Amazon outlines improvements to New World's end-game
And you can try it now on the new public test "realm".
Amazon Studios has plans to improve the end-game of its MMO, New World.
In a lengthy blog post on the official website, the team explained how "expedition mutators" will improve challenge and enjoyment of the game for those who've already experienced much of what the MMO has to offer.
"Mutators change the familiar by augmenting 'Normal' and 'Named' Enemies found within expeditions, changing the way encounters play out and what strategies players should consider before battle," the team said.
"This system is intended to rotate through a unique combination of Expeditions and Mutations each week, with 10 difficulty levels per Expedition Mutation. Players will be challenged to climb the ladder, with the aim of eventually reaching the max difficulty."
Expedition mutators haven't been deployed just yet, but if you're keen to get involved you can join the PTR (public test realm) with a second character.
Beyond that, there's also further information on what's coming later this month, as well as new features including umbral shards - "a mysterious, powerful resource that enables you to take an item with a Gear Score of 600 all the way up to a Gear Score of 625" - as well as tweaks to combat, fast travel costs, and a 50 per cent increase in the cost of summoning Brutes.
MMO New World has seen its aggregate user reviews on Steam fall from "mostly positive" to "mixed". Feedback seems mostly to criticise the game's "grind" and its litany of bugs and issues. A couple of months back, Amazon even said it would take "remediation steps" against New World players who "egregiously exploited" an irritating coin duplication bug.
The drop in ratings is further compounded by recent news that despite hitting an impressive all-time concurrent peak of just shy of a million players on 3rd October, New World seemingly lost more than half its player base just a month after its launch on PC, prompting a server merge just before the holiday period.