New World is steaming ahead towards it launch this August, and the patch notes today give a glimpse into how that development is progressing. The notes add the new Ice Gauntlet weapon, as well as provide more incentives for PvP in Aeternum.
Revealed earlier this month, the Ice Gauntlet has been added to the Alpha, bringing the ability to deal damage with the new magical weapon. According to the notes, the gauntlet has two trees, Ice Tempest and Ice Conjuror.
"We've introduced a new magic gauntlet weapon that harnesses the elemental power of Ice. The Ice Gauntlet’s attack scales off of Intelligence. Adventurers will be able to progress through two mastery trees, allowing the player to manipulate Ice magic in different ways:
The Ice Tempest weapon mastery tree focuses on damage and area denial
The Ice Conjuror weapon mastery tree focuses crowd control, protection, and a deployable Ice Pylon that fights alongside the player, improving their power and efficiency."
In addition, New World has added a new question to find a legendary version of the Ice Guantlet, Rimelash.
The Ice Guantlet isn't the only major addition with this latest Alpha patch, as Amazon Game Studios has made tweaks to Faction Warfare. Now New World has added the ability to capture and fight over forts themselves outside of a war. This is done through the addition of capturable points in all territory forts. As such, players can invade and capture these points simply by having more players in their faction there. However, players will have to be flagged for PvP in order to count towards capturing the point, and these control points only are activated when there isn't a current war or invasion declared.
There are benefits for capturing one of these forts as well in the form of a global buff to the controlling faction. Examples include reducing weight costs for fast travel, or reducing base housing taxes in the area of Brightwood.
Two new expeditions have been added as well: Lazarus Instrumentality and Dynasty Shipyard. These expeditions are group PvE instance dungeons where players will team up to delve more deeply into the story of New World. Achievements are also coming to New World in this Alpha, though players should note that the unlocking requirements in the Alpha period might be lower than the live version later this year, so that the system can be more adequately tested.
You can check out the full patch notes on the New World website.
