New World Devs Accepted The Community's Endgame Challenge, And Hilarity Ensued

The New World community, unhappy with endgame changes which made high-level elite zones more difficult and convinced Amazon Game Studios didn't play its own game, recently issued a challenge to the game's developers: stream an endgame Myrkgard run so players could see how it's supposed to be done.

To the community's surprise, Amazon accepted the challenge, recently releasing a video showing a group of 10 developers, including game director Scot Lane, attempting to overcome one of the game's more challenging pieces of endgame content. From the get-go, the developers admit they are undergeared and aren't nearly as skilled as New World's most dedicated players. But that didn't stop them from diving headfirst into the Myrkgard endgame elite zone all the same, often with humorous results.

Despite being undergeared, the devs put up a good fight, battling their way through the zone for around an hour. The video shows the perspectives of four different developers and even displays some "helpful" (and occasionally sarcastic) tips aimed at some of the developers who maybe weren't playing as optimally as they could have been. These tips include critical advice like "Keep your tank up or bad things happen" and "Sometimes surrender is the best option." Along the way the devs complain about terrible loot, cry out for heals, lament when their teammates pull way more enemies than they should and eventually, despite their valiant efforts, call it quits.

The video seems to have gone over well in the New World community, with players giving Amazon props for answering the call. It seems to be part of a larger effort on Amazon's part to be more transparent with the game's community, as is evident by a recently released hour-and-a-half long developer update video that answers many frequently asked community questions and details what players can expect to be coming to the game in the weeks and months ahead.

While seeing the game's creators struggle with many of the same challenges players have had to endure is nice, it remains to be seen if Amazon can fix many of the ongoing issues players have had to endure, including a lack of endgame content. New World has also been plagued with various bugs and exploits following its massive launch in September, and while many of those issues were fixed relatively quickly, they still proved to be incredibly disruptive to the game's playerbase.

New World recently received its first seasonal event, the Winter Convergence Festival, alongside additional endgame changes. One of those changes was the new Expertise system, which initially drew criticism from players. Feedback led to Amazon further tweaking the system to ensure those who relied on crafted gear or gear acquired from quests would not see their character's power decrease.