New World Is Switching To Seasonal Content Releases With A Battle Pass
2023 is turning out to be a year of big changes for video game publishers and developers, particularly with how content updates are pushed out. With the apparent success of seasonal content models and battle passes, Amazon Game Studios has decided to switch New World over to a similar framework starting with its first seasonal update, Fellowship & Fire.
The update will be rolling out on the public test server at 10 a.m. PST and will feature the open-world MMORPG’s first seasonal story arc, dubbed The Silver Crows. The new storyline will task players with assembling a group of mercenaries called The Silver Crows to help a client thwart a nefarious warlock’s plans and push back the Variagian horde.
The new Empyrean Forge expedition will also be available for testing alongside The Silver Crows. The Level 60+ expedition will send players off to the Great Cleave where they’ll team up with a knight of Artorius named Sir Loth to investigate and stop the source of mysterious magic deep within a necropolis.
The upcoming test build will also introduce another round of combat balance adjustments aimed at making ranged weapons and magic skills more viable in PvE encounters. Overall weapon balance for PvP will also be tweaked to bring the potency of melee and ranged weapons down a notch or two. Equipment loadouts are also getting a balance pass to allow for more loadout variety and offer more choices for different playstyles, especially for non-traditional builds.
The upcoming patch also hopes to address the issue of being able to use multiple alts to exploit the Faction War system by requiring players to designate one of their characters as “PvP Active.” This character will be the only one that will be allowed to participate in PvP game modes, including Wars, and will have a three-day cooldown before a new character can be tagged for PvP.
To cap things off, players can also expect several new quality-of-life updates including a notification system for dev gifts and the ability to save and switch between gear sets, with the chance to unlock additional gear slots through the new battle pass.
Details can be found in the full Season 1: Fellowship & Fire PTR notes on the New World official site. The dev team also offers more information on its new season in the developer update video below.
