Why ask players what they want out of World of Warcraft when you could ask the fancy auto-complete tool known as ChatGPT? I assume Ion Hazzikostas is just telling a fun humanizing story here and not seriously contemplating listening to a borky AI for WoW advice, but the game director did admit to IGN that he did at least plug the question in to see what the bot would say.
“I kid you not, the number one prompt it returned to me… was ‘Return to the Shadowlands,'” he says. “So I feel like I have pretty good job security, not too worried about ChatGPT replacing me anytime soon.” No bot required; the jokes here write themselves. And hey, that sure does look like Hazzikostas acknowledging Shadowlands wasn’t great.
Meanwhile, Blizzard has switched gears after the launch of Embers of Neltharion to give WoW Classic some attention. Last night, the company announced the impending opening of the 3.4.2 PTR – it’s today, “playable sometime in the early afternoon” – and the schedule of content testing through May 22nd. Notably, Trial of the Crusader testing kicks off tomorrowday.
“[W]e want to acknowledge that in previous PTR releases we expressed that we had hoped to be able to publish testing schedules–particularly raid testing schedules–as far ahead of time as possible. Unfortunately we had to make a last minute change to the testing schedule for 3.4.2 that forced us to move the timeline for raid testing forward from a later date to this coming weekend. We will be having a second round of raid testing per the schedule above, so if you can’t make it this weekend you will have at least one other opportunity to hop in and test Trial of the Crusader. Apologies for any inconvenience this might cause.”
