New World | Blake's Portfolio

Basic Info –

Role - Systems Designer
Engine - Azoth Engine (Formerly Lumberyard)
Platform - PC, Xbox One, PS5
Genre - Action MMORPG

Game Overview -

New World is an expansive, Action-Focused MMORPG.

Washed ashore on the strange land of Aeternum, you must uncover the mysteries of this fabled island where nothing truly dies. A king's ransom in gold? Immortality? Wisdom of the ages? They're all hidden here, but you were certainly not the first to be stranded here, and not even the local flora is friendly.

As a Systems Designer on New World I worked on progression, loot, rewards, combat, experience curves, economic design and balancing, and player investment across the whole game. I'll be focusing mostly on some examples of my personal work and the systems and designs I created for New World on this page. This is by no means exhaustive of all the work I've done on the game, but just a few standout examples.

Hardcore Seasonal Server

Image taken from our website's public marketing materials, link is provided below

Overview and Basics

This Seasonal Server is a time-limited experience I designed for the playerbase that is focused around completing the game's challenges without your character dying even once. This was built as my design on paper, pitched, and we built a strike team to create. In a normal hardcore experience, your character would be deleted upon death, however, for this server I wanted to focus on an experience that would be more fun for everyone, while also preserving the risky nature of hardcore. When you die on this server your character instead gains a stack of a status effect, and this status effect grants you 25 bonus attributes in all your stats for your character. It adds up to being quite powerful if you die 5 times (the maximum allowed). However, once your character has died even once, you lose eligibility for some of the account based rewards we created. Players are able to earn special new crafting materials that let them craft an Artifact of their choice, and a high-tier trophy of their choice for their main characters. These are fairly enticing rewards, as players are able to circumvent a lot of potential grinding by participating here, and we were able to build something quite enticing without requiring new tech (and low cost was a goal of development for this server experience).

Since I wanted to focus on the fun, I also worked with engineers and other designers to make a few small, but intentionally targeted changes for the player.

Instead of the standard leveling experience, this time we built a new (very accelerated) MSQ for the player. The goal was to get players up to max level quickly, so that you could reroll characters efficiently if you did accidentally die. Hardcore modes in games tend to be a bit of a knowledge check for players after all. This new MSQ also served as a playable tutorial for players, since all standard progression on the server was replaced with gathering new Azerite Tailing items used to gear up your character. These are, effectively, just currency for the crafting system that can be used to arbitrarily define the speed of progression on the experience. But, we spread different types around to lots of different activities in the game. And since you need at least 2 types of tailings to craft an items for gearing up your character, we incentivized players to try multiple things. Dungeons, Open World POIs, Elite Chests, Named Enemies, even Fishing has tailings you can earn. This gives players a lot of freedom to choose how they're progressing through this experience with their friends.

While expedited progression is fun by itself (and not having to play the same MSQ multiple times is quite nice for players) we also made another change focused on the fun for players; we allow them to equip as many Artifacts as they want. Normally, you can only equip 1 artifact into each equipment type (1 weapon, 1 armor, and 1 jewelry), but this new system allowed for a lot of fun not only in trying out all the crazy effects, but it also provided an extra type of fun. There's a lot of potential for making interesting and unique character builds with all these new combinations. I was able to layer multiple types of fun into this one short experience for our players.

It also lets us create something really fun for players, because we built a lot of what we call 'rough edges' into the game. Weird little spots where the game isn't super polished, and the experience isn't very clean. Because that provides interesting problems for the player to now solve for themselves. The many-artifacts design with hardcore gameplay allowed us to let the player just experiment and have fun, without too many controls from the designers.

We breathed new life into old systems with very targeted and intentional designs, and all on an aggressive time budget, as this server experience was built in just a few weeks. The time constraints were rough, but it forced us to get creative and I used the existing tools and systems to build designs that would solve multiple problems for us at one time.

And the server's been successful! It launched on June 3rd to positive reception from both Hardcore and Casual players. Players have been running around, dying, powering up, trying out wacky builds, and absolutely crunching bosses into dust. Which is great, because we added some extra new titles for a player's account for defeating things like Raid Bosses, and I've intentionally built these in to solve a problem the community has been experiencing. Right now in the live game, to get into a group for doing a raid or some of the other hardest content in the game, you need to show the group you've already completed it, usually by linking a specific token or item that only drops from there in chat. This is a really negative experience. However, these new titles should be able to show others that you've completed the fights before (in some way), and I'm hoping that this will be a way for the community to break out of that Catch-22. It remains to be seen if these titles solve this problem, but I'm hopeful that these small rewards will empower players to fix a problem the community has been stuck in without requiring us to add some major features. I've thrown a couple of testimonials from some of our players on Discord in here (with their names removed to protect their privacy of course)

