Exciting Changes Coming to New World

 We don't have the 2024 road map from the New World developers, but we did get news on some other exciting changes coming over the next few months.  The team has rewritten the code for the combat engine, are launching a new 10-man trial, and are bringing back some seasonal events.  Watch the update below and read on for my thoughts.

Too long/didn't watch summary on Reddit: LINK 

 First, the roadmap update has been pushed out to June.  It sounded like something "major" internally is causing the delay.  With controller support coming soon there is a lot of assumptions about a console release and a big update to go with it.

 A new 10-man trial was announced.  It was specifically mentioned to be targeted at pick up groups so difficulty level is expected to be "easy".  I feel this is a miss. There is no shortage of "easy" content in this game (Mutation level 3 and the Sandwurm 20-man raid being the only real challenging content).  The game needs new harder content and the 10-man trial could have been that (or at least bring a mutator system to it).

Phoenix? Broken?

 We will also get a slew of new artifacts.  The one causing alarm is Phoenix; an amulet that grants a two second invulnerability period upon reaching zero life.  This is the same as the original "defy death" on the hatchet which was too strong and nerfed so I am not sure how the team thinks adding it back on an amulet makes sense.  I foresee a lot of complaints if this makes it live as shown in the video (screenshot at right).

 As alluded to up front controller support is coming with this update.  I do own a Steam controller but not sure I will be interested in giving it a try.  The little bit they showed off did not seem like it'd be much fun to have to use (they showed a cursor being moved around by controller like it was a mouse instead of a more controller native interface where you press left/right/up/down to move through items).  It will also bring "aim assist" and "target lock on" which was stated as PvE only.  This is  concerning if in any way it makes it into PvP.

 The main story quest redesign for 1-60 will now be complete.  Personally, as I've shared before, I think this was a waste of time.  I don't like the new narrative as it dramatically differs from the original concept of New World.  Instead of mysterious island in the age of discovery we have morphed into King Arthur and rehashed fantasy. 

 Cooking is getting an overhaul.  I am looking forward to this as most of the cooking recipes are pointless.  Consolidation and simplification of recipes will go a long way to improving the profession.  I am also hopeful recipes will use a wider range of ingredients vs some of the most useful recipes being very strict on ingredients (and thus one ingredient is disproportionately more valuable than others of the same tier/effort to gather).

 Mounts will be allowed in Outpost Rush.  Finally.

 Most exciting in the news is the combat engine overhaul.  This is not a change to skills or balancing, but a code rewrite.  The developers noted that this will allow them to better isolate and troubleshoot problematic areas like desync where the server and client don't match up to what a player sees.  The revamp should also give better performance over all, but it was noted it may take a couple releases to realize that improvement.  I suspect this took a massive effort on the developers part so I am keen to see what this does and while not targeting balance it likely will influence build choices that may have performed poorly before but now are more reliable to play.

 Another exciting change was related to Magnify.  Players will now be able to determine the attribute it applies to.  This will make it easier to use pieces with Magnify.  While not ideal in my view the reality is that Magnify was everywhere and needed a better way to manage it.  Personally I've felt they should dial magnify way back to only few items; had they done this then the current system would of been fine.  I am also worried this new approach will eliminate "tricking" Magnify to split across two attributes which is the cornerstone of my current build.

 We are also getting repeat events.  Rabbit's Revenge where we kill lots and lots of rabbits.  Then Springtime Bloom returns. 

 All of this is expected during Season 5 which will kick off on March 12th (TBD exact changes we get on that patch vs later patches).