New World: Aeternum has had its highs and lows, and after this month’s developer Q&A session, there’s a good chance more highs are coming soon!
Below is a full list of some of the many topics covered throughout this session. If you’d like to join the conversation and share your thoughts around these topics, be sure to comment on the original Reddit post with this summary here.
Q: When can we expect to get news about Season 9 and the expansion coming later this year?
A: News about upcoming releases will be coming within the next few weeks.
Q: Will we get a new raid in 2025?
A: Stay tuned!
Q: It’s quite clear to many that pre-mades in PvP have a big advantage. Is there any chance we will get 1 singular pvp mode without them? It’s quite likely that the win rate for 4 stacks in the CTF mode will increase as the try-hards will simply do that instead. Also have arenas been moved back to allowing 3 stacks? We all know it’s an mmo and the social element is important but surely 1 solo friendly mode wouldn’t be too much.
A: We are working on an upcoming mode that will be solo queue only and while we’vediscussed having separate queues for solo and groups on existing modes, there is the concern that this will split the audience too much and result in longer queue times for everyone. Re: Arenas, they do allow 3 stacks, but their MMR is adjusted upwards to help balance the matches. We are continuing to look at how well our MMR system is working and have identified some improvements we can make specifically around balancing matches better with pre-mades and differing skill levels in the same match.
Q: When will we see guild houses? Our company is pumped up for this if this is a thing?
A: I know multiple people passionate about these types of features on the team and this is something we would really like to have one day. Unfortunately I do not have information to share at the current time about features like this beyond that the concept and ideas around it are in exploration.
Q: Does the team recognize the difficulty associated with completing an M3 on Gold? Why are rewards for this activity essentially no different from running an M1?
A: Rewards across the board need some work though I agree the disparity of rewards across M1-3 is not in the best spot. This is something we will continue to look at long term, but we also have a very large gear and rewards overhaul coming this year though I am not quite ready to give specifics on that just yet.
Q: Is there any plans in the near future to remove “Fresh Start” from worlds to be able to have more variety of players since it has been over a year now?
A: It’s in our plans to eventually convert Fresh Start worlds into Standard worlds, opening up those worlds to a larger group of players. We will share more on this as we get closer to Season 9.
Q: Can we possibly get previous Twitch Drop armor and weapon skins (Wheel of Time , Mars, etc.) put into the store or back on another Twitch Drop?
A: There are a few discussions on the dev team about just this topic. I will dig into this to see if there is anything preventing us from doing so or if we can start bring back some of these cool sets in a meaningful way.
Q: Is there any plans to incentivize or streamline open world PvP? There are MANY veteran players standing around in settlements waiting on a queue to pop.
A: On queues, we’re looking at queues very closely right now and have actually been running some experiments behind the scenes, and we have plans for how to improve queue times. On open world PVP in particular, no immediate plans beyond the PVP track for the immediate future, but having said that, open world PVP is one of the coolest things about NW and it is not something we want to neglect long term.
Q: Where is the summer medleyfaire event?
A: Summer Medleyfaire will be released with Season 9.
Q: When will void blade be nerfed?
A: Season 9 will have another nerf for the Void Blade in it. And season 10 will have a lot of power changes across the board that will completely mix up the meta.
Q: Any hints for the next skill(s) after Farming?
A: Nothing to share about farming or tradeskills at this time other than Farming is something we have in exploration and have made a few prototypes but are not quite ready to talk about new tradeskills.
Q: Are we getting an expansion/DLC with a sizeable amount of actual new content any time soon? Being forced into PvP activities when servers are unbalanced is getting tiresome.
A: Stay tuned for updates on future releases within the next few weeks.
Q: Are there any plans for new territories to be added? A snowy territory would be awesome to war in
A: We aim our plans about 3 zones ahead at a time in various phases: 1- Active development; 2- Concept approved; 3- Active exploration. We have a bucket of about 20 different ideas for zones that we choose from to fill those slots. There’s always a small chance that we will get to see snow again.
Q: Will the studio allow previous battle passes to be purchased? This would be awesome for players that are new to the game and have missed out on previous season cosmetics. I am sure people would pay for this. The FOMO makes me rush. For instance, I paid for a previous season but due to adulting I had to abandon before finishing. Now I missed out on the rest of the loot because we are on the new season. I want to get back in the game but I’m hesitant because of the FOMO with the season pass
A: We are actively exploring ways to bring back previous season pass content in a way that I think will be very accessible and positive for players, though I cant currently expand on details for this.