TL;DR:

We built a hardcore server where instead of deleting your character, we power it up on death but you lose access to some account rewards.
This content was built on a very accelerated time budget (a few weeks) so we needed to get scrappy and reuse existing tech and systems in new ways to breathe new life into the game
We built a new MSQ for the players to teach them how the new expedited progression systems work, and also make it so that they don't need to play the same questlines again
New progression items (in the form of Azerite Tailings) let us push players around to lots of different types of content, and provide a lot of options for enjoying the hardcore experience in different ways
Players can also equip as many artifacts as they want on the server, giving them a lot of new potential ways to play
We focused on wacky fun and rough edges for players. We empowered them with expedited progression to prevent them from getting and let them loose in the world to crunch their foes into dust

This is a link to the news page from our website:

https://www.newworld.com/en-gb/news/articles/hardcore-seasonal-world#ags-MediaPopup

Unfortunately, Wix (the online tool this site was built with) does not support embedding Youtube Shorts at this time, so these next two links are for the youtube shorts we released about the server:

https://youtube.com/shorts/_RqTHfptnnc?si=sgguS6X5m_Ad3tn1

https://youtube.com/shorts/GD-5o4b6Nvg?si=2syms7kHz_hgmz7Y

Artifacts

Artifacts were added with the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, and met with huge excitement from players. These were a design we created to fill a gap in both our progression and our combat, and they solved a few problems for us at the same time.

Artifacts are fun.
- Previously, all our loot was basically just stat sticks. There were differences between weapon types and armor types, but only the weapons really had meaningful gameplay variation in the form of their skills and animations. Artifacts are a way for us to build new and exciting gameplay into the combat of the game. Scorpion's Sting is one of my personal favorites (and a great example) because pulling the target right to you with the Javelin skill instead of just dealing some damage is very, very fun.
- This helped us to remove a lot of the bland same-y-ness of parts of our combat experience. Now, each slot type has some interesting effects available to it. And as a huge plus, players can only equip 1 of each type of Artifact at a time. This forces a lot of opportunity cost into the character building process, and makes the choice of which Artifacts to focus on much more meaningful for the player, while also preserving our existing loot as valuable. Otherwise you end up where Diablo 3 did with only legendary items mattering. That's not necessarily bad, but not what we wanted here, as we did not have the time or velocity necessary to make enough artifacts to satisfy that type of design. The limitation was very intentionally designed to preserve some existing rewards and thereby save us time.
Artifacts have built in progression in multiple ways.
- Each Artifact has its own unique perk that provides the exciting unique effects, but every other perk must be unlocked on the item by completing a small quest line. Usually something like "go kill this boss" or "beat this dungeon" or "kill 30 crabs on a beach". Some of these objectives are minor, but the more complex and difficult ones cause players to group up and tackle them together, creating a positive social experience with pug groups for these quests.
- Artifacts are a form of collection progression, something the game had been sorely lacking up until this point. Since you can only acquire each Artifact one time, there's a nice simple goal of collecting them all. And that is great for us, because it means players will go out and do lots of different activities to earn these items.
- When artifacts were released, we also designed a new addition to the crafting system to help support them. In the images above (which I grabbed from a player built tool, thanks to NWDB) you can see that not all perks are currently known. The final perk on these items is random, and, we created a crafting recipe for each artifact that would allow the player to 'reroll' it and change that final perk. This has been helpful for the playerbase, as now instead of needing to earn all new items when we rebalance parts of the game, they can reassign a perk on their items instead. That is overall a more pleasant experience for players.
  - This part of the design was inspired by another system I designed called Reforging that would allow a player to reroll perks on their items. I won't go into detail about Reforging here, but the important part is that the Reforging design was deemed too costly and time consuming to build, so it was cut. So I got more creative. Instead of building a whole new system, UI, tech, etc. I just reused the existing crafting system and screens. Since on the backend, all the crafting system does take inputs of things and output different things (a conversion more or less). So, you can use the Artifact itself as an input material (along with other stuff), and then output the same backend ID for the Artifact. But since the final perk is random, it's a different perk now. Also, because this was done in the crafting screen, a player can use a Perk Item (a special resource in New World that you can use when crafting to assign a specific perk to a crafted piece of equipment) to select an individual perk they want. This allowed us to achieve a form of rerolling perks on Artifacts at very minor programming cost, little to no UI cost, and almost entirely just Designer time with the existing tools we had.
  - This was a very valuable and successful part of the design, so we began using this on other item types as well.
  - Since it's a crafting recipe, we were able to create new items in the game as materials needed for this process, to create some new rewards for players to chase and create some more sinks for our economy. This allowed us to easily build some new progression loops for players and help build out our endgame play experience without needing lots of new content or tech, just a little bit of data management. We breathed a massive amount of life and gameplay into old, bland content with these new materials.

