New World has a new Forged in Aeternum giving insight into how the PTR helped shape Season 1, and how the team does respond to community feedback.
When it comes to community feedback, the team has made it clear on multiple occasions that they are looking at feedback (in addition to things like bug reports) on the New World forums, social media, and on Reddit, or the newly-opened New World Discord. In previous Forged in Aeternum episodes, they’ve done community Q&As responding even to some pretty harsh questions (and opinions).
Yet, this episode focuses on how feedback from testing has impacted the game.Though they do note that even if you give the best feedback and your idea makes sense so much that they plan to apply it to the game, this can take time. It can take a long time.
When a PTR opens ahead of an update, there are sometimes specific questions and testing the team is looking for feedback or data from, and the overall aspects and question of whether it’s fun and something you want to keep playing.
In the accompanying devblog, there’s a list of some of the changes that made it into the first Season, Fellowship & Fire. Some of the things that were influenced by the community testing were:
- Increased passive Season XP gain to make Season Pass progress feel consistent across all player activities.
- Introduced a new way to gain Season XP through regular character XP. Now everything you do in-game will also advance the Season Pass.
- Increased the ease of Activity Card progression via more accessible Season Activity categories.
- Changed Ifrit from Angry Earth to Human creature type so that players don’t need to bring Angry Earth ward gear into Empyrean Forge.
In addition to these additional rewards for both passive play and a bump in Season XP just for earning XP doing other things, the pass is also designed to offer some guidance with the goals. Something like Empyrean Forge might get you five stamps for completion.
Altogether, several of the topics and changes mentioned by the team in the full video were intended to, or added based on feedback, to give some flexibility to player options. This extended to rewards, since a new event was influenced by reaction to Legacy of Crassus, which was repeatable, but began giving out lesser loot on subsequent wins. This time around, the Fury of the Spriggan event will reward something valuable during any completion, though the biggest reward will be your first for that day.
For more, watch the full video, and read the devblog at New World.
