MoP Devblog #1
Recently we promised you info about the development progress of Mists Of Pandaria. Today we want to show you what we have done so far and what you can expect in the near future.
The actualy development of MoP began already some time ago while we still had to put most of our ressources towards Cataclysm. This initial work was mostly around the foundation of MoP to make future development on the game even possible and increase security.
However, we are now mostly fully commited towards the development of MoP, which is why we will only deal with gamebreaking issues on Cataclysm and leave other things aside.
We do not have a release date of MoP yet. If we have a date, we will publish that information as soon as possible. The MoP PTR is still only there for internal testing, you can expect public access to it soon™ (we will announce it). We also do not have detailed information yet on how the transition to MoP will take place. One general thing we can say already though: The characters you have played in Cataclysm will be available to be played on MoP. Also there will still be a Cata server after the release of MoP.
During the last months we have worked on a ton of general core changes. These reach from simple things like target handling to complex math related problems in c++.
Our developers have worked and are still working on some very specific features and mechanics that you will usually not find on other private servers. One small example would be making general damage and healing calculations more precise. This will be most noticeable in calculations that don’t always result in whole numbers, for example DoTs and HoTs.
Another system we’ve been working on is a basic one that determines if something should be a buff or a debuff. Usually, private servers have a static system with many exceptions – a very non-generic solution. We have been able to come up with a new generic system that so far seems to behave exactly like the one Blizzard uses. With this new system, it might be possible to eliminate a common bug private servers have – buffs that should be debuffs and vice versa.
These are just two examples of many changes we’ve made so far to elevate the quality of our upcoming Mists of Pandaria realm.
We were able to implement quite a few classes already which should basically be ready to play. These are Paladin, Rogue and Warrior. Currently the developer responsible for the classes is working on the Monk and will be able to move to another class shortly. This does not mean that other classes are unplayable, some basic work has gone into all of them already. We want to make sure that our high quality standards are upheld, which is why the implementation of classes also take a lot of time. We are testing every spell of every class one by one and in different circumstances.
As for zones, especially the zones that you as a player would face first, we also made huge steps forward within the short amount of time available. However, as the implementation of zones is a tedious work, there is still much to do on that regard. With Mists of Pandaria you will also have Scenarios available. Scenarios are short, 3-player instances, with progressive objectives and a story arc. We have roughly finished 1/3 of the scenarios that will be available with patch 5.0.4.
Now to the dungeons. The developer responsible for them has gone above and beyond and basically gave us 5 out of the 6 new dungeons ready to go so far. The one that still requires some work is Shado-Pan Monastery. Then there are also Scarlet Monastry, Scarlet Halls and Scholomance that will get a level 90 heroic version. These still have to get implemented.
Of course we did not forget about our PvP community and we are also working on the new Arenas and Battlegrounds. Temple of Kotmogu is already ready to go. Silvershard Mines and the two new arenas are still untested but this should change soon.
Obviously there are a lot of other things, especially in the background, that a normal player would never know about but we will try our best to keep you updated on the most important topics.
You can find a list where the important content related progress status is visible here. This list will be updated on a regular basis to give you an impression of how far we are.
Additionally we will regularly publish information in form of a devblog.