I've embedded a short video below (captured using debug tools to expedite the process) to help illustrate what I described above.

TL;DR:

Artifacts are focused on creating fun and unique gameplay pieces for players to have at their disposal
They were intentionally designed with multiple forms of progression to both save us time, and give players more things to chase
The perk rerolling crafting recipes for Artifacts were an adaptation of a different, more expensive, design. Rerolling was also successful enough that we began to use it for other item types

Mutated Expeditions

Image taken from New World's website, public marketing materials

Mutated Expedition Rewards and Progression –

Mutated Expeditions were one of our first major content additions to New World, and I built the rewards and progression loops and systems for them. At the time, New World was much more focused on Horizontal as opposed to Vertical Progression. However, there had been some discussion of swapping to vertical (or at least incorporating more vertical progression) so the rewards and progression through this new content was intentionally built to satisfy both desires.

When a player completes an expedition, they become eligible for Mutated Expeditions. These rotate weekly, and have new dangerous effects added into the dungeon. In order to build satisfying rewards for this new content, I worked with programmers to build a form of additive loot. Since Mutated Expeditions use the existing Expedition and just add some new effects, we built new tech to inject loot into every roll done in the Mutator. This means a player can get all loot they would normally see in the dungeon, plus, all the new options added by the Mutator. This satisfied the need for effective Horizontal progression, as players could still earn existing valuable items, plus all the new ones. However, I also designed a stair step progression to satisfy the desire for Vertical Progression in the game. Since Mutators increased in difficulty levels, I created intentional tiers where a player would go up in difficulty and unlock more (and better) loot. This was done by improving the chance for items to successfully roll perks, the chance for loot to drop, but also by unlocking more types of items that can drop. So as a player is progressing in difficulty they earned not only better items, but also more possibilities for all their loot. By coupling this with very favorable drop rates, Mutators released as a popular form of content, with the strongest loot at the time. The below images are a comparison of the loot from difficulty 1 and difficulty 3 of a mutation.

On the left is difficulty 1 (lowest) and on the right is difficulty 3 (highest). On the left we have far fewer possible items, and all are at a much lower quality. While the maximum difficulty on the right has many, many more items with some entries even being as high as purple rarity.

To go along with all this, Mutators also can drop loot with some unique, elementally themed perks that were not available anywhere else in the game. These helped to support both the horizontal nature of the progression, but also the weekly rotation of Mutations. As different elements rotate in and out, players would change the way the play in Mutations and also farm for different perks on their items.

An image I took in game showing one of these elemental perks. The 3 green boxes behind the item card a Nature-themed elemental effects applied to the expedition. These elemental perks had both offensive and defensive variants to provide more options for players, and also to fit the theming on both weapons and armor.

I also worked with artists to get appearances for these new items that would fit the theming in the mutation. While they were simple recolours of an existing, unused weapon set; this meant we were able to leverage some unused art and change it to build some more unique rewards for this content. This had the added benefit of simple conveyance - any item using this mesh (no matter what colour it is) always has a unique elemental mutation perk applied to it.

I evolved this design over time as well. When the Rise of the Angry Earth Expansion released, we also added gear score progression to the difficulty tiers mentioned above. As players went up in tiers, the possible gear score of items that could roll would shrink to be a smaller total range, while also increasing the possible maximum roll. I even added some special unique items to the higher difficulties that were built as the most powerful items in the game (at the time) so reaching the highest difficulty felt much more impactful. All of this worked together well to create a satisfying progression experience, because humans are very bad at both understanding probability, but also understanding reward. People tend to view rewards in games in binary terms. "Was this what I wanted? Was it good? No? Then this reward is trash." is a common problem for reward systems. By layering multiple ways of removing bad outcomes for players, I was able to build a system that would help to satisfy the goalposting that people naturally do with rewards in extrinsically motivated systems.

To show this in a graphical way (with some example numbers) it looks like this:

So as the player is going up in difficulties we are removing potential bad outcomes (Low gearscore and low rarity rolls. For context, rarity in New World is determined by the total number of perks on an item, so lower rarity items are less powerful) and adding in new options that players are interested in. These combine together to make a highly rewarding progression experience for a player as they conquer these challenges.

This was done with a few small code additions as needed plugins for the new content to provide loot in the first place. These new levers were designed by me to make controlling certain things like rarity and gear score easy for this type of content. But most of this work was data manipulation of our existing loot tables, gear score, and perk bucket systems as opposed to adding a lot of new tech or code. So this addition was fairly low risk, and also fairly low cost.

