More news for New World, as the New World team released a 90 minute long discussion video covering the big topics on players' minds.
This article covers everything the developers talked about from upcoming features to even discussing balance, lore, as well as bugs and bot issues. Below you will find things structured in segments, to keep things organized and easy to read through.
Table of contents
Intro
Starting off with the Intro; we’re with Greg Henninger, a Member of the AGS Community Team; Scot Lane, New World’s Game Director; and Rich Lawrence, a Studio Head for AGS.
They open with Greg saying this Developer Update Video will be touching on a lot of community questions, from the forums, Reddit and social media in general. Scot thanks the players for their engagement with New World so far. It’s then reiterated that This Developer Update Video will be diving into a lot of those questions, including a potential roadmap of sorts on what direction they’re taking the game and how players have influenced this direction.
Greg then leads with a huge question for the community, “Players have been concerned about and want more information on with as we’ve been updating the game and trying to fix existing issues, there have been more new issues popping up. Can you talk a little about how we’re working to prevent some of that?”
To this, Scot and Rich respond that they’ve started off by going too fast and trying to fix more than they should have initially. It left them with little time to test the patch, which created further issues for the game. So they’ve started stepping it back slowly, trying to balance both adding new content and fixing things. There’s a start to focus on making addition larger and testing them more to ensure they’re stable while limiting how much they try to fix all at once.
Personally, this does make a lot of sense, thinking about how much they were trying to slam into early fixes. While a lot of it may have been minor things, often a lot of varying things are tied together in code and can cause unexpected things to happen elsewhere. With their current trend of patches, things have been getting more stable, so if they continue in this direction until they fix that right balance for them, it’ll lead to better patches for New World overall.
Greg then continues by asking,” Is the introduction of the PTR, the Public Test Realm, going to help with that process?”
Scot and Rich respond that it absolutely has. They’ve been working on making PTR cycles longer so they can gather and act on more feedback. An example of this is the difference between the November and December PTR cycles, as they mention. They want to expand PTR further and make the cycles longer as well, letting things be tested from a more raw and unfinished state. This would let players have more time to provide feedback as well as give them more time to act on it as well.
This is very much true so far. Having been part of both PTR cycles so far, November’s was surprisingly short, and it didn’t seem like much feedback was acted on until after release. With the December PTR, they updated the PTR twice to reflect on some of the feedback given and made changes based on it before finally releasing Update 1.2 earlier this week.
Greg then asks, “What is the highest priority right now, is it bug fixes, new content or something else?”
To this Scot and Rich say the way they determine priorities is by how the Live version is currently going. If there’s a lot of high-impact bugs and such to fix, they put priority on those, if thing are fairly stable and there’s no critical issue there’s more focus on new content. Regardless, there are always teams working on both.
Again, this makes sense as the best way to prioritize things. They want to impact whatever is in most need.
New Year, New World
Greg opens this section by introducing us to the new folks in this segment and explaining this section is all about the vision for New World. This time alongside Greg and Scot are Creative Director Dave Verfaillie and Art Director Charles Bradbury.
Greg leads off with the big question for the segment asking, “So Scot, what is the vision for New World in the future?”
Scot explains the vision is not only for PvE and PvP players to coexist but compliment each other. The Territory system is given an example of that, stating that it still needs work, so people can oust Tyrants or Absent leaders. They want to support PvE and PvP equally and don’t have a favorite.
They talk heavily about wanting to close out the current chapter of the story PvE wise, so they can continue to grow and expand the world and make it more dynamic so each time you pass through the world it feels different. They mention there’s some focus on more Story, Mob Variety, Quest Variety, and generally more things to based on player input.
Dave goes on to explain they like that the players have some impact on the world, and they want to continue and even expand further in that direction. They mention that they want to add more dynamic events, much like Corrupted breaches, with the likelihood of adding Dynamic PvP events too.
