With the preview event behind us, it’s time to unpack things and see what the next steps are for New World, and that was part of the discussion during a streamed interview hosted by streamers Asmongold and Rich Campbell with Michael Willette, one of the MMO’s developers.
One of the earlier questions was regarding how much can change in the game between now and the final release, and while Willette said that things weren’t going to change dramatically in that time span, he did say that smaller, incremental changes from the devs and with community feedback will build things up to a final product. To that point, the devs are looking at changing up quest loops, adding new enemies, and introducing “visual variety” in terms of enemies and biomes. He also stressed that updates don’t stop at launch as well.
The interview itself opened with a little breakdown of the New World’s preview event. In Willette’s estimation, the game has “really strong bones” to turn into something that will have something for PvP and PvE players without punishing one group while the other excels.
“The framework is there and now it’s time to iterate, double down on the things that are hitting, re-examine the things that are missing and see how we can improve them. And so during this event […] we got to expand to even more people, to get more perspectives on ways we can accelerate and enhance the things that are already there.”
The rest of the interview goes into specific mechanics-related questions such as tuning open world challenges so they can’t be overcome with zerging, the ability to play the game without engaging in too much combat or as a focused crafter as well as crafting and gear at the top end, and adding more incentive to engage in and improvements to region control gameplay in order to promote “wars not ganks” as Willette put it. The full interview is embedded below.
