Covering New World‘s new “living roadmap” for 2025 seems like something I should have gotten to sooner, but in my defence I’ve been battling one of the worst flus of my life for the last several weeks. But I’ve gotten to the point I can eat solid food again, so let’s get into that roadmap.
For better and for worse, this is about what I’ve come to expect from a New World roadmap. There’s a lot of good stuff on there, but the timeline on when it will be delivered is disappointing.
The roadmap is divided into three sections: “next season,” which is self-explanatory; “in development,” which is stuff that’s actively being worked on and probably coming “within a season or two”; and “in exploration,” which appears to be a mix of far off updates and experimental ideas that may never make it live.
The big ticket update for next season is the first seasonal world. Similar to what you’d see in an OARPG like Diablo IV, these are fresh servers with mechanical twists and limited durations, after which characters from them will migrate to standard servers. The first one will be focused on open PvP, more closely resembling the original vision of the game.
I was a little surprised to see a lot of pushback on this from players, especially since seasonal play of this nature has been frequently requested by many players for quite a long time. If I’m forced to take a side, I’m inclined to say there’s some validity to the concerns around splitting the population. I’m certainly not interested in a seasonal server myself, at least not one that’s focused on PvP. But I do suspect there’s an audience for this.
There’s also going to be a preview of the long-awaited second outpost rush map, but it’s worth noting it’s only a preview. It sounds as if it’s just going to be available for one weekend to beta test. I wouldn’t be shocked if the full version of the map arrives late in the season, or early next season at the latest, but that’s still a bit of a wait considering how long people have wanted more maps for OPR.
Finally, the next season will feature more repeatable versions of old soul trials, but as long as the rewards for soul trials continue to be so poor, that’s not really worth anything. There’s also going to be some new crafting materials from dungeons — the accompanying dev video only mentions M3s, but hopefully that’s an error and all mutation difficulties will include the new rewards.
Unfortunately, the coming season doesn’t do much to address the lack of casual and solo endgame options that have been a problem since Aeternum turned the endgame structure upside down.
The latter sections of the roadmap do look a bit more interesting, though. The “in development” section includes what looks to be some very interesting endgame changes, though unfortunately details are scarce. “Umbrals V2” is mentioned, and as I’m someone who’s been agitating for a return of umbral shards as a form of incremental progression, that gives me some hope.
“Cross-character progression” is also mentioned. I’m wondering what this could apply to because for a game that originally didn’t even let you have multiple characters on a single server, New World is already remarkably alt-friendly, and most everything you could ask to be account-wide already is. What else could the devs be adding to the list? MSQ progression is an obvious option. Perhaps a shared gold pool, or item storage? I’d love a way to share items between characters without the mess of using the trading post. Account-wide trade skills would be amazing, but that seems too much to hope for.
Something I’m even more curious about is a bullet point labelled “wraparound XP.” People have wanted some kind of rewards for earning XP at max level forever, so my mind goes there, but “wraparound” is such a weird word to use. What could it be?
The in development section also promises some long-awaited quality of life improvements, including global storage and the barbershop. Seems like it would have better to add the barbershop before they changed everyone’s faces without our consent, but better late than never, I guess.
A lot of people are concerned the barbershop will be monetized, but I’m OK with that as long as all existing characters get one free use. Ideally any future characters would also get one free use after creation.
PvP fans will be glad to hear of the addition of pick-up wars, making one of the game’s most iconic modes no longer the purview of an elite few, and I’m excited to see some updates planned for the PvE invasions. I love invasions, but they’re a sorely neglected feature with no real variety. About time they got a spit-shine.
The last noteworthy thing from “in development” is some news about changes to territory and reputation, and that actually has me a bit nervous. I’m very happy with the current territory standing system — it feels like the perfect balance of being a useful bonus when you get it, but not something you need to go out of your way to grind — and I hope the devs don’t break it.
That brings us to the final section, “in exploration.” The biggest items here, at least in my view, are a new zone and new weapons, but that is also the biggest disappointment of the roadmap: that these things are still so far out. With nothing from “in exploration” likely to arrive until fall 2025 at the earliest, it’s likely we’ll end up going two years without a new weapon, a new zone, or a continuation of the main story, and that’s just depressing.
Also in this general timeline are more uplevels of existing zones. It’s good to see older content being made more relevant, but I still think doing this piecemeal is terribly inefficient, and the game needs a more unified scaling system to keep older content relevant.
We know from the dev video that Reekwater is the next zone to be upleveled, and that does strike me as a bit of an odd choice as Reekwater is already a level 60 zone and thus still pretty relevant for endgame play. Wouldn’t it make more sense to uplevel irrelevant zones like Restless Shore or Mourningdale? On the other hand, Reekwater is one of my favourite zones and the location of one of my houses, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
One exciting feature in this section is the promise of matchmaking for all instanced content and new raid difficulty levels. This will be a great way to make raids more widely relevant, as right now content like the Hive of the Gorgons is effectively the sole domain of high-end players and established raid groups.
Rounding out this last leg of the roadmap are company halls (likely using the currently inaccessible large homes in many settlements), procedural expeditions with extraction mechanics, ranked PvP, a new raid, an influence tower siege system, and several bullet points too vague to form an opinion on, such as “endgame rewards and systems overhaul.”
One other thing I want to mention is something that’s totally absent from the roadmap: new seasonal stories. I’ve said before I’m no fan of Grace O’Malley and the previous seasonal storylines have tended to be just OK at best, so I won’t be heartbroken if we don’t get any more, but they did provide a good chunk of casual-friendly content each season, and I’m concerned nothing is going to fill that niche going forward. If nothing else, it would be nice to have a clear answer on whether seasonal stories are really dead or just on pause, and they should bring back the old ones for those who never did them.
My overall takeaway is that there is a lot of things to be excited for on this roadmap, but once again the timeline throws a damper on things. The next season continues to offer very little for anyone who isn’t a hardcore PvP player, and the prospect of waiting nearly a full year for the next zone is painful. For casual and midcore players, the message seems to be to just go play other things for at least the next three to six months.
New World’s Aeternum is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers delve those secrets to provide you with in-depth coverage of all things New World through launch and beyond.