From the sounds of it, they have their own vision for the game’s world and are working through it. They also want to support a lot of the ideas we have that allows us to impact the vision of the world further. I’m personally hoping that they could add some dynamic events that end up shifting the world a little more than just being an event that spawns and disappears when it ends.
Greg then continues by stating, “I’d imagine that balance between PvE and PvP is something we’re going to continue investing in going forward.”
Dave responds say they absolutely are. Mentioning content for PvE like upcoming Expeditions as well as the currently ongoing Winter Convergence Event. While for PvP they mention waiting to bring more support and interesting things for the smaller scale PvP, to let War really just be the big exciting moment for PvP.
Arguably, PvP could use more love right now. With the mention of there possibly being dynamic PvP events and more things for small-scale PvP, it sounds like it will get there. While it does sound like they are favoring PvE, it is still very much playing catch up. As combat which is the core to PvP is already fairly well polished, compared to PvE which isn’t quite as polished as evidenced by the frequent PvE changes.
Scot then prompts Charles by saying, “Dave and I talked a bit about the vision forward, but art also has its own vision forwards, and I’d love for Charles to share a bit about that.”
Charles states by saying that he loves how the Lost and Corrupted have their own look, feel, and culture to them. They want to expand on that like that have with the Varangian Knights, and bring in more factions, with their own cultures, look, and feel to them. This includes outfits for players, new architecture to explore, new enemies to fight. There are plenty of opportunities to make the world of Aeternum more interesting as we add to it.
I think currently we can see this to a fair extent as things have been added. The Varangian Knights for example have been a bit of a mix-up for gameplay, adding more enemy variety to lower-level areas. Alongside this, we also got weapons and armors that match their styles.
Greg then continues by asking, “So can we expect all of these new enemies types and new areas to be limited to new zones, or will we continue to refresh the existing zones as well?”
Charles says it’ll continue to be both. They want the world to be dynamic and be able to change constantly to keep old zones interesting. They do also want new zones to offer new opportunities and adventures.
Scot jumps in to say they want to continue to support that drive to explore. So changing the existing areas keeps them fresh and gives you a different feel as you pass through them. It’s important to them that while the world is growing over time, all parts of it change and feel different over time.
So far they’ve stuck to what they’ve said they have for a vision. Alongside the Varangian Knights came addition for other factions as well, to make them more diverse as well. It does make you wonder though… Just how far they’ll end up pushing to change the existing world as they continue to expand it as well?
To close off the section, Greg asks Scot, ” Is there a roadmap or high-level view you can share with us today relating to the current vision of the game?”
Scot answers by saying that they’ll be going a bit deeper on some of these topics but gives a quick high-level view. In January, Mutators will be coming out; which change up Expeditions, making them harder and more rewarding the more times you do them. February will be completely devoted to balance, bots, and bugs; as they look to clean up as many bugs and balance issues as they can. Beyond that is the plan to close out the current chapter of the PvE Story.
Even though it’s a very short roadmap, it’s still a great thing to hear that they do have these things planned out. While February sounds like it’ll be a good time for the game, I do hope they have some plans to help with these issues in the meantime, as their current systems of dealing with them are pretty lackluster. Mutators sound interesting, but I’ll share my thoughts on them later as they discuss them.
Bugs, Bots, and Bans
For this section, Greg is joined by Senior Producer Katy Kazynski, Gameplay Engineer Scott Geiser, and Studio Head Rich Lawrence. This section all about how they deal with bans, bugs, dupes, exploits, and all of the topics surrounding those.
Greg leads off with a massive question that has absolutely been a big topic within the community. He asks Rich, “There are a lot of questions about how the ban system works in New World, can you give some insight on that?”
Rich responds there are multiple systems at work here. The first line of defense here, especially against cheats is Easy Anti-Cheat. EAC is updated regularly to detect cheats being used and prevents access to the game if it detects anything. Rich states that EAC is also the only automatic thing involved with bans in New World.
