New World: Forged in Aeternum – The History of Azoth and Leaderboards

Amazon Game Studios brings us a couple of new episodes of Forged in Aeternum, their video diary series where the developers behind the studio’s MMORPG New World discuss its various aspects and features. To kick things off, there’s one dedicated to the lore behind Azoth – a mystical substance serving as the source of the game’s magic.

Check it out:

Then, leading up to the game’s latest update that introduced player leaderboards on top of a series of assorted fixes, we got this episode that’s all about the new leaderboard system that will now track your PvP, PvE, and Trade Skill progress.

Have a look:

Some additional details:

Greetings, Adventurers!

We’re launching Leaderboards on February 7 to celebrate achievements throughout our community. There will be PvP, PvE, and even Fishing categories. Rise to the top of select weekly or quarterly Leaderboards for exclusive skins and titles. Check out our full announcement for an overview of the 20+ rewards, 50+ categories, and future updates.

Dive into our Leaderboard interview with the Development Team below, and then read on for some behind the scenes stories[…]

BEHIND THE SCENES

Game Designer Rachel Barnum shared a few additional tidbits on the development of Leaderboards. Her personal favorite — the infamous goat. “We were gathering screenshots of the reward skins,” Rachel said. “As we got perfectly posed, a goat came up and knocked one of our developers off a cliff. I still revisit that video for a laugh.”

Those laughs continued into other aspects of testing. “In one PTR instance, we discovered we had accidentally left in negative scores for Mutated Expeditions. It was actually showing up as positive scores. You could have done terrible in an Expedition and rose to the top. It gave us a good laugh.”

“We also had a lot of fun testing Leaderboards. We revisited our earlier content and stood around killing each other outside of town to produce stats. One challenge was simply the amount of Leaderboards to test. Our awesome QA team spent a lot of time in all of our activities to generate stats. It was quite the team effort!”

What’s the goofiest stat you can possibly think of? Let us know on the forums, Reddit, or YouTube comments section. Thanks for your support! We’ll see you in Aeternum.