Q: Will there be weapons for lightning, arcane, and poison damage like there are for fire frost and nature?
A: Flail currently uses arcane damage for several abilities, and poison damage is nature damage, which is currently the damage type for the Life Staff. Granted the life staff is not a DPS weapon. We have had many discussions on future weapons, or weapon variations that can mix up damage types, however there are no immediate plans for additional damage type weapons.
Q: There is a new end game progression system in development. Can we be sure that this system will finally become the main one in NW and that there will only be minor adjustments in the future, rather than full changes to this system?
A: Ideally the core of the system that we are developing won’t change over time, but I believe that we have built a system that will allow for some flexibility to change and evolve as the game and its content and rewards continues to do so as well.
Q: Will the end-game progression system be designed in a way that combines horizontal and vertical progression, so that even months after a major update it’s still fun to play?
A: Yes! You’ve just stated our primary goal for this feature. We recognize that vertical progression alone results in content that loses its reward incentives so our future plans are to do smaller vertical progression updates and rely more on horizontal to keep rewards interesting across the entire game.
Q: Do you plan on actual balance changes in season 9 for the pvp combat system and not just slight tweaks to damage numbers? If so what will they be?
A: Season 9 will be more focused on just balance updates, as well as a few more artifacts, and a rework of 3 existing lesser used artifacts to mix up the meta a bit. However, not for season 9, but an upcoming season, we are planning a massive overhaul of the entire perk perk system which should greatly mix up the meta.
Q: Can we get some confirmation that the dev team is aware of how timegated and unrewarding ALL content is now? Nothing is rewarding but Hive, the Wurm, and, minimally, the Well of Fortune (and not for a lot of builds). M10/Umbral era gave us: tons of BoEs to sell or give to friends; no loot biasing; ALL gear was upgradeable, some to three perks from two (OPR crates). Is Umbrals v2 just going to be a shiny coat of new paint on this current system, where nothing is worth doing, or is it an actual overhaul?
A: The goal with the overhaul is to start to address these exact types of problems. It’s built in a way that’s going to be scalable long term and allow us to make all content meaningful instead of just the pinacle content pieces. The umbral system we are going to use is more akin to the old one in that its systemic and will allow you to upgrade any gear in a speciifc gearscore range making much more content viable if you like the perks on the gear.
Q: It was mentioned previously that artifact perks would be changed easily without the burden of the high cost to facilitate build diversity in the last Q&A. Is there an update on this , and not only on artifacts but upgradeable items in general?
A: We have a large scale reward overhaul that will impact how players interact with gear going forward. This includes an umbral system with ways to upgrade your gearscore on endgame gear, more player customization by allowing players to slot/socket more perks of their chosing (not just gems), as well as new set bonuses on gear. The goal with all of these systems together is to improve our endgame chase and allow for more expression of player power and customization by giving players more control over more aspects of their gear.
Q: What is the timeline on saving attributes and weapon skill trees to gear sets
A: We are currently working on saving attributes to gear sets for a relatively soon release, however the saving weapon skill trees is not planned for the immediate future.
Q: Any plans to update the FFA zone ? Ways of Incentivising people going there?
A: We’ve got some updates coming in season 9 to both the rewards in the FFA zone as well as some new gameplay mechanics. Stay tuned for more info on these updates in an upcoming Forged in Aeternum!
Q: What does the roadmap look like for pvp? Are there plans to expand pvp beyond OPR and 3v3 arena? I don’t mean another instanced game mode such as CTF, but something much larger in scale like a large open zone where factions fight to capture and hold objectives.
A: We don’t have any current plans for this, but we have been talking about what the future of war looks like in the game and it will likely involve a complete revamp of how we handle open world PvP.
Q: Any plans to change the War experience and make it much more accessible to the larger player audience instead of the 1% it currently it enjoyed by?
A: Absolutely. When we talk about making wars more accessible to companies practicing wars, part of that plan is to make wars more generally accessible outside of companies as well.
