A new month and a new year for New World! AGS has given us another Developer Update Video, which we will cover and share our thoughts today!
Community Team Member Greg Henninger is leading the discussions and asking the questions once again. Greg leads off by saying they’re doing another one of these since the last one was positively received. They’re trying to keep these shorter though while still covering the community’s hot topics as well as upcoming content.
As with last time, we’ll cover each section the best we can, and cover the important questions.
Deep Dive: January Update
In this section they’re talking about the upcoming January Update, and really touching on a lot of the hot topic issues that popped up. For this section, Greg is joined by World Experience Lead Mike Willette and Creative Director Dave Verafaillie.
The first question directed at Dave asking, “What are the Main Features to expect in the January Update?”
Dave responds by saying Mutators are the main feature for the update, which adds additional variety and challenge to existing Expeditions. With multiple difficulties and mutators changing weekly, it should keep them interesting. There’s also room to add further mutations, later on, to really add variety.
Then Greg asks Mike, “Are any smaller features we should be aware of with the update that aren’t quite to the same scale as Mutators?”
Mike responds by explaining they’ve added new Spirit Shrines near the Expeditions and Arenas, to make them and by extension Mutated Expeditions, easier to access. With Expeditions and Arenas both being a big part of endgame due to Gypsum and now Mutated Expeditions as well, it’s good they’re making them easier to access.
The next question goes back to Dave, asking “Why add a new resource instead of just increasing the gear score?”
Dave responds, explaining that the Umbral Upgrade System is the second major feature of the update. They opted for this system to not invalidate existing 590-600 gear that players have already worked hard to get. The Upgrade reduces the need to go out and re-hunt new gear, letting you continue to use gear that has been crafted, purchased, dropped and such without worrying if you’ll fall behind. It was originally going to be for just 600 gear, but they lowered the requirement to 590 to make most any gear work. However, 590+ gear will not upgrade to Legendary upon reaching 600 and stays the same purple item up to 625.
Then Greg asks the big question “Why are we relying on tuning orbs to access the new Mutated Expeditions still?”
Mike responds by saying they needed a method to control access to them, as they want to make the rewards very valuable to players. Mike continues that while they want the reward to be valuable, they’ll be monitoring data from both PTR and Live to make sure that balance is right.
Dave then adds to this saying they felt they were too strict on their gating in the past, and this is their first step towards loosening by adding it to the Faction Shop and adjusting further as time goes on. Mike then adds to this that they’ll also be adding Orbs for the vanilla Expeditions to the Faction Shop as well to also make those more accessible as well.
Greg then asks, “So data and how players interact with the content will be a big part of how we view things right?”
Mike says Absolutely. It’ll be important to them to see how players interact with the new addition and they’ll be keeping an eye on a lot of those metrics. Among these are Gear Score for completed runs at each difficulty, which mutations are causing problems, and why those mutations are causing problems.
Our Thoughts
Honestly, I really do think they should stop gating content. I get it meant to try and avoid burnout, but I do sincerely think it causes way more burnout than if certain content isn’t limited. You end up going down this chain of like, doing the thing that are the most fun, then slowly get limited to things that may be less appealing for fun because of these gates.
Personally, I’m glad they lowered the requirement for the Umbral Upgrade System to 590. While it’s not a big leap, it does at least show respect for the time a large majority of players have put into the game. It’s not fully inclusive, but at the very least, crafting in this range is very consistent and easily done, so it makes crafting a good way to progress forward. However, it does still, unfortunately, require you to hit 600 Expertise in a slot before you can upgrade.
It will be interesting to see more additions to this system as time goes on. I do really hope it gets expanded to all Expeditions eventually too. They mentioned looking into it, but we have yet to see anything being added.
PTR: Expectations and what AGS has Learned
This section discusses what they’ve learned from PTR and what things they’re still looking to improve on for future PTR and update releases. For this section, Greg is joined by Senior Producer Katy Kaczynski, World Experience Lead Mike Willette, and Creative Director Dave Verafaillie.
Greg opens with a question directed at Mike, “What have we learned so far in the January Release, the things that we’ve found in the PTR?”
