New World will release its cross-world Expeditions feature this Wednesday, along with the improved Group Finder. The team dove into both of these features and how they will work when they make their debut this week.
Both features were in the planning stages for a while and initially intended to release last year, before being delayed a bit for more testing and polish. The full video goes into more of the challenge and the ultimate road to this week’s release.
Once the update goes live, you can queue in a group of 1-4 players, choose a role, and enter the cross-world Expedition group finder. Either get randomly matched or select a few criteria to control your experience more. The random option is fastest and also comes with a daily completion bonus to encourage its use. Once you have entered the Expedition together, a random group will also get a 15% bonus to damage, healing, and Max HP to help buffer the lack of familiarity between players.
There are daily, roll, and carry bonus rewards at the end of an Expedition, with a daily limit reset at 5:00 a.m. local time.
This should help with lingering population concerns for Expeditions at this time (and the team is asking for feedback on what other modes they should implement it for). As the team has added some new servers at times of greater demand and later had to merge some of them, this should make that less frequent, especially as it is added to other modes.
Both normal and mutated Expeditions will be included, with M1 and M2 also included. M3 is not included, since they want to preserve the competitive and high skill required. With M3 content being some of New World’s most challenging, it’s difficult to assign a one-click and make all the layers work.
As for the improved Group Finder, that one has also been a long time coming. Development on that was, in an earlier form, intended to help people find Expedition groups on their own servers, but that wasn’t addressing other issues, like population.