TL;DR:

The rewards and progression for Mutated expeditions were done as a combination of both horizontal and vertical progression
The structure utilizes tiered rewards very heavily to create a strong sense of progression in rewards and loot that is appropriate to the difficulty of the content
I intentionally designed many levers into the loot experience of mutations to make future balance work easier for myself and other designers
I made use of the removal of bad outcomes and the addition of new desireable outcomes to improve loot for players in our core piece of endgame content. This satisfied the complex way that people perceive rewards and made a much more satisfying progression experience

Raids Schematics

I designed and built the rewards and progression structure for our first (and at the time of writing this, only) raid, Hive of Gorgons. This is a piece of 10-player content that is built to be especially difficult, pinnacle content.

Image was taken from our website's public marketing materials

As part of the work I did for this raid I built a structured rewards plan for this raid and all future raids for designers to follow. This allows internal or external designers to quickly build rewards for new raids in the future, but the part I want to focus on here is Raid Schematics. Schematics in New World are a type of consumable that unlocks access to a recipe. A simple system, but this allowed me to design some positive improvements for the loot in Raids as opposed to other pieces of content.

Exciting Rare Drops - These schematics are one of the very few ways that players can craft maximum gear score items. But that's not all with these items, because this is also one of the only ways that players can craft tradeable max gear score items, and, the schematics are tradeable items. This means there are multiple ways that these rewards are interacting with the game's living economy. Now, all of that is great, but you're probably still lacking some context for why these are exciting rare drops or why the economic implications are important, so let's dig into that.
1. Timed Releases and Economic Fun - Something I haven't mentioned yet, is that not all item types had an associated schematic at launch. We started with only a small subset of all equipment types, and increased that volume over time, while also increasing the drop rates for these rewards as a whole. So these items began as a very, very rare drop (about a .5% chance to get one of these items after a very long and difficult raid). This means, that a player who gets one of these can corner the market for these items. That's a fun piece of the economy for players to chase after, but crucially, we don't want it to stay that way. This is why we updated the drop rates for these items over time, and today they sit at about a 10% chance to get one of these items (at the time of writing this; we will be increasing drop rates again in the future). This design allows players to have the fun of cornering the market, but everyone will be a participant eventually, and the loss of that cornering effect is mitigated by a natural increase in gear score over time when the next raid releases.
2. Player Progression and Community Progression - Building economic fun into the game is all well and good, but this also has some good implications for the progression experience and its social implications. As part of our plan with releasing this raid, we had others in development to be released at later times. The increased drop rate of these schematic items was intentionally designed to increase the supply of max gearscore items over time on the trading post. This helps to solve a specific community problem for us, access to progression being locked behind difficult content. A consistent problem in multiplayer games like this is players being unwilling to let others join them to play the game. If someone low skilled joins you, your own rewards are now harder to gain. The increased supply of both tradeable schematics and tradeable max gearscore items will over time increase the average gear score of the community on a specific world. This will make it easier over time for players to either join groups running the content (because increased power means players don't need to be as stringent with requirements for joining groups), but players are also not going to be simply locked out of finishing their progression experience because they can't find groups to join.
3. Players gearing themselves for the next Raid - Directly relevant to the above point, this whole design also means that players will be gearing themselves and their world up for the next raid with all of this increased supply. The increasing supply also means decreasing cost in money, so we can feel confident that the accessibility will increase over time.
4. Gear Flexibility - Another subtle benefit of this design is that the increased supply of max gear score items helps to bring costs down, and make player builds more flexible across the entire game. It's much easier to gear your character up cheaply, and therefore players can feel better when they need to swap to a new meta or want to try out something new for fun.
5. Progression isn't getting in the way of my fun - All of this is to say, I designed a rewards structure and progression loop that would not be getting in a players way of enjoying the gameplay and content. I did intentionally build some windows of high time investment required to earn that progression, but as time passes, players tend to dislike progression remaining as difficult or loot remaining as rare, especially for unchanged content and content that isn't new. This whole structure is built to make the release of a new Raid a really exciting moment for the community, and then as time passes and people settle in to farming the content (by making it a far more solved puzzle so to speak), the progression isn't remaining at the same level of difficulty, because the content has gotten easier over time in relation to both player power and player skill.

The raid was being developed at the same time as the game being brought to console, and the vast majority of our resources were being used to safely launch to console. This meant that our art budget was limited, and our engineering budget was even more limited. Schematics are a piece of tech that has existed in the game for a long time, but this was a clever use of the tech in my opinion. I'm proud of being able to build and implement a design with so many beneficial aspects for the game, by utilizing existing tools in a different way than we had previously.

