New World game director Scot Lane has checked in recently with an update from the game’s alpha in a new letter to the community which offers another look at just what the devs at Amazon Game Studios are attempting to accomplish with the title. In short, the devs are looking to mesh the seemingly disparate elements of sandbox and guided MMO gameplay, in an open world where PvP and PvE players coexist and even help one another out through their preferred playstyle.
Lane hopes to do this with a number of different systems working in concert like factions, crafting, town projects, town progression, war, corrupted breaches, influence, missions, and the upcoming addition of invasions. According to the letter, things like town progression, faction missions, and quests are giving PvE players things to do, while PvP players control space and earn higher tier rewards. These different systems are, reportedly, already helping to strike a PvPvE balance. In fact, players have already hit max level by exercising their options; the first max level player only completed 38 missions, while the second max level player completed over 700.
New features are in the works to further improve PvP gameplay, such as improved time to kill, coin rewards, refined PvP damage scaling which should be in the next update, and re-balancing of equipment. PvE players should soon see quest goals stay closer to home. And bridging the gap between the two are upcoming Influence War PvP missions, which the devs hope will coax PvE players into PvP along with the promise of higher tier rewards.
What will not be coming back is full loot open world PvP. “I’ve seen the discussions and want to be transparent and clear,” reads the letter. “The vision is a world where PvP and PvE players can coexist and complement each other, which could not be achieved with full loot open world PvP.” This reaffirmation of New World’s stance seems to counteract Lane’s remarks made during an interview, though the letter also effectively elaborates on the overall vision for the game mentioned in that same interview.
As for the alpha itself, new bugs and design opportunities are being found by the players and the devs, and there’s at lest one more content update due to New World before it moves into closed beta, which promises the addition of magic, more quests, and Corrupted Invasions. Timing on when this all arrives wasn’t provided.
