You might have noticed that when New World first announced Season of the Divide back in April, game director Scot Lane was conspicuously absent from the show. It turns out there’s a reason for it: Scot Lane has departed the team and has been replaced by Katy Kaszynski.
The news comes via the game’s May Q&A video from last night, when Kaszynski, who was previously the live lead and senior producer for the game, introduces herself as the new game director. Dan Henuber is also introduced as the new creative director and Joel Clift as the product owner on seasons and systems, signaling a full shift in development leadership. (The previous creative director was David Verfaillie; his Linkedin doesn’t show a shift yet, nor does Lane’s).
“We’re the ones that brought you the living roadmap, and that is our vision for what we see for New World Aeternum looking ahead,” Kaszynski says, referring to the game’s three-segment roadmap that distinguishes between current and next efforts and a someday wish list.
So what happened to Lane? “He has moved to another venture within Amazon Games,” she says – and that’s it. Of course, we know of several upcoming games in the Amazon stable, including the new Lord of the Rings MMORPG that Amazon revived alongside Embracer in 2023, so we’d not be at all surprised to find out he’s now working on that, especially since it seemed to be struggling in development last year.
The rest of the Q&A is a bit of a welcome return to pre-Aeternum form as the developers discuss progression rewards, the next weapon (no we don’t know what it is), stealth mechanics, Gorgonite weapon schematics coming in S9, new events (though day-to-day content and endgame are the priority), weapon balancing, a big meta shift over the next few seasons, the future of the territory system, the card system, raid joinability and difficulties, cute tmogs coming this summer, craftable armor, the Umbral system, transfers from console-only worlds to crossplay worlds, invasions and pickup wars, PvP servers, and the PvP weekends.
Since you’re probably not going to watch all that, we’ll point to two takeaways: Lots of the questions really do focus on PvP (which suggests the team’s ongoing focus on PvP is not misguided), and the devs have plans for the next several seasons (which suggests Amazon may have revamped the team but is still supporting the game into the future in spite of its dipping Steam numbers).
