WoW demon Cortyn is having fun with the new patch. Or at least would have if everything worked.
It annoys me. Really.
I have been playing World of Warcraft for over 20 years now. I have truly experienced all the highs and lows of the game. But one constant has established itself over the years: Patch days are terrible.
The state of Patch 12.1 Curse of Ula’tek on the first day was really unpleasant. Whether you wanted to focus on housing, tackle the new quests on the winding island, or just hit a few dungeons: pretty much all types of content had some kind of bug to deal with.
Looking at the new content, I really have to say: It’s good. I like the winding island. I enjoy both the campaign and the small side quests. The Vault of Atal’Utek, that is the “lower side” of the island, is significantly better than Val or Naigtal (which isn’t a big feat to be honest). I think I’ll spend a few evenings farming coins and unlocking new upgrades here. This could become a pleasant, almost meditative grind.
With the many small side quest lines, the winding island feels much more like a “real” new area rather than just a small patch addition. It may be because the Winding Island might have originally been intended for the launch of Midnight before plans changed – but that’s just speculation. In the quest lines, there are some typically silly quests, but also some with beautiful emotional stories. It’s a pleasant mix that is simply fun.
Or it would be fun if there weren’t any issues.
Many issues mar Patch 12.1
What I again have little understanding for is the amount of bugs and errors that have crept into this update as well. Perhaps these are problems that only became apparent during the transfer from the PTR to the live version of the game, but this time they were in many cases truly “Game Breaking”:
- On many realms, the events in the Vault of Atal’Utek have frozen after a while. The big final event simply wouldn’t start anymore because one of the smaller preparation events was stuck in an endless loop or just didn’t finish at 0 remaining seconds.
- Numerous objects in the game world occasionally disappeared, making it strangely empty. There were inns where all the chairs and benches vanished. In some dungeons, game-relevant “objects” (like the dragons after the first boss in the Ruby Life Pool) wouldn’t spawn at all, forcing you to abandon the dungeon.
- The world boss had issues. Some could kill him in his lair multiple times for loot, while others kept being placed in instances where the boss had already been defeated – without ever receiving any loot.
Yes, these are all bugs that will likely be fixed within the next hours and days (or already while you’re reading this article), but they still elicit a deep, frustrated sigh from me. They mar the start of a new patch once again and sometimes so devastatingly that during a dungeon you simply realize: “We can’t continue playing.”
Major errors that shouldn’t be at release
Patch 12.1 Curse of Ula’tek shares the fate of many previous WoW patches: It is a good content update with great content that just has to be “retested” in the live version for a few days.
And unfortunately, this is a trend that has increasingly become apparent in World of Warcraft over the last few years. There was a time when “Never play on patch day” was just a silly meme that had no justification anymore – now it’s once again a motto to keep in mind if you want to have a good time in WoW. One should simply wait out the first days of a patch to then, maybe on the weekend, have a nice time.
I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know if these errors wouldn’t have occurred if Blizzard had pushed the patch back a few weeks. Because many of the mentioned problems did not exist on the PTR or simply went unnoticed. Perhaps these are bugs that only appear with a very large number of characters in the live environment.
I now see Ion Hazzikostas in my mind’s eye, who will in an upcoming interview explain in a mantra-like manner that quality will not be sacrificed to a strict schedule and that the issues from past patches must not and will not repeat. But at some point, that simply becomes a hollow phrase.
But it annoys me. The initial hype, the great anticipation a new patch brings, is dampened time and again. You can see how good the patch is if it weren’t for this constant barrier of errors and problems. Or how did you experience it?
Until the situation improves, I’m still collecting items at level 305 on my characters – because that way I can avoid most new content.
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