Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Beta is Here! Not Much Has Changed!

The BFA Beta has officially begun. What that means for those of us who have been testing in the Alpha is simply that our characters have been wiped. Thankfully, they say they don't plan to do this again. We cannot currently copy over our existing characters, so it's back to square one.

The build itself does not appear to be significantly different, with a lot of the same bugs and issues still affecting it. The one major thing I've noticed is that some of the Battle of Lordaeron scenario parts are balanced a bit better.

So what have we got?

Right now I think all but a couple of the dungeons are open for testing. I believe Siege of Boralus and King's Rest remain to be opened. They've done some testing for Uldir, though I believe only one boss.

A lot of what is missing is polish to the leveling zones like adding voiceover lines and stitching up some broken terrain.

We're now just under four months away from the expansion's launch, and I think Blizzard will be pretty busy.

We can probably expect the pre-patch to land about a month or a month and a half before the launch of the expansion, which means I'm going to have to start really grinding away at Highlord Kruul when the Mage Tower is up.

My guess about the sequence of events is that we'll likely see the Burning of Teldrassil two weeks before the expansion launches, and then the Siege of Lordaeron one week out, so that the scenarios that lead into the new continents will be available when the expansion officially launches.

If the pre-patch comes out at six weeks before the expansion, that would put it some time around the beginning of July, which means that most of the testing needs to be done in the next two months, as we're getting close to May here.

And of course the PTR for 8.0 has got to be up for a bit before the patch comes out - I'd guess around the beginning of June.

The timetable is getting pretty small, so I'd keep a close eye on new Beta builds. There's a lot to get in there.

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