since Lost Ark’s original Korean launch, the game has made it to a global release. Smilegate RPG’s deal with Amazon Games sees update planning as a major consideration. One of those considerations is the number of changes in the biggest updates, what they refer to as “base builds”. The latest base build arrived this month, and has hundreds of changes to nearly every system across the game. To give an idea of how long some changes might take to surface in the global build, this base build has features from patches to the Korean version that were released between early July and mid-September. 

Base build updates touch so much of the game, from things players can see to backend updates, and most quality of life and balance change patches. The November update is in place, and we’ll see another base build update 

Of course, given that the initial updates are for the Korean version, some of those patches don't have content or updates that are relevant to the Western build so before it gets shared to the global version, some things need to be removed. Removing a number of changes from a large patch means that they have to test it all over again. 

This is another reason why calls for more simultaneous changes and for  content from the Korean version to make it over to the global build faster aren’t simple. There have been a number of ways that Smilegate and Amazon have  altered this cadence, such as when endgame raid changes andChaos Gate updates were more