Amazon Games’ MMORPG New World won’t see any major content releases in February, with the team instead looking to focus on delivering as many bug fixes as possible.
The news comes via a New World developer update video, in which different members of the development team discuss a variety of topics, ranging from soon-to-be-added systems like mutators to various technical issues the team is looking to address.
Bug fixes are currently a big priority for Amazon, which is why the game’s February update won’t include any new content.
“February is just a bug fix month,” senior producer Katy Kaszynski said. “There’s no major content that is coming with the February release. We have some things that we are focusing on for that to make sure we get a good amount of fixes in and we make a real difference for the players that have been asking for things for a long time.”
New World has been crippled on multiple occasions due to various bugs, including multiple instances of gold and item duplication exploits that led to Amazon temporarily disabling the game’s entire economy. While most of those issues have been fixed quickly once discovered, there are still a number of issues that are priorities for the team. In addition to fixes for various bugged quests, missing ingredients, and other issues, the team is also looking to improve server desync issues and making weapon swapping more reliable.
Part of ironing out many of the game’s technical issues means giving players more time on the game’s public test realm–at least two and a half weeks–to test out potential bug fixes and new features, which in turn gives the team more time to react to player feedback.
“We learned the first PTR, when we gave ourselves like seven days, we were like ‘We’ll just do scale testing, we’ll check to make sure the servers can handle it, and then we are good,'” Kaszynski said. “What we found out is we were not good. We were the opposite of good. Players felt like we lost their trust, we felt like we lost their trust, so we’ve been gaining it back since then and we want to continue to do that by providing the PTRs far enough in advance that we can listen to them, take their advice, find out what the biggest sticking points are and address those before things get released into the live game.”
The update also touches on Amazon’s plans to merge various low population New World servers, plans that didn’t go as smoothly as planned. A housing persistence bug caused a delay in the process, but more merges are being planned in the near future. Once those merges are complete, characters will once again be able to transfer servers.
In terms of what players can expect in the long term, the dev update was light on details, but did reaffirm that a new weapon, the Blunderbuss, is in the works. Other details include the possibility of mutated expeditions coming to lower-level expeditions. The team also likes the idea of more small-scale PvP like matchmade arenas or more casual versions of activities like Invasions or War, though no concrete plans were discussed. More dev-playthrough videos will be coming soon as well. A previous video saw the dev team accepting the community’s challenge to complete the Myrkgard endgame zone, with some humorous results.
New World’s next update will add a new endgame system in the form of Mutated Expeditions, as well a way to raise the maximum gear score of items. The new content is currently being tested on the game’s PTR and is slated to officially release later this month.
Source: Gamespot
