By now New World’s unsteadiness is well-known among MMORPG fans. The game’s initial launch caught fire, but over the past few months the game has been beleaguered by a laundry list of problems, from exploits to feature shutdowns to factional imbalances among other things, and while the game’s player count is still significant, the concurrency numbers at the time of this writing represent a hemorrhaging of players in comparison to the over 900K that the game saw at its peak. None of this is lost to director Scot Lane, naturally, and he took a moment to speak with PC GamesN about New World’s present and future.
In the interview, Lane admits that the dev team was too focused on fixing issues instead of communicating with players and that patch updates were kicked out too fast. At the same time, he also believes that the devs are finding the right balance between patch release and testing time, and explains that more resources diverted to testing and the opening of the game’s PTR are steps to improving the patch experience.
Lane also explains that improving the live game is the first priority for the devs, though new content is in the pipeline. Points of focus include adding more endgame activities, introducing more things for early and mid-game players, and “potential solutions” to address faction imbalance regarding territory control. He also notes that the island of New World is not necessarily the only land players will see in the game, while additional features like new expeditions, new quest types, and new dynamic events are being developed.
Finally, Lane discussed a few quality-of-life features that are being worked on, including the ability to check character inventory while on the run, adding more quest and crafting markers, and creating a group finder for expeditions.
