Just last night, I was telling my husband that New World’s Season of the Guardian was set to launch next week, so he’d better get ready. Well, scratch all that now because Amazon has just announced it’s delaying the launch – and we don’t know how long.
“Thank you for playing the Season of the Guardian PTR. To better address your feedback on the upgraded combat & animation system as well as issues identified through the PTR and internal tests, Season 5 will be delayed. We appreciate your support as we continue to resolve issues and work together towards an even more enjoyable release. Stay tuned for an updated Season 5 release date in the near future.”
The post does include a list of changes to the PTR build that the studio has made so far; they include a balance tweak for the invulnerability perk (meant to avoid making healers and ranged DPS overpowered), several tweaks to the poison tipped perk to ensure it applies only to heavy melee attacks, and no changes to the nature’s blessing perk. The team is also working on controller support, cooking resource collection, and the combat and animation system.
“It was apparent from your feedback following the first PTR update that some fine tuning was needed with the Upgraded Combat & Animation System (aka Slayer Script),” Amazon says. “While your reports helped us identify many of the bugs and issues, we will continue to test and improve this system for Season 5.”
We’ve already seen some grumbling over the delay, but Amazon has been saying for months now that its goal here is to make sure patches are clean when launching them – and delaying them when they’re not ready is how that’s achieved.
