The Cursed Mists PvP Zone Deep Dive

newworld.com:

The foggy southwest reaches of Cutlass Keys are a lawless place, where the “Golden Greed” curse of La Esperanza’s treasure drives fortune-hunters to murderous madness. Even the closest of companions are liable to lethally betray one another. Gather Cursed Doubloons and resources, but you’ll have to escape before other looters steal your spoils.

Get an inside look into the Cursed Mists before it releases on October 15 alongside New World: Aeternum.

Any new feature this complicated is going to require a lot of playtesting. During all of that testing, we discovering unexpected, but entertaining, issues. Early on, it was possible for PvE players to ranged attack or heal lawless, free-for-all PvP players from outside the zone border. You can imagine the shenanigans that followed.

We were delighted to find that many of the riskier features worked as well or better than imagined, often with hilarious results. Trying to collude with other players isn’t a bad strategy, but it’s horrifyingly easy to accidentally, or “accidentally,” catch friends in AoEs when the fighting gets hectic. I fondly recall lots of laughing, yelling, and sometimes sincere apologies.

It’s also a bittersweet treat to see the person who just murdered you pop up at a respawn point seconds after you, having perished to something like your Bleed or Smolder. “Well, we BOTH lost that one, didn’t we?” I actually partnered up with someone that way. We rushed back across the border to see if our dropped loot was still on the ground. It wasn’t. Someone luckier, or smarter, than us had come across it, but hey, it’s the friends we made along the way, right…?

We want to discourage massive murder balls of allied players. There’s always going to be collusion, but we don’t want to make it easy.

We implemented a new free-for-all system that eliminates all group, Company, and Faction ties. Even if you’re fighting alongside friends, it’s very easy to accidentally harm or kill one another.

We also implemented a new crowd