The latest Forged in Aeternum video sees New World's developers look back on the MMO's transition from a survival game to its current status as a storytelling MMORPG.
The latest video sees Narrative Director Rob Chestney, Lead Seasons Designer Patrick Smedley and Storytelling Producer Johannes Rasinkangas talk about how the MMO shifted during development from being a survival MMO to one that tells a story through questing and more. For those who haven't been following Amazon's MMO since its inception, New World was originally very much a PvP-focused survival MMO. And that DNA is still very much alive in its current form with the deep crafting and gathering mechanics to the open-world PvP throughout Aeternum.
However, during testing it became clear that New World needed to broaden its scope to an MMO that had more to do than just those survival mechanics. Thus the team started to look at building quests, a storyline and more to serve as content for eager players.
"So we did that transition where we were a survival game," Lead Seasons Designer Patrick Smedley says at the start of the video. "We did some self-reflection and decided that we were going to pivot more towards an MMO. And at that point in time, [..][we] did not have quests. So we started building a quest team at that point in time and slowly started introducing a more coherent narrative through the game and adding quests that ask players to go and do fairly basic things."
This didn't mean that New World in its survival version didn't have a back story, but that the MMO would now moreso flesh it out and really start to tell that story for players through its questing and dungeons. Fast forward now to just about two years after launch and the results are night and day compared to even its 2021 iteration.
If you'll recall, New World was delayed out of 2020 out of a desire to add more content in the form of late-game questing and more, and since then the team at Amazon Games has been iterating on this, tweaking quest chains to make the back and forth originally in the game lessened, as well as better storytelling overall.
Naturally, the questing evolved to a point where the team needed to start working with voice-over talent to bring the characters and world to life, Johannes Rasinkangas, the Storytelling Producer on New World states that they were just shy of 200 characters in-game that had voices when they were brought on. Now, Rasinkangas reveals, as the team enters into Season Two, they have "upwards of 500 fully voiced characters" in the MMO.
Chestney, the Narrative Director, also reflected on the launch state of the questing experience as well, talking about how players just did not like the back-and-forth many of the main quests required, as well as the simple, lackluster quests, and how that has evolved since 2021.
"The funny thing is that when the game launched, we had really about six NPCs in every settlement of different backgrounds and ethnicities, they had voice-over but had very simple stories - not interesting backstories or anything - but you know, at the time quests were just, you know, they would randomly sort of send you out across the zone and you would go running all the way over there and do the quest and come back. [...] Players reacted to that at launch, we had a lot of feedback."
Smedley responded, stating that players "did not like the running simulator" that questing had become (something we mentioned in our review of the MMORPG back in 2021 ourselves). Smedley talked about how the team has addressed that feedback specifically, improving the quests with NPCs that will now go along with you in order to cut down on this.
You can check out the full video in the embed below. New World's Season Two, Blood of the Sands, launched last week, bringing giant sand wurms to the MMO, as well as a new 20-player elite trial.
