A Brief Look at the WoW Development Pipeline - When Did Dragonflight Development Begin?
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A Brief Look at the WoW Development Pipeline - When Did Dragonflight Development Begin?
DRAGONFLIGHT POSTED 3 DAYS AGO BY ANSHLUN
It is always said that Blizzard starts working on expansions long before we ever see even announcements, but it is almost impossible to know the exact timelines of the development's inner works. With that in mind, today we've decided to dig into the deepest chasms of game data looking for hints of this development timeline and how it aligns with what is already known.
To start, it is important to say that none of this is 100% accurate, this is just information derived from datamining so take it with a grain of salt.
Indexing the World (of Warcraft)
Most of the timelines assembled here will be based using the information that all data in WoW is sequential. Which... saying it like that seems obvious, but the ramifications it has means that even parallel projects, like Classic, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight, for instance, have their data entries sequential. This means that knowing when something was added, means you also know what was added to the database before and what was added after that given date.
An example of that is the Tabard of Mastery, added as a reward in Season of Mastery for doing an Immortal Naxxramas 40 run, was added to the game's database around the same time many profession reagents were added to Dragonflight beta, as its ID falls right in-between entries for Draconic Vial and Potion Cauldron of Power.
Note, however, that this sequentiality is not always the truth, as there have been cases of Blizzard updating old database IDs for new purposes like the Elixir of Tongues, hotfixed in the game December 2018 to allow cross-faction communication using a very old item ID.
Zone Development
During datamining, Zones are usually one of the first things that show up, being usually included in the first builds, with open-world zones being included especially earlier.
For Dragonflight Zones, some of the first development zones added were 10 Highlands and Zone4TyrholdTest, both being indexed shortly before Skyhold, which was added to the Patch 9.1 PTR in build 38312, which was released on April 13th 2021, slightly over a year before the release of the Dragonflight announcement trailer on April 19th 2022.
These two zones, however, don't seem to have been used and could be just testing zones left over in the data. The first Dragonflight zones being used to this day where the major open world zones, Dragon Isles, The Great Sea, The Waking Shores, Ohn'ahran Plains, The Azure Span, and Thaldraszus. These zones are indexed before Tazavesh, the Veiled Market, which is the open-world version of the Tazavesh dungeon, where you have the flight path, vendors, and the dungeon portal area, which was added in the same Patch 9.1 PTR build, build 38312.
These indexing additions highly indicate that the work on the open-world features of Dragonflight started almost 18 months ago.
Dungeons, on the other hand, seem to have been added much later, with most of them being indexed around the addition of the Tirisfal Glades zone, which is used during the Dark Ranger customization scenario and first appeared in Patch 9.2.5 PTR, build 43022, from April 1st 2022.
Quests
For quests, many times the data can be very scrambled around, with quest chains being iterated, it can lead to many quests from a given chain being added earlier or later on in development. For Dragonflight, the earliest quests in the database are Winging It, a World Quest from Ohn'ahran Plains, and Arcane Guardians, a quest from the Dracthyr intro area.
The starting quests from the Dracthyr intro area, like Arcane Guardians and Awaken, Dracthyr, sit right in between quests from the Zereth Mortis campaign Kismetric Disc and one of the Paragon quests from Zereth Mortis, Supplies from The Enlightened. Both quests were added in Patch 9.2.0 PTR, build 42423, from February 18th 2022.
The first one, Winging It, is indexed in the middle of the Blood Elf Heritage questline added in Patch 9.2.5 PTR. The quest sits between Unfair Fight and A Fair Race, both added in build 42850, from March 22nd, 2022.
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