New World devs have released another video highlighting the January update and talking about the state of the MMO thus far.
A fair bit shorter than last month's dev roundtable, the New World team took to YouTube to talk about the January update, as well as look back on the Winter Convergence festival that was extended for a few more weeks to give players more time to participate.
On the horizon for January is the inclusion of Mutators for the dungeon-esque Expeditions in New World. The team touches mutators specifically again, though it's not the only thing they are hoping players are excited about with the January update. Mike Willette from the Amazon team says that fast travel should be a bit more convenient moving forward as the team is adding six new Spirit Shrines around the world to help.
"Because Mutators are being released, we want players to be able to get to those locations quicker. So we've added six additional Spirit Shrines throughout Aeternum. So a lot of those are going to be located next to, obviously, which Expeditions are getting mutations, but also towards end game content like Arenas. So look for those. In addition to that, we reduced the cost of fast travel, so it won't cost as much azoth."
The team also talks about the increase in gear score, which will be seeing an increase, as well touches on combat balancing and more. It's an interesting look at the state of the game right now, as well as a look ahead towards what could be coming on the next PTR as well. One of the issues that players are eager to learn about is what the team is doing to address the weapon swap issues plaguing the MMO currently.
Coming with the next PTR update, the team is implementing a "back tick check" to help with the reliability that a weapon swap occured. As such, the devs state that when you swap it's going to occur. They also touched on weapon swap canceling which is not something that they are really ready to address, but as it stands the next PTR update should start to show the improvements in this area.
One other thing to note is the mention of server merges While server merges didn't really work out as intended late last year, the team is gearing up to tackle this, what the team is calling "round 1.5" of merges once the housing persistence issue has been fixed.
"We did less than ideal merges in December," senior producer Katie Kaszynski says when asked about the next round of transfers being available. "So we had this grand plan to merge all of the worlds that were struggling into a world that would be good, right? So that means it's either worlds struggling into one world, and because of their populations and the type of populations that they had, that one world would now be what we consider healthy, or it was a low population world into an already healthy server. "
Kaszynski goes on to state that because of the housing persistence issue discovered during testing right before the merges went live, the team needed to pause it and fix - or it would have ended up "really awful." The housing persistent issue is currently being fixed and once it is the team is planning "merge 1.5." Once this is done and the dust settles, character transfers will open up once again.
New World has had an interesting 24 hours as the team disabled global character creation for a large chunk of time yesterday, turning them back on with an early morning patch today. No real reason was given as to why players couldn't create new characters during that stretch.
