Portfolio / New World: Influence Races

Influence Race action shot featuring a player with a bow shooting into a crowd of player enemies.

Influence Races Overview

New World is a MMORPG with an Open World PvP element. Companies (guilds) fight for ownership of territories through wars. To declare war on a territory, a Company’s faction must first earn enough Influence in a territory. Influence Races are an Open World PvP mode where players captured Influence Towers and battled against enemy factions.

I was the designer and feature owner of Influence Races. I partnered with other game designers, artists, and developers to build over 20 Influence Towers in the Open World (3x per territory) and create the scheduler and scoring system

Why Influence Races?

When New World first launched, players could earn Influence by completing open world repeatable missions that required them to flag for PvP. The missions were designed to put players near each other to encourage fighting. However, we found through feedback and data that players rarely fought – they really just wanted to go to War.

I designed Influence Races to encourage the open world battles New World’s combat was made for and to make earning Influence feel less like a chore and more like victory.

Design

  • Each territory opens for an Influence Race at a time scheduled in advance, driving players to Open World PvP Areas.
  • Influence Races are a tower capture open world mode with 3 towers and a Fort available for capture. Owning a tower generates influence for the faction. Players can still complete missions during a race to earn influence – earning more towers modifies the amount of influence earned by the missions.
  • The conflict state ends when a faction earns 100% influence or when the timer runs out. The faction with the most influence wins the opportunity to declare war on a territory.

Outcome

Influence Races were a success on Day 1, driving Twitch streams, YouTube content, and with over 240k unique players experiencing an Influence Race over the lifetime of New World. We were able to quickly respond to live issues at launch with the use of stack configs.

Influence Races