New World unveiled its next season, Season of the Guardian, this week, and now the team is diving into some of the upcoming changes and features ahead. This time, a new dev chat about the Cooking simplification and crafting improvements.
In Season 5, which begins rolling out to the PTR tomorrow, The team is looking to simplify and improve the Cooking tradeskill. With the various updates, they've increased the number of recipes, and reliance on crafting stations and everything got a little more complicated over time. Some of their goals are to simplify the Cooking process, improve it in ways that they see players gravitating towards in the first place, and continue to add more content for tradeskills without having to worry about performance as these features get additional options.
Simplifying things, they're looking at the crafting menus to make them less crowded, and they are taking a cue from their recent loot changes to make sure that inventory management is also simpler. Part of the way they are doing this is to cut a number of these food items out, which will, in turn, take up less inventory space. It isn’t just simply getting rid of items in number, but making sure what they do keep is maximizing efficiency.
Designer Joel Clift comments that “There's a lot of food that just doesn't have as much value. I can go get a piece of food with Con or Dex, and it's far more valuable than a dual stat one, because it's really hard to make a lot of those work easily”. This gives some insight into the future of this tradeskill. Don't overcomplicate things, and make sure what does remain works.
If you have created multiple stat bonus food, you can look forward to some of those items getting converted into a new “pure” version using the primary stat. A Focus + Dex food will become a Focus food. If you have some food items up for sale the Trade Post listings will be canceled and they will update the items for you.
They're also updating the food tiers to adapt to the new system, and reducing some of the level requirements for consuming some of the higher tier foods to make them more accessible. You won't cook one item at a time anymore, but instead in bundles of three. This will require more resources up front, but will also yield higher experience.
In addition to all this, fishing will also get some changes, with rarer legendary fish, important to creating the top-tier foods, and tweaks to the experience.
Watch the full video for more, including the team hinting that other tradeskills could get similar simplification overhauls in the future.
