The interviews just keep on coming from the devs of New World. This time around we’ve got one from GamesIndustry speaking with game director Scot Lane about things that make the upcoming MMO stand out as well as plans for the game’s future.
Lane’s own love for a variety of games including WoW, Black Desert, and Dark Souls as well as the team’s desire to blend fighting, action, and survival genres in to one helped steer New World in what he hopes is a different direction for the genre. “Everyone is always looking for the next new MMO, and we’ve had some really good ones. But it seems there hasn’t really been a new [hit] for a while, and a lot of the focus is shifting to other genres,” he notes. “I saw it as an opening…so our combat style, being physics based, was a differentiator.”
The interview then shifts towards New World’s setting, where Lane explained the general time period choice as a reason to blend “the last gasp of the sword and shield and plate mail, and the first breath of muskets and firearms” while also hinting that the island of Aeternum is a location out of time, meaning technologies and influences from the past and future could arrive to the game later. Lane also remarks that the devs are looking to provide “meaningful releases” on a monthly basis, with the team already entering into the cadence through alpha as a means of building muscle memory.
Lane also notes that, thanks to the association with Amazon, New World will be including some integrations with Twitch like a “Sub Army” feature that allows subscribers on the same server as a streamer in to their company or party, and a “Streamer Spotlight” feature that lets streamers identify themselves in-game and provides a notification of how many people saw the streamer get a kill or get killed.
