New World: What we have learned during our first year
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The following is a guest post from New World game director Scot Lane.
There is a saying that live games are owned by the development team until launch, and then at launch they become the game of the players. I could not agree more. Over the past year, we’ve had great success and made some mistakes. We learned a lot and are excited to apply those learnings in the future.
Before we launched New World a year ago, we did extensive alpha and beta testing in a live environment with tens of thousands of players and relied heavily on data and feedback to help shape the game. Those early days saw New World transition from a survival/creation game to a full-fledged PvPvE MMO, an evolution that was largely guided by what we heard from players.
Of course, running a game at scale is a different beast altogether, and when millions of players came to New World at launch last fall, we learned a lot. That learning continued throughout our first 12 months as a live game, as we observed player behavior and listened to their feedback. We made a lot of changes to New World during its first year, and while some of it is new content like expeditions and quests, a lot of it is quality of life changes that are directly based on what we’ve seen and what players have asked for. the way. Things like easier leveling up, accessing inventory while running, dropping orbs (keys), cheap fast travel, faster run speed, and many more have come about based on player feedback.
We use some simple rules to keep us on the right path of development. These are some of them and how we apply them.
listen to the player
When we started developing New World, it was a survival crafting game. There was some love for that style of play, but players told us they wanted more. And by the time we got to launch, New World had become an MMO. We learned early on that listening to our players was the way to build a great game, even when they asked for big changes.
Identifying the right channels to learn what players really want, and how they actually behave in the game, is key. We watch in-game chat for mentions of issues, concerns, and what people like so we can support them. We also take sentiment analysis from various sources, including our official forums, in-game feedback, and Reddit, where we have vibrant communities that will tell us when we’re failing or getting it right.
Sometimes when I’m working I have the game running but only keep the chat window visible. Limiting myself to just the chat window makes it easy for me to focus on what players are saying, both positive and negative, as they play. Watching the broader public comments go by, I get a sense of what everyone is thinking without having to guess.
When you’re in the middle of an update with countless team members focused on many features and added content, it can be easy to lose sight of the player’s voice. In light of that, it’s important to incorporate player feedback samples into your daily work.
Play your game/be a player
You have to play the game! I love playing our game and I think it’s critical that anyone who makes a game plays it (a lot). I can’t stress enough the importance of playing your game. It’s hard to make informed decisions without a deep understanding of the player experience, which can only be gained over time in the world.
I follow the discussions on social networks, but I also try to play daily, even more so when we are about to release a new update. Since I am a big fan of the MMO space, I play like the players play without special treatment. It is important to understand their complaints and preferences, even down to the details of the terminology used in the game, and doing so allows me to form my own opinions as a player.
Strong communities are the main goal of any multiplayer game, and one aspect of building a community is building a pool of internal testers and players, and more importantly, external players who love the game and will attract other players. The keywords in that sentence are “player” and “game”. All the hype in the world is useless if the game itself isn’t fun or if players, at launch, find the game unwieldy or worse, boring. The more the team plays and engages with the community, the better their decisions become, which should translate into more fun.
Measure game health
We incorporated telemetry into every part of the game, which was very helpful at launch. When we had bugs that broke the game or, worse, caused vulnerabilities, we were able to use the collected data to fix the vast majority of them. At launch, many of these systems were brand new along with their telemetry and often required a person to painstakingly review the data not only to identify the error but also to correct it (fixing the error and adjusting the data, for example, removing duplicate elements). ). Since then, we’ve built automation around many of these systems, so now when an error pops up, we often know about it before the player does. This means we can now see problems before they spread.
It kills me to see a game where I’m getting called out for being unfair or buggy. I want New World to be something that people are excited to play and fully immerse themselves in. These issues will distract from that goal, which is why we have telemetry and abnormal behavior alarms. It is difficult, but absolutely worth it.
Measurement also helps us make sure we’re making decisions based on actual player behavior. Sometimes what the community asks for doesn’t align with how they act in-game, and it’s important to look at both so you can identify the right course of action.
Adapt and improve
Even when you follow all these rules, even when you really listen, you can still be wrong. When we launched New World, we received feedback that the architecture of the game was too monotonous. We focus on Tudor style houses, large beams and plaster, as a style for the island. But that feedback kept bothering me. This is a massive world. Why did all the towns look like a quaint British town?
Over time, we’ve made improvements like you’d see in Reekwater and Ebonscale Reach. More recently, with the release of Brimstone Sands, we created cities made of brick and stone. We built a huge castle where King Arthur landed. Now we keep hearing adding new lands (swamps, mountains, deserts) and a new weapon with a high demand style of play, the Greatsword.
Listening is fun. Listening makes people happy because they know they have been heard. Listening works. And listening makes you successful.
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