New World Heart Of Madness Update Will Add Blunderbuss And New Endgame Content

After February's New World update focused entirely on bug fixes and balance updates, March's Heart of Madness update will see some significant new content coming to Amazon's MMORPG in the form of a new endgame expedition as well as a new weapon, the Blunderbuss.

The expedition, which is what New World's versions of dungeons are called, will take players to the heart of Shattered Mountain to confront the game's main villain up to this point--the corrupted leader Isabella, aka The Tempest. Along the way, players will discover "the secrets of her past" as they explore her corrupted mind. Tempest's Heart will be an endgame expedition for five players requiring level 60 and a recommended gear score of 550 or above.

The Heart of Madness update will also add another ranged weapon to New World's arsenal in the form of the Blunderbuss. Billed as a close to mid-range weapon, the Blunderbuss will scale with strength and intelligence, making it a good fit for both tanky bruiser characters or mages looking to pack a little extra heat. It will sport two distinct skill trees, Containment and Chaos. Containment will revolve around maneuverability and getting in close to deal damage at point blank range, while the Chaos tree focuses more on keeping a safe distance and dealing large area-of-effect damage.

Both the Blunderbuss and Tempest's Heart expedition will soon be playable on New World's public test realm, along with more weapon balance changes, bug fixes, and more.

New World's player counts have steadily dropped from hundreds of thousands of concurrent players at launch to a peak of around 30,000 in recent weeks. Amazon recently said it needed to give players more time on the game's PTR to test future updates. Amazon has also stressed that while it might not always happen as fast as fans would like, that the development team is listening to player concerns, and the team is taking a look at removing or altering some of the game's systems that are creating friction for players. Meanwhile, Amazon's other MMO, the free-to-play Lost Ark, continues to be one of the most-played games on Steam, having reached more than 1.3 million concurrent players shortly after launch.