New World Team Breaks Down How Content is Finalized for Release, and Even a Post-Release Fix

mmorpg.com:

The latestNew World Forged in Aeternum is a discussion on all things finalizing a release. From the outside, development teams release content, delay content, sometimes break up content to get part of it out first. Theteam discusses the process of testing, finalizing, and deciding when something is ready for release.

They take us into the process of planning and developing some content and then the ‘now what’ aspect of how they get to the final release and any needed follow ups. Release dates also include scheduling out content goals, so development, testing, and troubleshooting has to fall within that schedule. According to Derek Hernandez, once they have the bulk of the content done, they ”fork” the next process into both sending everything to the QA team and preparing the Public Test Realm release. Both, of course, help the team to make any needed changes and polish it all up into a final form. 

QA testing is also done in two forms–development work, and for release prep,so this adds even more layers on the technical side to getting something new ready. The discussion features Michael Corpora, QA Manager, who breaks down the process, in part, by looking at the whole first. He brings in the change that is occurring in the entire game to make sure that even things that weren't changed or focused on the new content release are all still working exactly as expected so that all the new features can integrate seamlessly. 

In the accompanying devblog that goes along with this week's video, Corpora goes into “the journey of a patch note”. Using an example of a December 2022 Winter Convergence Festival update, Corpora breaks down how, after release, they approached a bug that was preventing some players from accessing event