The latest New World Forged in Aeternum is here, and it’s no secret recipe: The team said last week that this update would dive into the cooking overhaul. Amazon’s Tony Morton says that the team is aiming to retool and simplify and debloat all of the crafting systems in the game, but cooking was the skill the team wanted to start with because it was “the lowest risk.”
“This was a decent-sized initiative, going in and taking the tradskill and really moving a lot of stuff, a moving pieces,” Morton explains. “And I was much more comfortable doing it with something like cooking than, say, starting with armoring or weaponsmithing.” The goal was to make it more approachable, although the devs also talk about things that didn’t work out; for example, at one point on the PTR, they tested making food take up significantly more resources in an attempt to tweak the economy, but grumpy player feedback ensured that didn’t make it to live. Likewise, the devs are tweaking cooking to help keep fishing viable.
In keeping with the theme, Amazon spends the back half of the video doing a cooking show in which the devs make pudding, all in a very weird preamble to introducing the game’s own cooking contest, the winners of which will score 20,000 Marks of Fortune. Go forth and bake.
