Why New World Can become Great Again After Tons of Updates?

New World, surprise-hit MMORPG, recently celebrated its first anniversary, and the team revealed a bunch of diverse player statistics that have built up over the past year, one of them being that the game has been played for a whopping 569.1 million hours total. The announcement was done via their official Twitter account, where an attached infograph showed off a lot of specific player stats like total number of NPC enemies killed (17.3 billion), total number of trees chopped down (6.3 billion), total number of minutes streamed on Twitch (12.4 billion), and more.

New World is a third-person action game strongly centered around player interaction. Unlike other MMOs, the game's economy is completely player-run, dependent on trading and material availability. Similarly, terrain can dynamically change hands, as settlements can be fought over and contested by other players.

Though the game suffered a rough critical reception at launch, it did command the attention of the MMO community for a good while. It had a healthy player base in terms of size and was undoubtedly a commercial success. To this day, New World's current player count on Steam sits at nearly 50,000 (as of 2:00 p.m. EST) with a monthly average of over 25,000. New World was first venture into gaming in a first-party capacity, being developed by a subsidiary team known as Orange County.

When it comes to a game like New World, IT has stated that it's a priority to work to have a more balanced system. Previously, they unveiled a series of tiers and varied taxes that would depend on the assessment of how valuable owning that territory was. The new system now has four tiers, with zones like Everfall, Brimstone, and Windward at the top. These are the highest value and will have higher rates.

Things step down into three more tiers, each with progressively lower rates. The intent here is to not have the top tiers just run away with all of the value and attention. The other side of this is the desire to make other territory also worth exploring and owning. Instead of fighting over just the most desirable places, things should hopefully start spreading out. Additionally, they've tied income to territory level, so if you level up and take care of what you claim and own, it will bring in more income for you.

One of the features the New World team has been talking about for months, and is finally set to make a reality soon, are Leaderboards. These will also tie into the territory changes, especially through the monthly and quarterly War boards, which will also show some stats on territory held.

So what else is coming? Social Feature Lead Dan Henuber names timing windows and faction control points as two things to look out for. Timing windows have to do with territories might be actively influential, creating density for PvP with naming hotspots and where the action is. And you can defend or even win influence there. The other option, faction control points, is something they're looking to improve, again to create density, but to tempt fights for the potential of greater rewards for both defense and attackers. In fact, they mention shoring up defense as a big appeal of some of these changes.

For more, watch the full episode above, and head to New World for more.