Q: Can you also go over the rationale behind so much haste and haste in pvp? Is there any look at capping haste in pvp?
A: Haste has power creeped itself out of control, and we are aware of it. In season 9 we have reduced the max haste clamp from 50% to 40%. As well as reduced the power of almost all hastes across the board from anywhere from 15% to 50%. We have also pivoted the functionality of the newly implemented Potent Alacrity Perk to be Potent Vivacity which increases the potency of energized effects.
Q: The world of Aeternum is so vast and it’s so sad to see some areas empty and uninteresting, do you have any plans to make some existing areas attractive?
A: We are always thinking about how to improve our older zones. Cutlass Keys was the first stage of that goal, and the Reekwater Revamp represents the next step. We eventually want to revisit Mourningdale as well.
Q: Do you plan to revamp NW’s perk system? The game has a lot of perks, but 10% of them are useful and popular, making 90% of them useless. Some perks require a major buff to make them attractive.
A: We are currently working on a rework of the entire perk system. Some perks will carry over into the new sytem, some will be changed, and new ones will be present. Along with an entirely new and interesting perk type to obtain.
Q: For future artifacts will we ever see ones that change skills like the conquerers weapons from S7?
A: A lot of the existing artifacts have definitely missed the mark by being more so just number increases over interesting alternative gameplay decisions. Going forward we want to slow down the release of artifacts and release fewer, but more intersting ones that actually dynamically change gameplay, as well as going back through and reworking older ones that have missed the mark in the past. Season 9 will have 3 reworked artifacts, and 3 new artifacts. Two of the new artifacts are based on Conqueror’s Item functionality.
Q: What do you guys think of forcing PVE players to PvP and vice versa? Isn’t it better to let players choose how to earn their rewards?
A: We’ve experimented with this one a lot over the years, in both directions. At a high level, forcing PVE players to PVP for PVE power is our top priority to avoid. PVP players always need to do some amount of PVE obviously, since that is a core part of the game. However we do want to respect PVP players’ time and generally not force them to spend tons of time in PVE if all they want to do is PVP. That’s the high level goal, but obviously the devil’s in the details.
Q: Can you tell us any super secret details about the Procedural Expedition Mode w/ Extraction?
A: Not yet, but ohhh boy do we want to! For now I can just say that it’s coming along really well, and the team building it are having a ton of fun with it. Designing content for Replayability is our main goal moving forward, and this mode is probably the most direct shot on that goal that we’re working on. Stay tuned, info is coming!
Q: Are there any plans to adjust how healing and TTK operate such as increasing duration and effectiveness of disease or making Sacred Ground not stack?
A: We are currently working on a large shift in perk meta and want to make some life staff adjustments to address some of these issues. However we don’t have any specifics ready to share at this time.
Q: Are there any plans to introduce a 20vs20vs20 or a 10vs10vs10 OPR? I think having 3 different teams going against each other would really offer that different pvp gameplay. I also think this addresses the one thing makes opr no fun when one team just dominates the other the whole match.
A: I agree this would be a really interesting variant on our existing modes, but it would be quite a bit of work since so much of the underlying system was built with the assumption of 2 teams. This might be something we explore down the line though to see what it would take to support.
Q: Hello, currently mobs/named enemies have CC immunity without any indicator—such as UI elements or animations—showing how long it lasts or any visual effect for that immunity. Will there be a rework on this? It has been affecting the M3 experience for many PvE players. Cheers.
A: With the release of New World: Aeternum, we added a reaction limiter system to gold nameplate characters so that after playing a stagger, they would have a 2 second window of stagger immunity to give them an opportunity counter attack and present a greater challenge to players than silver or normal nameplate character. There should be a vfx that displays around the character’s head during this immunity, though I can certainly understand that it’s hard to see during group combat. While I don’t have an eta on an adjustment, we’ll review the functionality of this and see if we can better inform players of when this immunity is active.
Q: Once again, the aim assist nerf wasn’t enough, players are locking the target and using spells like Meteor or Ice Storm with 100% accuracy, as well as Blunderbuss. Any news on this?
A: We’re continuing to look at improvements we can make to aim assist & target lock that maintain their usefulness without compromising the skilled nature of the game. There aren’t any additional changes coming in season 9, but we’ll be looking into this for future seasons.