The New World team continues previewing next week’s debut season, Fellowship & Fire. This time, we get a look into the new level 60+ expedition, The Empyrean Forge.
The official lore description sets the scene for a new type of challenge where you also have to worry about enemies, lava, and some intimidatingly strong pistons.
“After the destructive war that ended the Ancients’ rule, the Forge was abandoned but its mystic fires never went out. Centuries later, the wizard Myrddin made his way into the labyrinthian depths to study the techniques of Ancient engineering.”
This would prove to be the turning point, because his experiments not only opened fates to other realms, letting creatures and magic through, those energies that came through the gate binded to the Empyrean Forge itself. Sometimes, you’ve gotta leave the mysteriously burning ancient magical fire place alone.
The Varangians want the power now responsible for the bizarre events at the forge, and you’ll have to fight them, along with a number of other obstacles, enemy types, and challenging mechanics. The team focused on two main elements when conceptualizing and building the design of this Expedition, “player communication and unique environmental obstacles and interactions”. We can expect this to be a goal for future designs, so the Empyrean Forge is a good opportunity to get in some practice once it releases on March 28th.
Expect a two-part puzzle that they wanted to involve more than just uncovering a lock and running over to solve. For an additional layer of challenge, they prioritized including randomness in the solution, so it's not a matter of just memorizing it once. You and your team will have to communicate and interact to open two combination locks, without accidentally resetting the entire puzzle and starting over from scratch.
Then there’s the lava, and those pistons, which add an industrial feeling to the whole forge setting, and also paired with the industrial and techno-inspired sound in the expedition. They’re all obstacles and hazards, but it’s to be seen which of the elements trips teams up the most on their way to victory.