Below is a short video to give you a visual explanation of these items and the system. At the time of this recording Broddmother is the final boss of Hive of Gorgons raid, and the maximum Gear Score in game is 725. The only other ways to earn items at this gear score are from loot drops in the raid, or the Free-For-All PvP Zone (also at the time of writing this and recording the below video):

When the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion released, we wanted to transition the game away from Horizontal Progression and focus more on Vertical Progression. Raids were a major part of that for the PvE experience. I reworked all the existing loot, and gear score progression in the game to fit a vertical model. As our piece of pinnacle content Raids are a key part of this, and the schematics have been a very valuable chase item for us to use in them.

PvP Reward Track

The PvP Reward Track is a form of progression used for PvP content in New World and offers a slew of rewards for PvP oriented players. At the time of its release, we only had individual rewards for specific game modes, and frankly those rewards were very weak. So this was built to satisfy the PvP section of the community. I worked with my teammates to design the system, build it, and balance the experience curve and economy. Below is a short video I took showing the basics of interacting with the reward track:

Image and video captured from in-game

To give you some basic context around how the track is used:

A player earns PvP XP by doing PvP Activities. Once they have enough PvP XP, a tier unlocks, and they can use Azoth Salts (also earned by completing PvP Activities) to purchase an item or thing. That's the most basic form of interaction loop: Earn XP/Currency from activities, then spend, then repeat. However, players may not like what offered to them by the track. So, if you reach the XP cap for your current level, you can choose to simply move on and gain some extra salts when you do so (this is true for each tier you did not purchase something at. You don't have to purchase something from Tier 1 to have access to Tier 2). This provides a way for players to feel like they can make more positive choices for themselves by simply being patient if they don't like what they see. We're literally giving them free money if they want to be patient.

The track itself is also set up in such a way, that as you go up in levels the value of your entries is increasing. The more you play, the better stuff you get. Items improved gear score ranges, higher rarities, and things like Artifacts become more common as well. On top of that, the track has built in milestones for Extra rewards like title and more Azoth Salt currency.

In simple terms, the PvP Reward Track gives us a way to layer more rewards on top of the existing rewards for PvP activities, and the word activities is important as opposed to Game Modes. Because players earn PvP XP by doing any PvP activity, even just killing other players in the open world. Game Modes do give the lion's share of PvP XP, but it can be earned in many different ways, and this was very intentional.

Something I've learned while working on this project is that PvP and PvE focused players tend to approach games differently from each other. PvE focused players tend to gravitate towards an archetype or specific character concept across many different games. For example, an 'Elven Ranger', bow wielding, dexterous, rogue-ish, woodland themed. Or how Whirlwind Barbarian is such a popular character in many games. So, PvE players tend to have a specific idea in mind already of the fun thing they want to do, and they want to do that one specific thing.

However, PvP players tend to like options and tools. A really easy example of this is how CS:GO players have been playing on Dust 2 for the past 20 years, and will be playing on Dust 2 until they are unable to even play the game at all. PvP players want lots of maps, lots of weapons, lots of just tools to keep the game fresher. So, the PvP Reward Track was intentionally built with Horizontal Rewards and Earnings in mind. The ability to earn PvP XP and Azoth Salts (the currency used on the track) across all forms of PvP content was done to satisfy this desire of players. The flexibility was key. This was also true with the design of the purchasing experience. We wanted to provide a lot of flexibility to these players when choosing their rewards.

While I do think the PvP Reward Track has been a successful design, it's not in as good of a state as I would like. We're still tuning and working on finding the right balance of Reward (and speed of progression) vs. Time vs. Activity for the players. One of the most important levers I think this system is missing is easy ways to increase the volume of potential loot rewards. At the time of writing this, the Reward Track can only provide 1 item per entry, so only 3 items per Tier. While this is nice, one of the best ways to tune loot systems is by increasing the volume of potential rewards. That's not something we can do with the current UI, as it doesn't support that in any way. This is one of its biggest limitations right now that I am hoping we can fix in the future.

Loot Tables and Loot Tooling

Loot tables in New World are intentionally built as a flexible and fairly generic tool as this gives us Designers a lot of control and ability to manipulate them for our needs. Most of this section is going to be focused on the work I've done with engineers to improve our toolsets for loot and rewards, but I'll also be explaining some things for context, as well as calling out a few key parts of the use of these tools.

To give a very short explanation, a loot table is a data structure that can provide items to the player. It can be activated in multiple ways in the game, and can link to other data structures as well. This allows us a lot of flexibility when building loot results for a large open world game. To give a quick visual mockup example for the sake of your understanding (all our data is handled in excel data sheets, so I'll just be using excel here as well):

I'm going to give a quick (very high level) rundown of how loot tables work in this section so you have context for this discussion and example further down, if you aren't interested (it's not strictly necessary for understanding the major example of this whole section) feel free to skip this part. I'll be going into some specific technical explanations about the system itself and giving some examples of how I've used this tool to build safety nets and progression.