Beyond that is the Ban and Suspension system. This lets them suspend you if you’re being disruptive or doing things you shouldn’t be. It also lets them ban you for more serious actions, which he cites economy disruption, something related to gameplay (exploits), or even making a War or unfair, like throwing or other unfair advantages.
Rich continues stating, “We don’t automatically ban on reports. Reports lead to a human investigating the reports and gauging the impact of the reported actions. If it’s negative and affects many other players, you might get banned. It’s never based on volume of reports or a specific report.”
They state that every appeal is also investigated, and there have been some mistakes made with people being wrongly banned. Such cases are reversed. They continue by saying it’s all based on the impact it has on the game and other players. But they do make it clear it’s heavily based on their view of how it impacts the game, not the players.
Katy continues into the topic saying that impact is measured by their code of conduct and what was done to violate it. This is a large part of how they determine the impact of the Code of Conduct.
As far as I’m concerned, and as much as I’d hate to bash the dev team in any way, there have been numerous cases where this has been proven false. Coupled with the fact that bann information is still completely withheld, even to those that can utilize the GDPR to get information on their account. It’s just them trying harder to pretend like everything is fine. There’s a step they can very easily take to clean up both the ban and appeal process that would do wonders for disproving what people have dealt with currently.
Greg then asks, “Is there a scale, for things like repeat offenders and things like that?”
Katy says yes, stating that all moderators and Customer Support representatives can see how often you’ve been reported, your logs, and your ban(suspension) history. She continues that if you keep repeatedly going back and violating the Code of Conduct, you’ll continue to get a worse and worse penalty.
This almost entirely invalidates the previous point of “not being determined by the volume of reports” statement of earlier. How can you possibly tell me that with full access to someone’s chat logs, and a high report frequency that someone will just look at that and like it just carry on as if nothing happened? They’re absolutely not going to. The fact that despite saying there are logs, yet have never once shared them or used them to justify their ban decisions via the appeal process, is a huge red flag. If they have proof or solid reasons why people are being banned, they need to share them. That’s how an appeal process should work.
Greg then moves to the next topic, bots. He asks Scott, “If I report a bot, how long does it take to have a meaningful impact?”
Scott continues by saying they try to avoid basing bans solely off reports, due to rumors of players using reporting as a weapon against other players. This is a large part of why it takes longer to get bots out of the world. They use Telemetry and other data to prove there’s botting going on.
Katy adds to this recalling when they banned a wave of gathering bots, there were a few actual players that got caught up in it, as that was the sole job they did for their company. They met a threshold that they believed was only possible for a bot. So they claim to have adjusted the threshold so that way it didn’t happen again.
Given they mention using data and telemetry to identify bots, I think it’s rather unbelievable that some bots could last for weeks. Yet many have, even lasting long enough to make it to level 60. While I doubt it’s an entirely accurate way of doing so, wouldn’t they have data on a player’s specific movements, and find that it’s the exact same ones every time? Like they move and hit X resources from Y positions every time. It can;t be that hard to detect that. No matter how well a person can do these tasks, they’ll never be that perfect.
Greg then moves on to the next topic, bugs. He asks, “How do you determine what bugs and exploits to prioritize?”
Scott replies that first, it has to be verified by QA. Then QA passes to the relevant team to be triaged there. Player impact is a big determining factor, so exploits and things of that nature are given the highest priority. While minor things like typos aren’t given as high of a priority.
Katy also states that in-game bug reporting is what helps determine a lot of the player impact. Everything from frequency and consistency for the bug appearing can shift its priority. They also read reports on both the forums and Reddit as well. She continues that while an issue may only affect 100 players, if it’s game-breaking for them it will be given higher priority, with broken trades preventing transfers being an example of that.
Greg follows this up by asking, “If Someone finds an exploit, what’s the best way to report it?”
Katy says the absolute best way is by directly messaging anyone with the Developer or Community Manager tag under their name in the forums. They would actually prefer you reach out to them directly if you discover an exploit, rather than post it to the forums for others to use maliciously.
