Greetings, Adventurers!
Join Game Director Scot Lane alongside members of the New World team for a discussion on the addition of February update, the state of the in-game economy, and questions from the community. The video ends with the team answering questions sourced from the community, so check it out below! The video will sectioned on YouTube, so if you’re only interested in certain topics, you will easily be able to find them. If you can’t tune in for the video, you can find a summary of key topics below.
Video Summary
Find a recap of some of the team’s discussions and key answers to questions below.
Topic: Player Friction
Players have mentioned there is friction preventing them from experiencing the game that they want. Is this something that the team agrees with?
“We think there are numerous things getting in the way of people playing the game that they want to play. Fast travel, mutation orbs, storage, a lot of things differently making it difficult for people to experience the game they want. That’s something we’re definitely looking at and we’re going to be taking a look at. The game has gone through a long history and some of these things are from past iterations of the game, when it was a little more of a survival/crafting game, and I think we’ve held onto those. I think now is the time to start shedding that, and letting people experience the game.”
“One of the things we’re working on that should be in the Feb build is reducing the cost of azoth travel. Big boon, teleport anywhere you want at any time. Reducing inn recovery time from an hour to 30mins. Resetting the cost for your house recall as well. A lot of reductions, you’re going to be able to move around the world really freely, it’s going to be great.”
-Scot Lane & David Verfaillie
Topic: February Update
What’s the focus of the February Update?
“We’ve been calling it bugs, bots, and balance update. We’ve been focusing on taking the systems we already have in game that we had at launch, put into the game in November, December, January, and improving on those and the bugs associated with them. Folks who have joined February PTR have noticed the difference. Players have really appreciated it. We want to continue that momentum in the future.”
“We fixed more than 700 defects in this build alone. Fixed about 350 minor bugs, and 225 tasks that were improvements. Most of the things we fixed were things discovered after we launched in September. We fixed a lot of major issues people would see and experience, but also added some polish to existing systems.”
-Katy Kaszynski & Greg Jones
Topic: Server Merges
What’s happening with Server Merges and Transer Tokens?
“We completed some fairly large merges recently. We merged cross set for the first time and that that went really well. No additional merge is on the horizon for now. We are going to provide a transfer token. We're going to let players move if they don't like the world that they ended up in, or their world didn't get merged and they would like to go somewhere else. We're going to give them that opportunity, that agency to go to the world that that they feel like they get the best gameplay. There will be some worlds that are marked full, just in fair warning, because we have to consider the total players that are on a specific register. Everyone with a current current character at the time we provide that second token will get a token.*”
-Katy Kaszynski
*Note, tokens were distributed on February 15, right after this update was filmed.
Topic: Combat & Game Modes
Clunky movement has been a concern for a lot of players, especially when they're doing PvP. Have there any been any changes?
“Absolutely. It's one of our primary focuses right now and I think we've done some great changes already. We've started looking at our jumps and our jump lands and how those are actually working in the game and how they kept stopping you over and over again. We've worked on updating it if you're moving you continue to move— we don't want you to stop moving to jump off the two meter high thing— you're gonna be fine and keep moving. It's gonna feel good. One other thing we did, as you do a melee attack you no longer have a slowdown. There used to be a forced slowdown after melee attacks that is no longer in the game. So melee players should feel a little faster after this.”
-David Hall
So let's talk about Outpost Rush. So how are you handling the changes to scoring and the rewards?
“We took a pass at updating the scoring to make sure everybody that's contributing feels they get the score they deserve We were a little harsh on our initial scoring system. We were trying to combat bots, they were pretty big issue. But we feel like we got a better handle on those now, and we're going to start to look at the scoring system. The rewards are getting a major overhaul in February also, that's really exciting. So not only are you going to get better weapons from the caches, the caches have a higher chance to give you an expertise bump, and you're going to get faction tokens. Faction tokens as we know are becoming more and more important because you can buy mutated orbs with them. And something else that's coming into February is you can now buy a gypsum award once. Another big change. So hopefully there's a nice loop forming with Outpost Rush where people that like that mode can get everything they need from it.”
-David Hall & David Verfaillie
Check out the video for the full discussions on the in-game economy, lore/story progress updates, a dive into how luck and trophies work and more! Thanks for your support. We’ll see you in Aeternum!