The next season for New World is looking to be yet another with little to nothing on offer for PvE players, but there is finally some hope on the horizon with a roadmap update promising a lot of exciting stuff in season ten.

A lot of people are celebrating this as the start of a new and better era for the game, but while I’d like to share in their joy, I don’t think this is necessarily the sign that the game is changing direction, and I fear the community has misunderstood what the fundamental problem dogging New World is.

I’m trying not to be too negative here, so let’s start with the good news. Season 10 — which should be arriving roughly late October or early November — has a lot of very promising updates in it.

Firstly, we’re getting a new zone. An actual fully new zone, not just a revamp of an existing one. In theory, this should finally be the datamined Dunwood zone south of Brimstone Sands, which based on prior teases should have a gothic horror theme featuring vampires and werewolves. Sign me the hell up. I’m especially excited for the prospect of some spooky haunted manor style housing.

We’re also getting a new raid, which doesn’t do much for me, but I’m happy for those who will play it. Potentially more interesting is the “procedural expeditions with extraction” bullet point. We’ll need to see more about it before I form a strong opinion, but as long as it’s not some PvPvE mess, it could be a lot of fun. New World could use more variety of endgame activities.

We’re also finally getting the option to save attribute loadouts with gear sets, a massive quality-of-life win that will allow New World to finally deliver on the promises of its classless progression system. I have literally been asking for this since the very first Vitae Aeternum column.

Aside from that, the remaining big items are the endgame progression overhaul, return of umbral shard gear upgrades, and set bonuses, the latter two really just being an extension of the first. We’ll need more details before we know how good or bad this really is, but I’m cautiously optimistic. New World has always struggled with giving people long-term goals at endgame, the result of WoW-style vertical progression without WoW‘s content cadence. People quickly reach the gear cap and then run out of things to do.

I’m not sure whether the progression revamp will fix that entirely, but the return of umbrals should help with steady long term advancement, and I know the developers have talked about wanting to shift toward more horizontal progression, with the gear chase being more about finding the ideal perks for your build than just chasing item levels. That’s a good direction to take.

I am a bit concerned that there’s still not really much of a reason to pursue further progression in the game. Current gear caps are already enough to trivialize most of the game. Why would I keep chasing gear just so I can stomp the same content slightly harder than I already do?

One also wonders if this will be another paid expansion, like Rise of the Angry Earth. I don’t think hanging a price tag on a content update of this scale would be an entirely unreasonable thing to do, but given the extreme content drought over the last few years, I doubt it would go over well with most players.

Fans on social media seem to see this as a real positive change in direction for the game brought about the departure of Scot Lane and elevation of Katy Kaszynski to game director. No disrespect to Kaszynski, but I think that’s a bit wrong-headed for a couple reasons.

Firstly, I think hanging all of the game’s woes on Scot Lane is foolish. It’s another example of gamers’ exhaustingly stupid instinct to scapegoat one visible dev for everything that goes wrong in their favourite game. Remember when World of Warcraft fans spent years blaming Ghostcrawler for everything, and then it turned he mostly just designed UI elements and the devs only made him their public face because he was the extrovert of the bunch?

I’d also like to point out that all of the stuff coming in season 10 has been on the roadmap for a long time, just without a specific release date. All of these plans were created when Scot Lane was at the helm, and that they’re now coming to fruition after he left the team is almost certainly pure coincidence, especially when you consider that it has always been New World‘s pattern to have one big update in autumn and smaller updates the rest of the year. At best I see this as a return to New World‘s usual cadence following the disruption caused by the Aeternum relaunch.

I’ve talked before about what I believe the real behind the scenes problem is with New World. The short version is that I don’t think the game has ever been successful enough to satisfy the higher-ups at Amazon Games, and all its flailing between different directions since then has been an attempt to change that. With the console launch also seemingly failing to significantly alter the game’s fortunes, I think the executives have just fully put the game on the back burner. They don’t want the PR hit that would come from shuttering the studio’s only released in-house game, but they don’t want to give it the resources it needs to thrive, either.

People like to say that the developers are lazy or incompetent, but it’s clear to that me that they’re doing the best they can with what they have. Things like seasonal servers and repurposing dungeon bosses as open world encounters are what you do when you’re desperate to give the players something to do but don’t have the resources for more meaningful content. I’ve played enough struggling low-budget games to recognize the pattern.

That’s not to say that the developers are above criticism or that they haven’t made any mistakes. Locking essential gear upgrades behind raiding or PvP was an unforced error (at least they finally added 725 upgrade mats to the faction vendors recently). But I do think the deeper problem is that they simply haven’t been given the tools they need to do the game justice, and that will still be true regardless of whether it’s Lane or Kaszynski in charge.

My suspicion is that we’ll see a repeat of the events we saw with previous big fall updates like Brimstone Sands and Rise of the Angry Earth. Season 10 will bring a lot of good stuff, and for a few weeks the tone of the community will turn toward optimism, but it will be another full year before the next update of the same scale, and public sentiment will sour during the long months in between.

If the progression revamp is good enough, it may give the game a bit more longevity than it’s had in the past, but I’m not sure how much it could ever replace regular large scale content updates.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom because for the first time in a long time there is something to genuinely look forward to as a New World fan, but I fear the people seeing this as the start of a big turnaround for the game are going to be in for a rude awakening next year – not because the developers aren’t willing or capable, but because I don’t believe Amazon’s leadership has faith in the game.

New World’s Aeternum is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers delve those secrets to provide you with in-depth coverage of all things New World through launch and beyond.