Rich also chimes in, emphasizing the use of the in-game tool, as it provides a lot of contextual information like time and location. He also says that if you’re unsure if something is an exploit or it can break the game, try it on the PTR. That way even if you’re repeating it to be sure it works consistently, there’s no possible repercussion for you, since it’s the PTR and you’re not impacting the live servers. Whereas on Live, they do look at how many times you’ve done something before reporting it and would likely remove duped items and such.
Winter Convergence
This section is all about the ongoing Winter Convergence Festival Event. Greg is joined by World Experience Lead Mike Willette, Narrative Lead Rob Chesney, and Open World Lead Phil Bolus.
Greg leads off by asking Mike to give a high-level overview of the event and its story. Mike describes the event as a holiday event where we celebrate the Celestial Binding in Aeternum, where the Northern Lights and falling Gleamite meteors are an indication of the coming Forever Winter. The Winter Wanderer is there to remind us to come together and stop the Forever Winter.
Honestly, I wish the lore and quests kind of explain this better in-game, as I don’t feel like they did. It’s a somewhat interesting questline, but being tied to a holiday event it felt pretty empty. With this being one of the game’s first full-scale events, including some more dynamic parts to it, they seem to want to do further events in a similar way.
They go into the backstory of how they designed the Winter Convergence events, bringing inspiration from many cultures around the world. They mention Winter Solstice as a focal point, the Yeti being Asia-inspired, many elements of Christmas, as well as Winter Villages, being Europe-inspired.
It’s pretty nice to see them draw on so many cultural inspirations overall. Though, it’s hard to say just how well they executed them. Nonetheless, the more global inspiration and not limiting themselves to just more local culture is nice.
New Feature: Mutators
This is a short section related to a feature coming in January, Dungeon Mutators. In This section Greg is joined by World Experience Lead Mike Willette, Narrative Lead Rob Chesney, and Art Director Charles Bradbury.
Greg opens the conversation by asking Mike, “So what are Mutators and how do they work?”
To this Mike responds that Mutators are Augments to Expedition AI. They’re randomized, but follow a weekly schedule and cadence as they rotate through different variations. They give access to a harder Expedition that serves to add additional challenges, test your power level as well as further increase your power level.
These sound like just the thing PvE in New World really needs right now. As a lot of people seem to think most of the PvE is rather easy. With enhanced rewards that can make you stronger being a key point made, it sounds like they could very well end up be a good way to boost your Expertise.
Mike continues that these Mutated Expeditions will be easier to access. They will also increase in difficulty as you complete them, ramping up both difficulty and rewards even more. Each Expedition will have up to 10 levels of Mutations every week. These challenges may even require you to gear up for them, as enemies’ resistances may change, possibly forcing you to switch your gear up each week.
Expeditions that can be accessed regularly sound like a great thing overall. Though with the difficulty of getting great gear as-is, I imagine it’ll be harder to get perfect gear for each set of Mutators that occur. They also don’t really state that there will be endgame version of each Expedition, but I think that’d be a great way for them to make use of existing content in general.
Greg also asks, “Will Mutators make their way to Invasions and Outpost Rush, and possibly shake things up there too?”
Mike says it’s a possibility that they are exploring, but are unlikely to be in the initial addition of Mutators. The possibility of such will depend on how Mutators do on PTR and the amount of feedback that is received on them.
It sounds like they don’t want to put them quite everywhere, which is good. It’s good they’re waiting for initial feedback before even expanding it beyond Expeditions at least. I’m certainly looking forward to testing them on the PTR.
Greg then asks, “What kind of rewards comes from doing content that has a Mutator?”
Charles responds by saying there are new sets of rewards tied to each Expedition, as well as rotating rewards that are determined by the Mutator. There are even unique sets with new visuals that may reflect the Mutator or Expedition.