Mike responds to this by mentioning the Mutator orbs, alongside the frequency and methods of acquiring them. He also brings up that they’re looking into how to make Mutators work for the rest of the Expeditions. One of the biggest things they’ve found, both internally and from playtests is that certain named enemies are a huge pain with certain mutations.
Greg then asks in response, “Is there a chance that these harder combinations stick around for higher difficulties then?”
Mike responds by saying it’s possible. They’d only want to keep it if there’s a way for players to overcome it and not have it feel unfair. They want to balance it between difficulty but also keep it fair enough that you’re still going to enjoy the experience.
Dave then jumps in to bring up another point for the original question, lowering the requirements to use the Umbral Upgrade System. It was done to balance out the fact that getting Gear Score 600 items is highly luck-based at the moment. They do want Legendary Items to still feel special though, which is why Epic Rarity gear doesn’t get bumped up at GS 600.
Greg then goes into the next question, “So we’ve talked about the current PTR, but how about what we’ve learned from past PTR runs that improved the current experience?”
Dave responds by saying one of the bigger things is making sure the players can actually test the new content. They’ve improved the backstories, or the starting points you select when starting the PTR. They’ve also made sure all the crafting stations are upgraded and all the fast travel points are open and usable. All of which has helped a ton with making it easier for players to jump in and test.
Dave continues saying that the other big thing is providing patch notes. They don’t want players feeling like they’re hiding changes, even though they missed a few things in the initial notes for the PTR.
Katy jumps in and says it was a hard decision to make. The PTR had a lot of changes before the holiday, and bringing together the notes from multiple iterations afterward, unfortunately, meant some things got missed. They did give notice they were incomplete and have tried to get more of the big changes listed in them as the PTR continued in spite of that. They did want players to be able to start testing ASAP, and not delay the PTR just to get the notes fully ready.
Greg then asks Katy, “With the February PTR coming in the near future, can you talk a little about the timing windows we’re aiming for between when things hit PTR and when they go live?”
Katy responds that there is a PTR for February, despite it being a month focused on bug fixes. They do still have things they are focusing on and want to make sure the fixes make a real difference for players. There’s been a number of things they’ve been working on as far as player concerns, but they haven’t had proper testing yet so haven’t pushed them out.
She continues that as far as when PTR Starts, they want to give themselves enough time to collect and respond to feedback on the PTR. There’s no specific time frame which they want to start a PTR or a specific duration really. They do however try to aim for at least two and a half weeks but generally longer to be able to address things as they come up before they go live. As they found from the first PTR and it only lasted a week, is that it wasn’t even close to enough time to get things adjusted or take in feedback.
Greg then asks a follow-up question, “I know the devs like to hop into Live Servers sometimes to see how things are going and to collect feedback that way; is that something they do for the PTR as well?”
Katy responds by saying definitely. Last time they were definitely more visible, especially with them doing the Myrkgard run on PTR. They also have internal playtests that they do, but last time they had everyone pile into the PTR to see what was going on. It’s not always noticeable though, because they have special builds they use that allow them to be more visible in chat and things like that. They’re not always going to be visible, but they’re almost always there.
Our Thoughts
I do hope they continue to make Expeditions a more viable option to grind at end game. They’ve always felt like more engaging content as far as PvE goes. All the gates around content feel like they’re heavily trying to enforce playing a certain way instead of letting several options be viable and just letting players do what they enjoy.
The Next PTR seems like it could be interesting. Despite the lack of new content, one of the big things hurting the game is the lack of polish for existing content. So finally taking some time to clean up existing issues and clean up as many things as possible sounds like a good approach overall. It’s not going to slow down their ability to make additional content, as that’s often a different team focusing on that. If anything it gives them more time to prepare a big content release for March. Given the timing it’s possible that could be a new area, expedition or similar bigger content.
I do agree that they really need to have 2-3 weeks of PTR minimum to be able to react to feedback. It’s been a huge improvement over the last couple PTRs to see them acting on feedback more readily before it goes live. It gives them a good cadence to do weekly PTR updates giving us multiple patches to see what feedback they’ve acted on so far.
