New World Developers Say They’re Open To Possibly Going Back To Free-For-All Full Loot PvP

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Back in January, Amazon Game Studios revealed that they were scrapping open-loot free-for-all PvP in New World in favor of opt-in PvP. Naturally, this earned the ire of hardcore players who initially flocked to the game because of PvP.

Amazon further added fuel to the fire when they banned a player for posting negative feedback on the new PvP mechanics which was followed by an announcement that they will not be reverting to full-loot PvP and that players should focus on giving feedback on other aspects of the game.

Apparently, the developers are now open to possibly reverting to the original plan. “We will always consider bringing things back,” Game Director Scot Lane told IGN. “We are set on launching our alphas and betas this way and seeing what happens.”

Lane, however, assures the community that they’re still committed to creating an MMORPG that caters to both PvP and PvE players. “What we want is a world where they [PvP players and PvE players] could co-exist,” said Lane. “We want everyone to play. We think it's a really special world and really fun. So we're trying to create a way we can do that. We have options. We could do servers, like we said we could do PVP areas...but what I don't want to do is exclude people from content.”

While large-scale PvP has been a selling-point for most MMORPGs for the past couple of years, Lane says that it isn’t the only feature that will help New World stand out from other MMORPGs. The Game Director says that the combination of the game’s art style, combat, and its wars and invasion system makes it unique. “I think those three features put us in this other bracket of MMO that really hasn't been done yet.”

Director of Game Technology Richard Lawrence also talked about the game’s underlying technology. According to Lawrence, New World runs most of its simulations on Amazon’s servers instead of the user’s machine. This allows players to participate in massive battles and experience the game’s real-time physics-based combat without putting too much strain on their machines.

“A tremendous amount of our simulation is server-based, instead of client-based,” he said. “In a lot of games, the client makes suggestions to the server and the server verifies. For us, the server actually does the action. The server says, ‘Oh, you're swinging your sword, I'll do that for you and I'll figure out what happens in terms of intersection with another player and causing damage.’ That's pretty expensive computationally, but it turns out Amazon has a few servers, so we felt like that's something that might be solvable long term.”