I’m absolutely down for more weapons and armors that are more closely tied to either elements or enemy visuals. It’ll be interesting to see how these look in-game and how many people are actually able to get them.
Balance and Tuning
This section covers their goals for the February Update, being focused more around balance and tuning things. Greg is joined by Player Experience Lead Dave Hall, Senior Producer Katy Kazynski, and Gameplay Engineer Scott Geiser.
Greg opens with a question directed at Dave, “So how do you determine if a weapon is overpowered?”
Dave says there’s a lot of things that go into it. They look at posts on the forums, internal testing, experienced players, and usage in Wars and Outpost Rush. He also cites the somewhat recent incident with Ice Gauntlet breaking Wars entirely saying, “If 40 out of 50 people on one side of a war are using Ice Gauntlet, there’s probably a reason.”
He continues by saying a big factor of how they determine balance is how the player on the receiving end feels. They check to see if it’s something that is just uncounterable, or otherwise feel punishing that they aren’t using that weapon.
This is generally how a lot of teams would handle balance. Though the PvP can be a little unforgiving at times. Seeing as they cited the Ice Gauntlet issue, but did not actually address that it wasn’t a balance issue rather than an exploit, that does mean some things could get nerfed due to exploits too. It’s a bit sad to think of it that way, but seeing as they ended up doing a ton of fixes targeted at War Lag and stability, they just didn’t want to publicly state that.
Greg immediately follows up with, “On the opposite side, how is it determined if something is underpowered?”
Greg mentions the Fire Staff and Ice Gauntlet specifically for this question. Dave says they’re in a close place though, despite the changes to them not being well received. He does state they’re looking at buffs for them soon, to bring them in line with other weapons.
Personally playing as a Mage myself in New World, these changes did hit as hard as I expected them to. They were enough to bring the weapons down a bit, but they really don’t feel too underpowered. It’s good to hear they will be getting some buffs soon though.
They continue into talking about Outpost Rush Botters and AFKers, which Scott addresses saying that the December changes are a start to preventing that from happening. He says by shortening AFK timer and adjusting the assist credits earned, it’s less likely for a bot to actually get enough credit to earn chests.
Then Greg asks another big question, “When people feel like things have been left out of patch notes, they feel it might be intentional. Can you talk about how the team puts together patch notes?”
Katy replies saying that nothing is ever intentionally missed from that patch notes. With their patch, not structure changing from Alpha release to now, there are just so many changes that occur. She cites a Monthly Update having several thousand changes to the game, making it hard to keep track of every change. They are however trying to improve that process so less is missed and patch notes are more complete.
New Weapons
This section talks a bit about upcoming weapons and weapons that are being looked into. For this section, Greg is joined by Creative Director Dave Verfaillie and Player Experience Lead Dave Hall.
Greg leads off with a question for Dave Verfaillie asking, “When you’re coming up with an idea for a weapon or what weapon should be introduced next, how do you decide on that?”
Verfaillie says there are a few things that go into making that decision. They’re always looking for weapons that could introduce a new playstyle to the game, like with the Void Gauntlet focusing on debuffing and countering healing. The other main thing they try to accomplish is to fill gaps. Again the Void Gauntlet is used again being that it was made to complement the Life Staff, which previously didn’t have a clear pairing.
I do like the fact they’re trying to bring something new with each weapon that adds. It’s much better than just simply slapping it in and reusing some of the same animations they may use for other weapons. It’s fantastic that they also try to fill clear gaps in weapons as well.
Greg then goes right into the next question, “Can you talk about the Blunderbuss and how it might be different from say, the musket?”
Hall mentions that the Blunderbuss will be coming soon, but doesn’t give a specific time frame. He says where the Musket is more of a strategic weapon, with its longer range and lower rate of fire; The Blunderbuss is more explosive and chaotic, and has more of a run and gun style to it. It’s then hinted that it may pair well with melee weapons and maybe even staves.
