With the big announcement about the change to a seasonal model and upcoming content, the New World team’s latest Forged in Aeternum video is a community Q&A on seasons, PvP, combat balance, cross-world content, and more.
With this huge change at the center of all things New World recently, the new episode features Game Director Scot Lane, Creative Director David Verfaillie, and Senior Producer Katy Kaszynski.
One of the early questions has to do with adding more PvP content, including some criticism that the team had moved way too slowly on this and on combat balance changes. Lane acknowledges some mistakes and admits the team may have been too cautious in not wanting to break anything, which ultimately slowed pacing, but they’re course correcting. They also say that feedback on PVP or any of these issues is great on the official forums, or even Reddit, and all helps to let them know where to look to investigate issues, especially if there's bigger conversation happening that affects others.
“Why seasons?” opens up the topic of the new big shift, and Scot Lane responds that it is a way to build trust with players to offer a regular, reliable new content cadence. This works alongside always having something new to do, whether that’s exploring new narratives, or other content.
Season 1 content is now on the PTR, so at least a part of the community has had the chance to get in and try some of the new stuff out, which Verfaillie points out when responding to a question about endgame content and being able to get the season pass rewards. They’re looking to support different playstyles with the pass and new content.
There’s much more covered in the episode, but also notable is cross-world content. Outpost Rush has been named a number of times before, so that’s no surprise. They're planning to make sure all goes well with OPR before they bring other instanced game modes into the cross-world availability.
The team has had to learn from things breaking before, and it seems like they're trying to both increase the number of things to do, but also to do it carefully.
See more over at New World.