Community Questions: Bots, Bans, and Exploits
This section focuses heavily on questions frequently asked by the community about hot topics. For this Section Greg is going by Senior Gameplay Engineer Scott Geiser, Studio Lead Scot Lane, and Senior Producer Katy Kaczynski.
Greg directs the first question at Katy asking, “Can you give us insight when to expect the next round of server transfers?”
Katy responds that currently, they had to planned to do more merges, but a Housing Persistance issue popped up just prior to starting them. So they paused them to address the big. While this doesn’t directly affect server transfers, is does keep us from finishing these planned merges.
She continues, once they get the bug resolved and can finish merges, they’ll be looking to do another round of free transfers after these settle and players have time to see if the newly merged world fits them.
Scot Lane adds to this that Merges and Transfers are huge priorities for the team. They want to get them done ASAP, but they don’t want to rush and have things break or go horribly wrong in the process.
Greg then addresses the next question at Scott Geiser asking, “Another thing players have been wanting to know is the status of some of these major bugs in the game, what information do you have on those?”
Scott Geiser responds by saying that each gameplay team has its own priority list of bugs and they try to address the larger ones first. Like some of the ones that have been fixed in this upcoming release are things like drowning on land, faction progress being halted if you swapped faction and swapped back later. There have also been fixes for weapons as well, fixing the Void Gauntlet being able to slide and Bow being able to spam jump to fire faster than intended.
Scot Lane adds to this that there’s a lot of concern over a Weapon Swap glitch that has been a big point among the community. He confirms that this is not a bug, at least not in the way it’s thought to be, but that’s a point talked about later into the video as well as the weapon desync issue.
Lane continues that there are a few more fixes that can be talked about, like the Brutes in Outpost Rush spamming their “meatball” attack. Scott Geiser also adds that the Brute is having its cost increased as well.
Scot Lane continues that there’s also the Housing Tax change, where they’re adjusting the bracket down. This brings it to a medium between the incredibly low discounted rate that’s currently active and the previous rate which was incredibly high. Since players are quite happy with the tax rates as they are, they’ll be closer to that being a much smaller 2.5 – 10% bracket, down from the 5 – 20% bracket it was previously.
Greg then continues asking the question, “Since our last Dev Update where we talked about bans, bots and exploits; what has been done since that point in time in regard to those topics?”
Scott Geiser Responds that there’s been a lot going on in that regard, and remains one of the bigger priorities for the Gameplay team. The health of the game’s economy is central to the game so they need to do whatever they can to protect that.
Geiser continues that there are a lot of teams involved with these topics. The customer Service team has been improving their workflow to be able to respond to reports of bots, cheats, and gold sellers much quicker. Player reports are a huge part of how these things are combated, so reducing the time between when a report is sent and when it’s investigated makes a big difference. They still make use of telemetry data as well to assist this investigation, as they don’t want to allow reports to be weaponized by players. Customer Service has more access to this data, to more readily see if an account is already flagged by the telemetry allowing them to act on them quicker.
Geiser continues that they’re always investigating bots and different bot programs as well as working with EAC to ensure these programs get flagged and can automatically ban machines running these programs. In total there have been about 9,000 bots that have been banned since the last Dev Update thanks to these changes. There’s also been 600 or so that have been banned through investigation, despite them using programs that haven’t been detected.
Greg asks a follow-up question, “Has the PTR been beneficial in finding some of these [bot programs], through feedback from the community or reports from the PTR?”
Katy responds that for bots it doesn’t really help, but does help catch a lot of exploits early on. They’ve gotten a lot of DMs on the forums about exploits that were possible on the PTR and have been able to take care of them before they made it live. It’s also highly stressed that exploits should not be posted publicly on the forums, they want them to be DM’d so they can be fixed before they’re more widely discovered.
Greg then moves into the next question asking, “With February being focused on bug fixes, are there specific ones that people should be aware of, or ones that may have been a long time coming but haven’t made it in until now?”
