Hi folks,
As you probably have seen in the various announcement threads, we’re approaching the end of this phase of our Alpha, and subsequently will be going dark for a period of time (months) while we work on some major new features.
This wasn’t a casual decision for the team. There are many factors that make keeping the Alpha live appealing. The MMO audience (that’s you!) are smart, knowledgeable players and you’ve been proving that to us throughout this phase of testing, with great and thoughtful feedback on direction of the game, and finding bugs or edges of gameplay we never expected. This is great and we always want that close daily feedback.
Through your feedback we’ve learned that you really like the game, and you’d like it even more if we added a few things – for instance, more gameplay depth on the PvE side (while still keeping interesting PvP). We heard you and have been prototyping major new features and content internally, but it requires the focus of the entire team to execute with quality and will make some changes large and small across the game experience. To do these without having the feature done and playable would feel disruptive to gameplay. The idea that we wouldn’t have a lot of change to show players for an extended period was the strongest reason to go dark, until we do have that change to show.
With our time we intend to come back with a game that shows the same intensity of our existing PvP wars, but accomplishes that in PvE settings as well. A game with a greater variety in ways to play, and diversity in rewards that we haven’t yet reached in the current version. PvE depth is only one of the areas we are working on to change gameplay – you’ve given us other ideas to improve, but we don’t want to promise features we haven’t built confidence in prototyping yet, so we’ll hold on details for the moment.
Large features take time to get right, but please know our goal is to get New World back in your hands as quickly as possible. Not because of the proverbial “time is money” consideration – that’s certainly true – but more importantly because we know our game improves dramatically when we’ve had time to test it with you as players. Thank you for your time and feedback so far and we are excited to show you what we’re working on in the coming months!
- Rich Lawrence, Executive Producer of New World
