So, who’s hungry?! You, hopefully, and if not, you will be by the time you make it through the newest New World dev blogs – and there are actually two to feast your eyes and ears on so far this week.
The first is focused entirely on the cooking overhaul; Amazon says the devs now have over two years of watching us eat video game food and now has “a far better idea of how players structure builds and use consumables.” That means the team is removing split attribute food, tweaking and swapping some recipes and ingredients, improving tradeskill food, making fishing more useful, boosting cooking experience, and so forth. Do note, the cooking blog from yesterday does include a video, but it’s the same one Amazon released a week or two ago.
The new video here is actually the February community Q&A with Scot Lane, Katy Kaszynski, and Scott Geiser. It’s… pretty combative, honestly, since the questions are community-submitted; the very first one leads off with an insult, throwing Scot Lane’s previous comments about slowing the cadence to improve quality back in his face.
“Sometimes I guess things get a little worse before they get better,” Lane replies ruefully. “This is an example of that. All I can do is tell you that when we make a mistake, we do what we call a Correction of Errors. We understand what the mistake was, and then we try not to make that same mistake again. We are slowing down as we’ve talked about, and I can promise you that we’re putting every effort we can into making Season Five a smooth, super fun, awesome event with negative eventless release.”
The devs also talk about the achievement spam bug, quest limits, server merges (yes, they’re looking at more, but the merge team is working on something else right now), player activity metrics (“most PvP players also do a lot of PvE” and PvP-intensive players are about a third of the playerbase), traps for mounts, Wurm raid loot, missing lore notes, and cross-world arenas eventually.
