New World’s Amazon crew is back with another Forged in Aeternum Q&A this week, headed up by game director Scot Lane and senior gameplay engineer Scott Geiser, who are joined by creative director David Verfaillie, and this one starts with a bit of bad news: This episode will mark the last Q&A before the big mystery announcement in June. That’s because the devs feel they’re not in a position to answer much until then, and they don’t want to have to keep dodging the community’s burning questions. Instead, there will be a long Q&A after the announcement, and presumably it’ll resume cadence after that.
This last Q&A does tackle a bunch of big questions, such as how it’s possible for reported bugs to still make it to live (triage, basically), endgame PvP, repeatable vs. storyline content, feedback on Discord, raising the overall quality of the game using bundled fixes, gearscore updates, territory ownership, gathering artifacts, and fresh start servers (yes more fresh start servers are coming).
There’s one key question in here about regaining the trust of the community; Scot Lane calls it a “super fair” question. “The only way we’re going to do it is by putting out quality releases that you all like,” he says. “I can tell you that we failed differently on this last one than the one before. We won’t fail this way again. But anything I say is not going to make you trust us. It’s going to be when we put interesting software in your hand that is on time and works.”
Scott Geiser also addresses a question about QA processes, explaining that for season 5, the team was trying to fix a build (which was already delayed) two ways at nearly the last minute, and that brought its own problems. He does clarify that they’re still working the kinks out of their QA pipeline (and trying to juggle the desire to get things out now vs. get them out perfect).
“We want to see this whole thing come together in a bug-free polish manner,” David Verfaillie says.
