The devs noticed that in the alpha of the survival horror version of New World, more experienced players were just… just absolutely ganking new players as they were brought into the alpha. The older players were, obviously, enjoying this. The newer players? Not so much. Kaszynski notes that if players are interacting with your game and end up making it a different game to the one you thought you’d created, that can be fine. It might be better than you imagined, or different in a good way. But the early version of New World had, she said, become “pretty toxic” in a way that made it apparent they needed to change. “That’s when we used player sentiment from the players that were having fun doing the toxic things, and the players that were like, ‘Hey this is what I’d prefer,’ and figured out how that still fit with our vision of this island that was somewhat mystical, and [players] being explorers and adventurers,” Kaszynski explains. That’s when the team made the big shift away from survival horror, and Kaszynski joined the team just after this. In her Develop talk, Kaszynski brought up mounts as an example, which don’t exist in New World (and, if the lore is to be believed, cannot). The primary function of a mount is to get you around a game world quickly, so the devs put in fast travel shrines to service this need. But mounts are still something people are asking for, so they’re still thinking about it. The other most polarising issue is a minimap. “There are people that are just die-hard, ‘Give me a mount, give me a mini-map’,” says Kaszynski, laughing, “and then there’s other folks that are like, ‘No, no! I like running around! How am I going to know there’s that dye that I can harvest if I’m on a mount?’” That’s one of the reasons the devs are hesitant to whap in some big mounts: they’re trying to get people excited about exploring, raiding a mob you come across or pausing to chop some wood because you’re close to dinging your next logging skill point. This sort of quiet, personal exploration is the bit Kaszynski enjoys most in New World. Her favourite thing is to spend time fishing in the game - something she doesn’t like in real life. “The most relaxing thing for me to do is just pop a beer and then fish in my game,” she says. She told her team this once and they sent her boxes of different beers, and fake fishing trophies. She enjoys seeing players doing this sort of thing, like the Town Criers, a group who formed after the alpha who would gather the (in-game) news of the day and then go to different settlements yelling this news out loud. Even after developing alongside an open alpha, it wasn’t at the player scale that New world has now, so the team are getting new and surprising data all the time. Everything, Kaszynski emphasises, is a conversation. “There’s no just ’this is the right answer’. It has to be a conversation and you have to bring in as much data as you can, so that you can do what’s in the best interest of your players and the game,” she explains. They’re thinking about the future, but Kaszynki wouldn’t be drawn into any specifics, because she doesn’t want to make any promises before it’s in her hand, ready to be shipped - something she regrets happening with the server transfers. “In order to get it into the shape that it was in - which we thought was good, it turns out it wasn’t that great - but in order to get it into the shape that we thought was good, we needed more time than we originally anticipated, and that’s now a broken promise to our players,” she says. “And that’s absolutely not who we want to be. That’s not who I want us to be.” A big expansion is coming, though, as you’d expect, but Kaszynski doesn’t know when that will be. She says that the team have stuff they’re considering “for the far future”, some things that will go “into an expansion down the line”, but there’s a lot planned for the next year and a half. “That work [on the expansion] hasn’t even started because we’re so focused on developing this game that we have today, for our day one players and for everyone who’s joined since.”