A loot table has a few basic components inherently, like the things it will grant to you, or the total Maximum Roll of the table itself (tables roll between 0 and MaxRoll). A loot roll becomes eligible for an entry if the roll number exceeds the probability entry for that entry. So if you roll on ParentTable, and roll 90,001 you would be able to get the 1hSword item as part of your roll. Each table also has two ways it can grant items AND & OR tables. AND tables give you all entries you are eligible for, and OR tables only give you the entry your current falls into the range of. So, with a roll of 90,001, the player would also be eligible for Entry1 and Entry2. However, those are not directly items, but instead another table (Entry1) and a loot bucket (Entry 2). These are links to other data structures. To say it another way, loot tables use designer set probability ranges for their entries, and loot buckets use weighted probabilities for their entries. Having easy access to both these types of math is very helpful (among all the other potential levers) is very valuable, as it gives us designers far more ways to manipulate numbers and accomplish our goals.

Also very important, is that loot tables can have Conditions applied to them. These conditions are applied to the loot roll at runtime as a series of string tags that designers define and apply to various sources of loot (like AI or chests). So, when you roll on ParentTable (either by hitting it first, or from a link from another table) your roll must have the tag "Named" applied to it. Otherwise, you simply can't roll on the table and will receive nothing from it.

Now, to give a specific example of how this was used in game:

The metaphor I like to use, is that this is something akin to a series of pipes where loot keeps flowing until it is prevented. By applying loot tags in multiple ways, and at multiple levels, I created an additive system of loot to support the open world experience. A loot roll will take loot tags from the zone in the world, the POI you are in, the AI itself, the player, etc. So we can theme a lot of the loot results based on what you are doing at the time. Corrupted AI drop corrupted weapons which have traits like red and black art, perks relating to corrupted AI, unique flavour text relating to corruption, etc. We can have a zone add in a new type of loot if you kill AI there, a POI can easily have some unique loot added to the pool, and this work can be done easily in parallel with other teams and disciplines. However, the system is also intentionally built in such a way that every AI in the game rolls on the same parent table. This means that every AI is going through the same filtering process, and issues with loot rolls tend to be more noticeable this way. Since all of this is based on a series of probabilities it can be hard to see individual problems in one small POI or one random location. With this setup, when loot is broken in one place, it tends to break in others as well. This setup has been helpful for us in identifying problems before they make it to the live product and it is just a manipulation of the data itself. We've used this same type of setup for most of the loot rolls in the game (across other types of loot and content as well), but this also has the added benefit of being fast and easy to make large scale changes to all loot game. By knowing where to apply conditions and loot tags to entries, I can make a lot of edits and iterate quickly.

Loot Tooling

This section is going to be relatively brief, but it highlights some collaborative work I've done with engineers on our team to improve our tools for debugging through problems in our loot system. The changes I designed here were focused on 2 main things:

Increasing usability
Ensuring all necessary information would be visible/accessible in the same location

Below this paragraph is a short video showing some more visual parts of this tool.

The Last Loot Results tool lets you visually walk through the previous loot rolls on your character. Originally, this tool was significantly more limited in its capabilities. The user experience was much worse, you could only see the most recent roll, loot tags were unable to display their associated value, editing data you entered for debug was slow and cumbersome, etc.

Not all of that will make sense without contextual understanding of the system itself, but suffice it to say, the tool did not display anywhere close to enough data well enough to understand exactly what is going wrong with a loot roll. I use this tool daily, so it's important that we make its use efficient. I identified some key areas for improvements and worked with a few programmers to implement the improvements. Below, I'll talk about a few examples.

The colour coding was an early step that made this tool significantly easier to use by better showing issues with individual entries. The Last Loot Results tool colour codes table entries based on simple criteria:

Green - The roll was eligible for this entry and the roll succeeded for it
Yellow - The roll was eligible for this entry, but a different option was chosen
Red - The roll was not eligible for this entry, either due to not meeting the required conditions, or due to the roll being too low

This was a massive improvement for the usability of this tool, and is probably the easiest one to see visually without a deeper knowledge of the systems. Previous versions of this tool had no colour at all, so the whole list was both difficult to read and difficult to mentally parse quickly.

The colour coding was also added to individual portions of an entry in the list. In the above video you can see some line entries are green, but the Required Conditions are Red. This was implemented to specifically call out that the loot roll is missing a required condition (a loot tag applied by designers) to be eligible for an entry, and is much more noticeable than the previous version where the whole line would simply be green.

