The new MMO New World is facing criticism from players. It is said that New World was released unfinished and needed more time for development. The head of the game, Scot Lane, comments on this in an interview.
Where do the statements come from? The site MMORPG.com had the opportunity to speak with Scot Lane, the head of New World. He also recently gave an interview about the significant player loss on Steam to a Polish MMORPG site.
What does he say about the launch delay? Lane is confronted with fans’ criticism that New World should have been delayed once more to address the many issues that arose after the launch, especially regarding the bugs and the dupe exploits.
Lane says:
“It’s difficult, we have been discussing this a lot internally lately. The thing is: We didn’t know about the exploit and the issues with dupes until after the launch. A delay wouldn’t have helped here.”
Scot Lane
New World promises more content in 2022 – focus on mid and endgame
Isn’t there a lack of content as well? Regarding the criticism of insufficient content, Lane says that progress was made in 2021.
In 2022, they aim to improve storytelling and bring more content for mid and endgame.
Players will soon see new types of quests; there are plans to invest more resources here. Lane also mentions that they have a lot in store for PvP players and is looking forward to showing more of that.
Team works so hard on problems that burnout is looming
What was the big problem? Lane states that the biggest issue was the scale of the launch. The surge of players in New World was so immense that they were overwhelmed. Testing at this level of players was not feasible prior.
This raised issues that the team wanted to address as quickly as possible. And in the rush to tackle the new problems, mistakes occurred.
The team was so excited to see so many players that they felt driven to respond quickly, enabling players to refocus on having fun.
A significant challenge was to find the right pace and to be more methodical in testing and reviewing updates. The team is working hard: they are currently looking to distribute the workload so that no one gets overworked.
The team is so committed that everyone wanted to work around the clock to solve problems, but that’s not sustainable. They want to prevent the team from burning out.
“A major lesson for us is: Even though we had an alpha for a year and a preview event and a public test – once you go live and have so many players for a long time, new issues will arise.”
Scot Lane
The problems Lane describes are reminiscent of statements made by the former face of WildStar, Stephan Frost, who once explained why every MMO launches with too little endgame content and too many bugs. And that the team is particularly in acute danger of burning out at release:
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