New World has announced its first expansion “Rise of the Angry Earth.” MeinMMO had the opportunity to ask Creative Director David Verfaillie and Live Lead / Senior Producer Katy Kaszynski some questions about the MMORPG.
On October 3, the new expansion, which brings us among other things a new level cap, new equipment and the long-awaited mounts, will be released.
Additionally, they are reworking the area First Light and turning it into an endgame zone. This is especially cool and we dedicated a separate article to it here: I played the new expansion and the area was so cool that it distracted me from questing.
We talked with the developers at an event in America about the general changes to New World and future plans.
“I pushed for us to be scarier”
MeinMMO: What do you think has been the most important update or patch so far? Aside from “Rise of the Angry Earth.”
Verfaillie: Scot Lane talked a bit about what we called the “Reduce Friction” initiative. That was in February/March. I believe when you’re developing a game for the first time, you already have a few ideas of what you want to do next.
So you have a small pipeline, but then we really started taking player feedback into account, and we radically changed our plans accordingly.
That was a big change. We didn’t speed up fast travel. We made it much cheaper. We allowed storage. That was the beginning of a new pattern where we catered a bit more to the players and less along the lines of: “Hey, here’s our roadmap. This is what we’re going to do.”
Kaszynski: Yes, Reduce Friction is definitely an innovation that I consider very important. But I think one of the biggest changes we made in one of the most interesting patches was the introduction of seasons.
This introduced a cycle in which players can expect content. Even if we wouldn’t release a roadmap, they could rely on the seasons appearing. So we will have at least one reward track that gives us these really cool rewards for playing New World.
We talked earlier [before the interview] about MMOs being work and we want that work to be fun. And part of what makes the work fun is the incentive, the reward. Therefore, the introduction of the season reward track was very important. It gave players something exciting to look forward to.
MeinMMO: Are there still any contents that are not in the game and that the community hasn’t asked for, but that you would like to see in the game?
Verfaillie: Yes, of course. I think it’s our job to come up with cool ideas that we want to implement. Katy, you mentioned in the last interview that our goal is to complete the “New World” experience.
With the completion of the main quest, we have the last little segment ahead of us. I believe that’s a very important part of it. We now have the storage of equipment, which has completed us. There are still a few more little things we want to do.
Kaszynski: What we currently have on the roadmap and the future that the developers know about is really exciting. But what I would like to see relates more to an art style or design decisions.
I pushed for us to be a little scarier. Let’s do things that could seem a little creepy. And the expansion is a really interesting transition. […] But I would like to take it a step further and make it a little creepy, not all the time, but in moments where you feel your heart racing.
When you first enter the Apophis fight in Brimstone, it’s terrifying, but not in terms of design, not in terms of art. So that’s something I would really like to do at some point in the future. I will always bring that back to the design table.
“There is now much more depth for the endgame”
MeinMMO: Where do you want to take New World? Originally it was a survival game. Now you have several dungeons and even your first raid, and the player base loves it. What is now the big overarching goal for New World?
Verfaillie: We made the switch to an open-world MMO some time ago, and that’s kind of our charter here. That’s exactly the point we are at and where we want to continue to be a really fun open-world MMO.
This will include a variety of PvE and PvP content. One thing we don’t talk about too much are the influence updates that are also coming. So even in this update, we have a lot of PvE content, but with the influence updates we have something really, really cool for PvE.
MeinMMO: Many players were immediately excited about your world, but they criticized the scope of the endgame. How do you see that in retrospect?
Kaszynski: This expansion is a really good example that we are focusing on the endgame. Many of the elements we’re adding are definitely for people just getting into it. When you’ve just started with your character and reached level 25, you get a mount.
But there is now much more depth for the endgame. The hunt for equipment is something you can do. You can do the ECRs [Elite Chest Runs], but you can also go into the new area and go through the main story. That’s definitely deeper than what we had before. So we are definitely focusing on making our endgame very extensive.
Verfaillie: We added a lot of new content for the endgame, right? Four new expeditions have been added. There’s the Sand Wurm elite trial and now another one is coming with the expansion.
Additionally, there’s the update of the gear score, which I believe will be another cool advancement for the players. And finally, I believe the artifacts will provide another incentive in the end, right? So you don’t just want to create your gear, but you also want to get your artifact combinations. I think there’s a lot of fun things to do.
“Swimming is on the to-do list”
MeinMMO: I have researched and asked around why many players are no longer playing New World. And the most commonly mentioned answer was because of the faction system. Players were in one faction and the others were overpowering. Do you plan to improve this system to make it a bit more competitive, so that a weak faction has a chance against a strong one?
Kaszynski: That’s something we are constantly monitoring. Every week we look at the composition of factions on the servers. Interestingly, most servers are evenly distributed. So even if it seems that one faction has dominance, they only have that by a very small margin. It’s really just about the active users.
Verfaillie: We’ve made a few changes, especially since launch, to achieve that, right? We did things like making it not so easy to change factions. Another thing we’ve done is that for some people, war is not so important, but it was so obviously.
On the map, that is now no longer displayed by default, unless you have a PvP flag. The bonuses you get for owning territories have decreased. And the other big thing is that we’ve tried to make it not feel bad to be the outsider, so I think we’ve also tried to minimize the impact of that a little.
MeinMMO: Aside from the mounts, the most requested feature is swimming.
Verfaillie: We agree that it’s something that will probably happen at some point. We are not working on it immediately, but I think it’s a natural extension of the game. We will keep an eye on that.
MeinMMO: So it’s on the to-do list?
Verfaillie: It is on the to-do list, but it’s not in the pipeline yet.
Kaszynski: Imagine an MMO table that is probably 60 times larger than this table here [in the room]. Let’s say it’s on the table, although on the edge, but it’s on the table. Right now we are focusing on the middle of the table. As Dave said, that’s something we are discussing. We are talking about it, but there are no immediate plans or anything we can announce.
Verfaillie: Unfortunately, that’s all we can say at the moment.
We thank the Amazon Games development team for answering our questions. Are there any questions that are burning under your nails?
In a previous interview, we were able to ask some questions: The director of New World explains to us that complaining doesn’t help if your class is “too weak”
