Amazon Game Studios has announced the latest batch of stuff coming to New World's public test realm, the game's standard way of testing out its latest content before releasing it to the masses. The PTRs pop up as temporary servers that all players are able to access, and provide pre-built characters for players to test out the content at various levels. This one's content, unsurprisingly, has a big winter vibe.
It's the holiday of the Winter Convergence (does this mean Christmas?) in New World which is marked by snowfall and the Northern Lights (yep, Christmas). Of course Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without our jolly chum... the yeti?
"This is a time of duality and dichotomy as the Yeti, the Winter Wanderer, comes to the land," says Amazon Game Studios. OK let's roll with it. Essentially a bunch of repeatable events are going to pop up in which you collect winter tokens to spend in a themed shop on cosmetics, and the more tokens that players turn-in, the happier the yeti gets: Whatever that means. The shop will have new armours, weapons, furnishings, skins, consumables, and a 'present gifting' emote.
Players will also be able to take on a special town project to upgrade each settlement's 'Tree of Light', presumably with more lights, and the world will now be dotted with lost presents that can be turned in for more winter tokens. There are also going to be basically Christmas comets: "Gleamite Showers are a new random, dynamic event that occurs at night throughout Aeternum: Keep your eyes and ears open as you search for locations where the showers are most prevalent." These crystals can be harvested for, yup, more winter tokens. This is gonna be one happy yeti.
There's also a bunch of ice caves appearing over the world which, even after the seasonal event is over, will remain around.
In addition to the seasonal stuff, this update brings with it a bunch more quests, some journal tweaks, and most interestingly a new endgame system. New World's higher level activities now drop a new resource called Gypsum that can go through various crafting processes to get a particular type of gear with a guaranteed expertise bump. The High Water Mark category has been renamed Expertise, and levelling up is now shown. Finally in terms of endgame there are two 'new' zones where players can fight level 66 enemies and seek elite chests: Both Malevolence in Edengrove, and the Imperial Palace/North Dynasty Shrine areas have been up-levelled.
There are new elements to trading, tweaks to the PvP damage formula (apparently lower level gear was working better than it should have), crit damage has been very slightly nerfed, and the developer has done a "general consistency pass" across the buffering windows for all weapons: "The updated buffer windows starts when the first frame of the attack that would deal damage or on the first casting frame in the case of abilities that do not deal damage." The full patch notes can be read here.
Well, the yeti was unexpected. Going by past form this PTR content should be rolled-out to the main game quite soon, though the patch notes didn't address some wider concerns: the game's had all manner of issues, from having to temporarily turn off the economy to what seems like endless waves of fishing bots. Still it's always nice to enjoy these seasonal events, so guess Aeternum's residents best get out there and start pleasing a yeti.
