March 28, 2024

So, there’s been an interview with Tom Chilton over on a German site where he states that Cataclysm needs “a couple more months” before it’s ready.  While it’s nice to have an official voice here I don’t think it’s actually news, anyone who’s been on the beta can easily relate (and it’s probably hard to stop them) the problems, bugs, balancing and the general “this is massively unfinished” feel to the game.

Within our group there has been some discussion on whether it’s actually ready for beta or not, I don’t have a firm benchmark to work on here as this is the first Blizzard beta I’ve been able to get into.  However from experience with IT, support and development I can state that it really does feel like they’ve leapt early because of the deadline given by the suits at the top of the chain.

The graphics are still very broken in places where to be frank I would have expected things to be sorted by now,professions aren’t live in the game, the bug reporting tool has remained broken for the last two patches and so on.

Where does this leave us.  Assuming that the timeline given is accurate and we have no reason to believe he’s lying, he also does have an internal view on the task lists and what development is being done which hasn’t yet been rolled into the public beta version then I reckon we’re looking at mid-late Oct for it going gold and November for release.

Interview
WOW.com article