WoW Classic made the 'radical change' to stop testing new content with players to bring back a sense of 'mystery and discovery'
Phase 3 launches for Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery today, and players will once again explore a WoW Classic update with no advance community testing. Not having a Public Test Realm (PTR) for Classic means some things will be broken, developers said in a PC Gamer interview—and that's okay.
Not just okay, Blizzard argued, but good, even.
«I think our whole team has been extremely pleased with not having PTRs,» said Clayton Stone, associate production director. «That was a radical change. Keeping that level of mystery and of discovery for Season of Discovery, with each phase that we roll out, has really created a moment every time for the whole player base to come together and experience something fresh together at the same time.»
Oddly, that means that players in the Classic version of World of Warcraft are sometimes seeing things with less notice or foreknowledge than players of the modern version. That can lead to some hiccups along the way.
«I recognize, and I think our players do, there's definitely an experimental nature that's inherent to the whole Season,» Stone said. «Players are also a little bit open to us experimenting, or things not working out exactly as we intended.»
The team plans for some live update time to go to fixing issues as they occur.
«We're able to hop right on and bring fixes and continue developing,» Stone said. It's impossible for the team to predict everything that might go wrong, even with advance testing in-house. Some things break when creative players get their hands on them. Sometimes problems only arise when a bunch of players descend on an area at once, as they did for the Stranglethorn Vale Blood Moon PvP event, which debuted in Season of Discovery Phase 2.
Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors.
«Occasionally our ambition outstretches our technical capabilities or the way WoW was originally crafted, particularly Classic WoW,» Stone said. «Even though we're trying to run
Read more on pcgamer.com