Katy responds that yeah, there are definitely some to be aware of. While this isn’t a release focused on a new feature, there are a lot of bugs being squashed all over. One of the big ones is missing materials, items, and recipes; as well as improving the search for these items on the trade post. There are also a lot of fixes aimed at Abilities and Perks, which should help with a lot of outstanding weapon bugs.
Scot Lane adds in they also have a goal to fix every single one of the mission and quest-related bugs and make sure there are no issues completing any of those. This means fixing a lot of broken quest markers, drop just not happening, and even faction quest lines being broken.
Our Thoughts
Honestly, I think a full major patch being focused on bugs can resolve a lot of the community’s big pain points with the game. While it’s not new content, there are plenty of things that can be done through bug fixes to make the game better and more enjoyable. We’ll have to see how big this mountain of fixes actually is and how much actually gets fixed.
While they may have improved a lot of things regarding handling bots and reports, they’re still a lot of highly noticeable and even high-level bots that have yet to be taken care of. There’s still a lot of room for improvement there.
Combat: Weapons & Balancing
This section talks about Weapons and how they’re balanced. For this section Greg is joined by Player Experience Lead David Hall and Creative Director Dave Verfaillie.
Greg opens with a question for Hall, asking “So the Great Axe, the Rapier, the Fire Staff, the Ice Gauntlet have among the most threads in the forums discussing their power. How does the team feel about these threads and topics?”
Hall responds that there’s definitely a lot of feedback on these weapons, but they feel like they’re getting to a place where they’re close to where they should be. These weapons will still be getting changes, but they’ll be minor. They don’t feel there’s major issues coming up with them, so major changes don’t feel necessary. So they’ll be doing smaller balances to them and adjusting from there if needed.
Greg asks a follow-up question,“Will these changes be available on the PTR?”
Hall Responds that they will not be on the current PTR in January, but very likely the next one in February. Verfaillie adds to this that every PTR generally has some balance changes. There are a lot of things we have to account for when balancing, because there’s solo PvE, Group PvE, Small-scale PvP and Large-scale PvP to account for that makes balancing them perfectly tough. That’s why they’re focusing smaller changes, because even small changes can have a big impact over time.
Greg then asks Hall, “Are there any updates regarding the Weapon Desync Issues?”
Hall responds, yeah they do now have a team focused on the desync issue. It’s one of our top priorities at the moment. They’ve addressed some issues already and have further changes on the way to address them. Verfaillie adds to that that it’s not one singular issue, but they’ve been working through the weapons one by one to get them fixed up and address the most problematic ones first. It will still take a while to get them all done, which is why the more problematic ones are being fixed first.
Greg then asks Verfaillie, “Is there anything you can share about the future of combat that people might not know about yet?”
Verfaillie responds that there’s not really anything big. There’s a lot of focus on balance and bugs. A lot of these big bugs like Desync and Weapon Swap are high priority for the team, and they’re always looking at Weapon Balance. New Weapons are still a thing that are also being worked on, like the Blunderbuss we mentioned in the last Dev Update. They’re testing the Blunderbuss internally and it’s been super fun and bring a new play style to ranged weapons. All of these are what the team has been focused on.
Greg then going into the next question, “Scot mentioned it earlier, as well as Verfaillie; what are we doing about the weapon swap delay?”
Hall responds that there will be a new change for players to test on the next PTR. They’ve added a backtick to confirm that a weapon swap is going to occur when you hit that button. This should make it much more reliable than it is currently and has been in the past. It’s important to not that they do not have instant cancels added for their swaps, it’s a big topic and not something they’re ready to tackle at the moment. We will still have to wait for the windows to weapon swap, but it should queue up correctly now.
Our Thoughts
I’m glad they’re not going for huge changes anymore and will be working to do more fine tuning. It’ll help a lot of weapons stay much more stable in the long run and be fairly balanced for most content.
It’s also good to hear they’re aware of concerns with combat and are going to be addressing them soon. It;s hard to say how these changes will land before they happen, but they do sound promising at the very least.
