New World Soul Trials, Where Combat Meets Narrative, To Be Repeatable Down the Line

The latest New World Forged in Aeternum is out, and the team discusses the narrative and mechanics of Soul Trials, including why they’re not replayable (yet), goals behind them, and answer community questions.

In an MMORPG, story and combat meet somewhere. InNew World, this is also true and in one way that has grown significantly is in the addition of Soul Trials. The video focuses on “where story meets combat”, and since Brimstone Sands, and the subsequent expansion and move to a seasonal model, there have been a bunch of additions to those meetings between story and combat. 

The latest Forged in Aeternum video discusses these in-depth (and there are spoilers).

Soul Trials came about as a way for solo players to do cool things and experience slices of story while taking on boss fights. Solo players should get to do cool things too and have fun in these challenges. The challenges are also accompanied by narrative elements and lore that the team crafts the combat mechanics around.  It's a particular blend to test combat skills but also go into personal struggles and ambitions and beliefs of the characters to add emotional weight to what you're playing through. the lore and the narrative get a chance to shine in these bite-sized challenges.

When it comes to Soul Trials, the team keeps getting asked why you can only play them once. The asker comments on the story and that they’re well done, all around challenges, and memorable character encounters, including companions like Daichi in his dojo. Well, their plan is to eventually make them repeatable. There's no timeline since this will be “sometime in the future”, and it will take a lot of work to adapt them. So we might see select options.

Another suggestion floated is a Tower style, an instance where the next Trial boss might be on the next level instead of having to just rework every trial on its own.

With the blend of narrative and combat an important one, it seems these will be revisited, which will be good news for