From the sounds of it, the Blunderbuss will be a STR/INT weapon possibly, it may also just follow suit with the Musket and be DEX/INT as well. Given there’s currently not a STR/INT weapon available it would end up filling a gap that does need filling currently. With it also having mobility tools as well, it could end up being a strong secondary for mages that lack any mobility tools.
Greg then asks, “So people have been talking about and getting excited about the Great Sword and Dagger, can you tell us anything about them?”
Verfaillie says with wanting to change up gameplay and make the Great Sword stand out from existing heavy weapons, they’re playing with the idea of switching stances. Having multiple modes within the weapon itself. Hall speaks to the Daggers, mention there’s a lot of weapons on the table but some time after Great Sword.
I like the concept of stance switching weapons, those also tend to be the more interesting weapons in most games. I personally hope the Great Sword ends up being a weapon that scales with CON and has a mode that lets you expend health to empower attacks and abilities. With Daggers being mentioned as on the table, but no mention of being right after the Great Sword, this hints there may be other weapons in development that may get to come out first.
To close out this section Greg asks, “When can I use a Shield with another single-handed Weapon?”
Hall responds that it’s not currently on the table. While they do want to do it, it’s a big endeavor to make a new weapon. They want to focus on filling gaps in various play spaces before they revisit a concept similar to one that already exists. Verfaillie comments that while a unique weapon pairing like the Sword and Shield that doesn’t include the shield could have more priority over it as it’s a different concept.
Late Game Progression
This section talks a lot about endgame content. Greg is joined by Creative Director Dave Verfaillie and Open World Lead Phil Bolus.
Greg starts off with a good question, “Why did you decide to change the High Water Mark system?”
Dave responds there were improvements they wanted to make. He continues that the High Water Mark system was completely random, and offered no control to the player; where the Expertise System and the Gypsum part of it allow them to choose what items they increase. They also wanted to encourage a wider variety of activities to progress your Expertise. So they pulled back a bit on the rewards for taking down Named Enemies to be able to offer other paths to the same progress.
I think these changes were overall good. It definitely reduced the amount of RNG needed to get some progress on things. However, I don’t feel like it really offers the player as much control as it could, as each type of cast is still limited daily instead of say weekly.
Phil goes into talking about how Expertise feels different from High Water Mark, saying that making it visible and having notifications when it improves has helped it to feel different overall. He also thinks it makes it more exciting to be able to see have the toast popup when you do get an Expertise bump.
Then Greg asks, “Another big question going around is why downscale gear instead of raising the gear score cap?”
Phil says when they were looking at Expertise scores for players, most of them weren’t even maxed out. So they wanted to address that first before attempting to raise the cap. They also thought that having the system more viable makes it feel like a more meaningful progression. If they do raise the Gear Score cap, they want that to be attached to a large content update, and not just do it randomly.
Given their reaction to players not maxing out Expertise and instead of crafting or purchasing crafted weapons is to essentially force players to interact with the system is a bit of a “yikes” moment. I don’t think anyone in the game’s community legitimately considered High Water Mark or Expertise to be “Endgame content”, and just a meaningless progression gate. It shows that while they do listen to us as a community, they’re also ignoring parts of why things are done and simply guessing at some things.
Greg then asks, “How do you see crafters fitting into these changes?”
Dave responds by saying they want crafters to contribute in their own way, by doing what they do best, craft. While they may not go out to do activities as often as other players, instead of focusing on their crafting and trophies, we do want them to have a part in endgame. Phil continues this by talking about the recently added Timeless Shards and Patterns, that give varying levels of control over the existing crafting system.
Honestly, the additions they made to crafting are great, but then (eventually) removing a bit of the profitability by making them scale down to current Expertise when traded hurt them a bit. While they can gear themselves, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything in place to help distribute gear to players without the downscaling, which can just devalue crafting almost entirely.
