‘New World’ shares 2022 roadmap, will add 3v3 arena in spring

Amazon Game Studios has released a developers roundtable, which briefly explores what to expect from New World this year – check it out below.

The hour-long video spends a chunk of time covering March’s Heart Of Madness update, including a 3v3 PvP arena, expanded PvP rewards and the new Blunderbuss weapon.

They also speak about the motivations behind Isabella, a character previously encountered in the Dynasty Shipyard Expedition and central to the new Tempest’s Heart quest, an endgame expedition for five players with a recommended character level of 60 and gear score of 550 or higher. Check out the video below.

Elsewhere in the video, the team confirms that another new expedition, the pirate-themed Barnacles And Black Powder, will launch in summer alongside the introduction of an LFG tool for expeditions and an as-of-yet undisclosed summer event.

Then in autumn, around the one year anniversary of New World, the world map will be expanded with the Brimstone Sands region, and players will be able to pick up the Greatsword – a new weapon with its own moveset and ability trees. The autumn update will also add the Ennead expedition, as well as leaderboards and two events – Nightvale Hallow and Turkulon 2022.

The dev team have also confirmed free unrestricted inventory transfers between storage chests regardless of faction and announced plans for paid cross-region transfers.

Last year, devs confirmed they wanted to make New World better for solo players. New World’s game director Scot Lane said: “We are also continuing to add more quests for the early and mid-game players. New quest types are being added, and they will help unfold more of the mysteries of Aeternum. We understand that some players would like to focus more on solo gameplay, and we are doing more to make that viable through alternate quest lines, and more solo-supported gameplay.”

In other news, Crucible developer Stephen Dewhurst shared that “Amazon is not a great place to make games” and revealed that it “was pretty apparent at the time” that Crucible would fail in a new interview with NME.

Dewhurst identified several issues with Amazon and said that “fundamentally [Amazon’s] executive leadership has a lot of hubris that stems from having been very successful at a bunch of stuff and thinking that their success in those things translates to success in other things when they’re not remotely similar,” adding that “there’s just a bunch of all-hands where I can recall executives giving answers that at the time we’d look at as wildly incorrect.”