Latest New World Blog Post Offers More Details On Expedition Mutators

The dev team of Amazon Games and Smilegate's New World have been talking a lot about the addition of Mutators to the game over the last few months. They're a big addition to the game, offering new challenges to the players in Expeditions. And, apparently, they took a lot of work, from the original conception to dropping the first Mutator for players to try out.

For those that are interested in the process behind video game development, it's always great to see behind the curtain on these things, so it's pretty awesome that some of the game's dev team – specifically Level Designer Darren McKinsey and World Experience lead Michael Willette – decided to share some of their process with players in the game's latest blog post.

In the post, they discuss the design and development process. The concept was fueled mostly by brainstorming sessions, but the inspiration came from roguelikes. To demonstrate the process, the post takes a look at the creation of the first Mutator: Explosive. An interesting byproduct of the work on this particular Mutator is that it increased the communication between internal testing teams as someone had to let everyone else know there would be an explosion.

The post also discusses the main principle behind the creation of Mutators. More or less, it boils down to the fact that they just want to encourage different gameplay, teamwork, and communication. They believe this helps generate replayability in the game.

Finally, they discuss figuring out how much challenge is a good amount of challenge. The idea isn't just to make strong enemies, but to create something that keeps Expeditions feeling new. They've designed Mutator difficulty to be like a ladder, with each step adding something new. This way, players can take on challenges and feel good about them no matter where they're at. It also allows them to experiment with the different roles in the game.