Below are a few more examples of targeted improvements I designed for this tool and worked with engineers to build (I've hopefully made the images large enough that you can at least read the text):

Simulating Test Rolls:

This is a screenshot of the simulator debug tool we use for testing loot rolls, and I've edited the below screenshot to show a few things I worked to add for making it easier to use.

In this screenshot I've used red lines to show examples of what I worked with engineers to add.

I'll put them in a quick list here:

Filtering & Group by ItemID - We previously had no filtering options, and trying to read the entire list was unhelpful at best, and usually just impossible since it was a giant block of text. These filters can help to reformat the way data is presented and make understanding certain data points (like total number of specific items) easier to parse quickly.
Rarity, Gear Score, and PerkIDs - These were added to make it easier to quickly what was actually being done with the items that were rolled. Did they roll with certain perks? How powerful are they? This addition made the tool much more powerful for quickly understanding the value of loot coming out of rolls we were testing.
Percentage - A small addition, but the system now calculates what percent of your results were an individual item, instead of the user doing it for themselves.

Debug Loot Tags:

This allow us to define the conditions for the roll we are simulating, or forcibly add conditions to in-game rolls for testing purposes. Just like above, I've edited the following screenshot to show some of the improvements I designed for this tool as well.

Preset and Common Loot Tags - These are defined by designers and can be used to make the process of adding commonly used conditions much faster. You can also define a preset list of conditions for testing purposes in the simulator, reducing the time needed for entering conditions multiple times or in batches. If you're iterating a lot on a new upcoming Dungeon, you can simply create a loot tag preset to apply all of the necessary tags for various loot sources in there. This removes the amount of overhead time needed for testing work, and allowed for faster iteration for us.
Adjust & Delete - Previously, if you made an error when adding tags this way, you would have to clear all your tags. This addition improved the usability of this tool greatly, because you no longer needed to clear all conditions to edit or remove a specific condition. Testing is much easier with this feature, as you can now more specifically target something to change in order to test a behavior.

These additions (among others not shown or called out here) were improvements to the workflow for building loot and rewards in New World. They allowed our designers to more than double our velocity when working with rewards tasks and drastically reduced confusion when debugging through issues. This tool has become powerful enough that even designers not specialized in progression and loot can be quickly onboarded to debug through anything they may be encountering with the loot system.

Other Systems or Interesting Notes

So far, I've given you a few of what I think are standout or interesting examples of systems and features I've worked on as a Systems Designer on New World, and since this page is already quite long, I'll make the rest of these brief. This will be fairly quickfire (and it's lighter on video and images so this is a bit of a wall of text), so if you'd like more context, information, or an explanation, or more examples (as this is not a fully exhaustive list, just a few more that I felt were important systems in the game) feel free to reach out to me at my e-mail linked on this site.

Crafting -

New World began as a Survival Crafting game, so many of those bones are still inside the system, and the game's crafting (and especially gathering) loops are a strong player experience. However, there is one specific note I wanted to call out here - the vast majority of the material crafting in the game folds into the higher tiers, and better materials allow you to craft a higher quality result.
By utilizing higher tier materials, I (as a player) can craft a better item (higher Gear Score outputs for equipment, or more resulting items for non-equipment recipes). This makes it very satisfying for me as a player to go get higher tier materials, and when I find a lucky drop, it's exciting. This portion has been largely removed over the years for varying reasons, but for a crafting gameplay experience, the system succeeded well.
Another key point to call out here, is that lower tier resources are needed to craft higher tier ones as well. Basically, if you want to craft steel, you also need iron. This means that every node in the game remains exciting or interesting to find. The whole world space feels different because every time I see a node, I'm interested in it. I want to go over there and mine it, I want to climb that cliff to get it. This portion of the system makes the whole world feel much more alive.
Below is a small image to help illustrate this concept. The item is in placed in a list, with example ingredients below, and a quick calculation of the total amount of iron ore needed.

Materia:

This was added as a form of bad luck protection for PvE loot drops. This is a common solution in games, but at the time we had none, so this was a clear need for the community. Ideally, this would have been built with its own in-game merchant for purchasing items from PvE instances, but that was deemed too expensive. So, I worked around this limitation by adding materia as a crafting material and built recipes for items using materia as the only material component (hopefully my bad joke wasn't totally lost on everyone, material -> materia).
Basically, since getting a proper NPC shopfront was too expensive I utilizied a crafting recipe as a 'shop'. Every recipe had the same singular cost in materials, so it functioned as a way to purchase what you wanted.