Community Questions: World Events & PvP
This last section covers a lot of questions from content creators and has a mix of questions. For this last section Greg is joined by Studio Lead Scot Lane, Creative Director David Verfaillie, and Player Experience Lead David Hall.
The first question is directed at Scot. Greg asks, “Are there any plans to expand content in the open world; things like random incursions or dynamic events?”
Scot says there is, but he can’t get too specific with it just yet. He does believe that the more dynamic the world is, the better it is overall. Revisiting place should feel fresh and exciting each time you do. You can definitely expect more dynamic events and open world content in upcoming patches.
Greg then ask Verfaillie a big question a lot of people have been wanting an answer to, ” Can you explain the philosophy behind bumping the Gear Score so soon?”
Verfaillie explains the reason they’re bumping the Gear Score now is to tie in with Mutators. They wanted to make it so as players climbed the difficulty ranks they can increase their gear score as they do. They made this decision a long time ago, and felt it would be the best time to increase Gear Score alongside this new and more challenging content. If They were to make that decision today, they might not have due to all the bugs and other things that would take priority. With it already being closely tied to Mutators, we wanted to get that in earlier rather than later.
Scot adds to this that anticipating what players might want well in advance of the game going live isn’t the easiest thing. They feel strongly that Mutators is a strong feature for New World, but in hindsight, it may be a little earlier than it could have been.
The next question is directed at David Hall; which Greg asks, “Are there any planned changes or overhauls to Wars or Invasions planned, and how does the team feel about that Content?”
Hall responds that as a developer you’re rarely happy with your feature and there’s always ways to make it better. They do have smaller changes coming for these features. Their big focus right now is on War Declarations and War Performance, there’s still a lot that can be done to improve there.
Scot adds in that longer term they are exploring a more casual version of these features. Scot comments that he enjoys these features and would like more people to be able to experience them.
The next question is directed at Verfaillie which Greg asks, “The New PvP missions looked great on paper, but have been more mundane than expected; can we expect some improvements in these missions?”
Verfaillie responds that he likes the changes to the PvP missions, as they’re more directed towards the actual PvP activities rather than just being things to do while flagged. The whole process of flipping a territory is cumbersome, and some of that is by design so territories can’t just be flipped on a whim. It is still something they’re looking at and keeping their eyes on, but not any immediate priority at the moment.
Greg then follows up by asking, “Players would like to see PvP Arenas out in the world. Is there any thought on adding these small-scale arenas and maybe even matchmaking for them?”
Hall responds that he thinks the small-scale PvP is one of the best parts of New World and really shines a light on the game’s combat. They do want to support it further and we do have some things coming down the pipe. Though not sure if it’s something they could talk about yet.
Verfaillie says there’s nothing quite ready to talk about just yet. Arenas however are something that are being looked into. If and when they do add such a thing, it may not be a fully-featured thing, but rather a foundation to build upon like other features have been.
Scot says it’s exciting to be in a match where it’s an expected 3v3 or 5v5 PvP experience, as it rarely ends up that way in the open world. You wouldn’t be able to really hide or sneak up out of nowhere and suddenly change a fight. It’d just be more exciting to know it’s an even fight.
Greg wraps up by commenting that they’ve noticed people making circles and having a “fight club” or even having tourneys and brackets that way.
Our Thoughts
I think having more dynamic events would be a great thing to have. It gets a bit boring going around and even doing quests in some areas. This hits especially hard in Edengrove, where there’s not even as much as a corruption event that occurs. Hopefully, they can do some fun and interesting things to help make going point A to Point B more interesting, especially while on foot.
I personally don’t see the Gear Score being increased as a bad thing. Maybe a bit soon, but I do agree that it ties into Mutated Expeditions quite well. Here’s hoping that Mutated Expedition land well enough to not be pushed aside almost immediately.
While I’m not much into the PvP anymore outside the occasional Outpost Rush, I’m glad to see them more actively supporting smaller-scale PvP. If they do add Arenas in, it may be the thing that renews my interest in PvP again. Not sure I’d be super interested if they decided to add a ranking system for it, as that often bring out the absolute worst in people.
Full New World Developer Video
If you want to watch the full video, here it is.
