The wait continues for New World’s delayed Season of the Guardian, but Amazon is filling the gap with its latest Forged in Aeternum video. The studio’s Rob Chesney, Krishna Thiruvengadam, and Lula Lucent sit down to discuss the intersection of combat and storytelling in the game – specifically, soul trials, the instance content that delivers a “heavy dose” of both.
For one example, a large chunk of the video is devoted to the Umberto fight, which was designed as a capstone for both the storyline and the content for Brightwood. Brother Umberto isn’t just a random placeholder boss; the encounter was built to match the story.
The devs do answer multiple player questions about two-thirds though; they say that they’re hoping to devise a way to let very old characters re-do the current main story quest, they’d like to allow solo trials to be repeatable (it’s just a ton of work), they’d love to do more combat that combines players and NPCs in co-op, and they’re definitely considering some sort of scaling tower instance common to lots of MMOs.
It probably goes without saying, but the YouTube replies are pretty awful as players are pretty mad about the season 5 delay and what they characterize as a lack of communication about it. Which of course is not the fault of the narrative and combat AI devs in the video.
