New World’s Season of the Guardian is in full swing, and the latest new dev video dives into the Cooking overhaul, what the team learned from the PTR, and future considerations, along with a real-world contest.
For the new season, the team announced a while back that Cooking and food would be overhauled on the whole, with the term simplification being tossed around a lot for the changes.
Patrick Smedley and Tony Morton detail how they decided what to cut, starting with dual stack recipes, and to bring what was vital to the tradeskill, in terms of resources and output into a more efficient operation. The team has been clear that this is essentially a test run for future changes to tradeskills and they started with Cooking because, as they mention here, it seemed like the lowest risk to start with. This is in spite of how large a change this is and how many items that they were tweaking (or removing).
The ability to test on the PTR was also something they credit. One change that got a lot of feedback was getting rid of single item crafting, replacing it with a bundle that required much more by way of resources. This was not just simplifying crafting, even with the greater reward. “I wanted to see if we couldn't get away with sinking more things out of the economy,” Morton says. And after a couple of hours on the PTR, the feedback was to bring it back down. So they reversed the change.
Now that they have the season launch behind them, they're all so looking around potential future changes, including additions and changes to make the crafting system more dynamic overall.
The full video ends in a cooking contest, and the team also announced a real cooking contest to go along with it. From now through April 22nd, if you prepare your favorite in-game recipe as a real dish, you can enter for a chance to win 20,000 Marks of Fortune in New World. There will be two winners, the most accurate dish and another judged to be the most creative.
