Amazon Games has released the latest episode of Forged in Aeternum, the video series that takes players behind the scenes of the development of New World, the company’s MMORPG set in the mysterious and magical land of Aeternum. In episode 27, host Katy Kaszynski, along with Michael Corpora, QA Manager, and Derek Hernandez, Live Operations, discuss the process of finalizing a release.

The episode’s theme is testing, testing, and testing, with the team diving deep into the public test realm (PTR) and the reasons why they may decide to withhold a release from the PTR. The PTR is a crucial tool for the development team to ensure that the final release is as bug-free as possible, but it also raises the question of whether to keep some content secret to surprise players, in exchange for fewer bug tests.

QA Manager Michael Corpora walks viewers through the journey of a patch note and shares some insights into the Winter Festival update that was released in December 2022. The update included the Winter Convergence world event, which was core to the release and the first world event to repeat since the game’s launch. Additional quests were added to engage new and returning players, but after the release, some players reported that the first three Winter Convergence quests were inaccessible.

After investigating the issue, the team found that the quest completion data for unrelated main story quests had been reused in the update for these new quests, which was outside of the test coverage for the Winter Convergence update. Once identified, the team created characters with this quest completion data to verify that they were not offered the new quests. The next step was to implement a fix and create test scenarios to verify that both the Winter Convergence quests and the main story quests functioned correctly for all characters, including those who had already participated in the live event. This fix was then merged into a patch and released to players on December 8, 2022.