So why do we have a beta for this long for classic? Me curious

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I am no software engineer so excuse my ignorance but, Was beta even needed?

Just odd having a beta for this long for something that has already been developed in the past.

Did they have to re-code the code?

I’m just curious,

thank you :slight_smile:

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They had to take a Square peg (1.12 code) and hammer it into a round hole (current code base)

So yes. . Lots of regression to go over.

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From what I understand most of the original game was missing/lost. Specifically the scripting on the server side. Classic runs on the legion engine and not the old vanilla game engine.

So technically yes, the did re-code the code.

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:ant::honeybee::beetle::cricket::mosquito:

Because of these.

And there are a lot of them. My poor Hunter is in a sorry state at the moment.

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Thank you I am now a informed gnome.

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There is most likely a small team trying to rebuild one of the biggest MMO in history to work with modern architecture. Really, 3 months of beta is probably too short a time frame to accomplish this.

Go back and try to build a ten year old Lego set and see if you can find all the pieces, let alone rebuilding this beautiful monstrosity.

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Sorry for asking questions I don’t know the answer too you mean fat bear.

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Oof! That was meant as a rare non-snarky answer. Nothing but love for ya, you small hairy football -:heart:

Hope to see you in Classic Azaroth my friend.

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No matter how confident developers are in their work something always goes wrong. It’s not just something that’s likely, it’s inevitable.

So yeah, a certain level of quality assurance is required. Quality video games always have a beta phase.

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Don’t listen to people on the forums. They don’t always give the full info.

That link I posted gives a glimpse of the work they had to do. They did use the Legion client but at some point the switched over to the BfA client.

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Nothing worst as a QA lead to get a phone call in the middle of the night they pushed a release to find a bug you did not discover. . Nothing!

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As a software engineer, it seems perfectly natural to me.

a) They redesigned the data interface. As they described in the Dev Watercooler, that required a lot of checking and adjusting to match.
b) They literally had to look at every single thing in the game and check for purple. Previously, a textureless item was White, but they changed it to Purple for ease of spotting. However… the original Devs used the inherent white-ness for lights and such, so some lights simply didn’t have textures.
c) Layering is new development.
d) They rebuilt the Retail client to work for Classic, meaning they had to go through and rip whole wodges out of it, without breaking it.
e) They had to redesign parts of the WoW engine for old elements like Weapon Skills, Spell Power and Healing Power, as well as ensuring that all the old calculations worked as they were.

This was not a “Re-deploy the old server code” sort of deal. They have a reference client to compare to, but a lot of the server we’ll be running on is the modern infrastructure, so there’s a lot of work to check.

If I was provisioning the team for this, I’d be putting more testers than developers in it, but then… that’s what Beta’s for :smiley:

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With what we’ve found, yes!

Imagine we only got a 1month beta would that group of testers have had enough time to gather enough evidence that the client was scaling weapons with Retails calculations before the servers went live?

Hunters?

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This is not a long beta at all.

Some games never get out of beta and fall into becoming micro transaction money traps.

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You just couldn’t resist being a cynic could you?

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Don’t forget they caulked the top to make it look good and make it “water tight”. Caulk is King baby!

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Padre eyes Hash suspiciously That you mom?

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Some games turn into vaporware and never get launched.

Yep, Classic is vaporware.

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They’re running 15 year old code on machines with wildly different specs and completely different operating systems than it was designed for, using with modern code that has been worked on and patched for 15 years. Try taking a physical copy of a game, any game, from 2004, and try running it on your PC today. Chances are, it won’t even be able to read the thing, and certainly won’t run it. The fact that we have something that is playable, and not a complete mess, is a credit to the devs who have been working on this.