Greg then asks about why some Gypsum is varied in how many are needed to make a cast. Phil explains that it’s to balance that difficulty of acquiring that Gypsum compared to another one. Dave follows up by explaining they added an 8th Gypsum by player request to give more appeal to their big events.
Greg then asks, “Players feel like Expeditions aren’t worth the time, do you agree with that statement?”
Phil says to a degree, they do. They’ve been working to address this. He also feels like with the December Update, they’re very rewarding Expertise-wise. Between the guaranteed bumps from bosses in the Expedition, the possibility of bumps from the Elite Chests, and the additional Gypsum drop also giving a bump; it makes them a fairly good source of Expertise.
This is true on all fronts, there’s definitely work that needs to be done. I have a feeling Mutators will play a big part in making them more rewarding and easier to access. They are also a great source of Gypsum, as you can get several at once if you’re running the Lazarus Instrumentality or Garden of Genesis Expeditions.
Finally, Greg asks, “What impact do you see Mutators having on this if any?”
Dave just says a lot of impact. As with Mutators, we’ll also be boosting the Gear Score Cap, because you’ll need it to take on the higher tier of Mutator. It’ll be really challenging content that will actually need that power bump to deal with it. For this, we’ll be adding an item to increase your weapons gear score to keep up with the more difficult enemies.
This really just has me looking forward to the January PTR. Mutators sound like they’ll be a ton of fun to mess with overall. Hopefully, they won’t be too insane, given they’re raising the gear score cap a bit to “help deal with the difficult enemies”. We’ll have to see how that plays out.
Quests and Lore
This section dives into well, Quests and Lore. Greg is joined by World Experience Lead Mike Willette, Narrative Lead Rob Chesney, and Art Director Charles Bradbury.
Greg starts off by asking Rob, “There have been changes to the main story line since launch, are there plans to continue doing this?”
Rob says absolutely. They’re constantly working to improve quests in a variety of ways. From making them more fun, more impactful and just generally improve their tools for making quests. We’ve already implemented some of these changes like adding destructible objects, wave encounters, and some other new additions to existing quests.
Mike continues stating they’ve been also working to make areas more district. Enhancing visual themes surrounding Corrupted and the other factions as well. This helps them accentuate and lift up the stories being told through the game’s lore and quests.
Greg continues with another question, “Players have expressed frustration with quest flow and the travel time between quests. How are we addressing those things?”
Mike starts off by mentioning the Haste effect on roads that were added in November. They also working on adding additional spirit shrines, to make it easier to get to certain expeditions, like the one added near Dynasty Shipyard in the December Update. They’ve also removed the distance modifier from Fast Traveling. They’ve also pre-marked all the Spirit Shrines on the map, to make them easier to find and unlock. Additionally, with their new quests, they’re having NPC follow along with you. This means that they’ll be closer by for turn-in and follow-up quests.
I think all of these changes have made a pretty big difference with quests. While I’ve only experienced them in a limited capacity on PTR and some side quests on live, these have all been good changes. It makes it less of a hassle to do quests and otherwise get around. It’s also made them more fun to complete, with the shift away from “X defeats” or “Collect X Items” to a more interesting quest design.
Greg then asks,”Even as we’re getting ready to wrap up a storyline and currently have more questions than answers; will that element of the mystery surrounding Aeternum still remain?”
Rob responds absolutely. They want the island of Aeternum to remain as this mysterious source of myth and legend for all the world’s cultures. There’s a lot of folk stories and superstitions associated with Aeternum, and they want to keep that idea going for the entirety of New World.
They want to expand on the history and dynamics of the enemy factions like the Corrupted, Lost, and how they to the Ancients. Other mysteries like who the Ancients were, where they came from, where they went are just among the many stories they want to tell as the game goes on.
Personally haven’t gotten to deep into the game’s lore yet. There’s a lot of unanswered questions for sure, but it seems like they have a solid plan to tell these stories and more as time goes on. It’ll be interesting to see where they take them.