Timeless shards, Golden Scarabs, Prismatic Scarabs:

All 3 of these are items that unlock new recipes for the player, and are a consumable material used in those recipes.
Each recipe type allows the players to add more perk items to the craft, and thereby guarantee more and more of their item's result instead of relying on random chance. Timeless shards allow you to select an attribute type, golden scarabs let you select 2 perks and the attribute, and Prismatic Scarabs let you select everything by using perk items.

Loot Biasing:

Loot Biasing is a system that reads your character's currently 2 highest attributes, and equipped weapons and armor types. It then gives you more loot results with similar attribute perks and item types. This was designed to reduce the frustration of loot results that are simply not what the player is interested in.
While this does work, it's a system I think still needs some updates to work best for our players. As part of the original design I wanted the system to allow the player to simply select "I want [swords] with [strength], [light] [headwear] with [constitution], [heavy] [chestwear] with [strength], etc." with some new buttons and sections in the UI, but that was unfortunately cut due to cost.
- Reading the active stats and equipment on the player character is good, but there's not an inherent link in the system between what a player wants and what they are currently using. Since New World is a classless game we shouldn't just assume that what a player wants is what they currently have. You could very easily be trying to farm rapiers with a greatsword because the greatsword is strong on this patch, or you just haven't found a good enough rapier yet.

Salvage Loot Tables:

Salvage is a system that grants the player stuff (originally coin and repair parts which are both currencies and not inventory items), and in New World the way we accomplished this was by sending a game event when the player salvages the item. Game events are able to grant the player currencies when they are activated, however, they are also able to utilize loot tables when activated. At the time, the salvage UI did not support Loot Tables, but the backend did. I identified this as a way to improve the system for our players and provide us a more flexible tool (and also as a way to achieve a design that was causing bugs in a way that would not cause those same bugs, detailed below in the Musical Instruments section), and worked with some engineers and UI artists to design and build support for loot tables when salvaging items. This allowed us to provide a items as part of salvage (instead of just currencies), but we could also provide multiple different options at one time.
At the time, we designed a 'Perfect Salvage' System to use with crafting, where (based on the quality of the item salvaged) the player could get better materials and use them for crafting high power items, though that has since been largely eclipsed by power creep. Perfect salvage was a successful system when released, as it made salvaging items a much more meaningful action to take for players.
The largest benefit for our team though, was the massive increase in flexibility when using Game Events and salvage. We've been able to make use of this piece of tech for things like the Season of Conquerors (a drop on death PvP seasonal experience) or granting perk items when salvaging certain item types. Since each raid introduces some new perks, I've built the source of those perk items as being salvaged from the loot in the raid. This creates a system where players are running the raid for the new perks and items, and if they don't get exactly what they want, they salvage for the new perk items that are at a premium value on release. On top of that, if you didn't exactly what you wanted, you can use the perk items from your salvage to guarantee the new perks on a crafted item.
I've included a short video below to help show this:

Musical Instruments:

The above item salvaging tech was actually first used with the Musical Instruments feature. The lowest tier instruments can be crafted normally with a recipe, but higher tier instruments require a charm that is gained by salvaging musical instruments. Originally, we were intending to use the instrument itself as an ingredient in the recipe (to make it feel like you are upgrading and keeping the same instrument your entire playthrough) but that was unfortunately too buggy at the time. The salvaging tech was partially built to solve this problem, and also partially for the reasons stated above.
The 'upgrading the same instrument' aspect of the design is something I very much wanted to keep, because Musical Instruments are a low player investment, casual feature, so the progression for them was intentionally built to be very simple. We only built a small number of perks for the items, so players would not need to spend much time trying to get the exact instrument they wanted.
We also created Music Sheets as lootable items out in the world and spread them all across the game. Since this was a casual feature, we wanted to make it fairly easy to get lots of these music pages by doing the standard activities you would normally be doing in the game (mining, fighting AI, doing expeditions, etc). We also intentionally themed the sources for each page based on music sheet's name (with the added bonus of being able to have another form of collection in the game). These are all fairly small forms of progression, but they all added up together to make a pleasant, casual progression for the playerbase.
While the progression loop or musical instruments is something I'm pleased with, as I think it is a successful form of casual progression, there's one flaw I'd like to revisit if I had the opportunity. Currently, you're able to find a music sheet after you have used it to learn a song. This isn't particularly valuable to the player, because music sheets serve no meaningful purpose after you learn the song. While we did identify this problem early, we lacked safe ways to fix it. Our only tool available is to apply loot limits, and the number of active limits we can have on a character is limited in code. If we exceed that number some very concerning problems can occur for our reward loops, so the risk is unfortunately not worth the gain. There's just too many music sheets, and we don't have enough loot limits for all of them. We don't currently have tech to properly prevent this issue (and since it's not causing a particularly negative experience, it's lower priority), but it's a problem I would like to solve.

The below video should help show the salvaging aspect: