Go Behind the Scenes of New World's Minor Updates, Their Role, and Even Misconceptions

mmorpg.com:

The New World team discusses how they approach updates this week, with a focus on planning minor updates, those content updates that occur in between the big, new shiny content patches. These are also now particularly relevant now that we are in the middle of the first season, with the next update upon us and the Fury of the Spriggan event starting on Wednesday.

This is the subject of the latest Forged in Aeternum episode, and details a little more of the behind the scenes work that goes into update planning. They’ve had some other episodes detailing updates,  seasons and other reason why sometimes fixes or featuresmight take some more time than you think, due to needed work by multiple teams, but this week it’s a short and sweet kind of explainer. 

Major updates are the huge content updates that essentially bring something new and big into New World , including new systems, new events, and a whole bunch of things to do. Minor updates are the more frequent in-between updates that include quality of life changes, bug fixes, sometimes balance tweaks, but they aren't the new and shiny big stuff but can sometimes be more of a housekeeping update. 

Live Operations Lead Producer Derek Hernandez says that minor updates, as opposed to the major ones that take months of planning and teamwork, “allow us to have a little bit of agility in terms of reacting to what the players are experiencing in the now”. The minor updates are also for high priority (but sometimes not the most urgent) fixes.

There’s an accompanying devblog with examples on a different kind of update that contributes to the development and maintenance process. This is all about “fast patches”, things that need to be fixed ASAP, and how they evaluate which