Yesterday, we covered claims by the New World community that Amazon was banning players for using minimap mods – claims that Amazon strongly denied. But the studio also promised more elucidation on the topic, which arrived late last night. The team says it understands that some players want a minimap, while others don’t want to feel at a disadvantage for not using one if it existed. Fortunately for that latter group, Amazon isn’t putting one in any time soon.
“Right now creating a mini-map is not a high priority for us as we have other items we feel are more pressing. The high level reasoning is that we have concerns with it meshing with New World’s action combat style and world design, that it could break immersion, may limit the drive for exploration, and there are technical limitations. We feel the compass fulfills the needs, fits the setting, promotes exploration, and supports combat.
“Diving in to some specifics, a big part of our combat is situational awareness and the addition of a minimap may compromise this in a few ways. First, we are concerned that eyes may be planted on mini-maps as opposed to the play space. Second, if there are any combatants (AI or Players) on the mini-map, it could change how the game is played.
“Another concern is that players may play the mini-map (or at least stare at it) as opposed to the game world which could have a negative effect on immersion. Once implemented, the desire for more efficiency will likely drive to adding gameplay elements like nodes (active and in-active), local wildlife, and players. Then gameplay could become more about efficiency and less about getting lost in Aeternum. At that point, we are playing a 2D game as opposed to this beautiful interactive world we’ve created.”
That said, the team also isn’t taking action against people using third-party minimap mods, provided all of the information displayed in the map comes from the Overwolf API and not from external sources – in other words, it’s not allowed to show you every node or human in the game, just the ones your unlocks allow you personally to see. “In the future, we may change our position on this and decide to add a mini-map or change our position on allowing Overwolf,” Amazon cautions.
Amazon did say that it will be skipping its weekly patch, which you probably already guessed when it didn’t happen Wednesday and instead the team pushed out the new public test servers. Instead, the “bigger update” will deploy next week. As we noted yesterday, the PTR patch notes – and datamining – have already revealed plenty of nifty tweaks, including the Albion Online-esque feature of faster foot travel on roads. The team also says it’s still working on lingering transfer issues.
