Today’s unannounced New World patch adds zone revamp, new cosmetics, and daggers [Update]

It seems New World’s remaining developers are not content to go quietly into the night following its transition to maintenance mode: An unannounced patch this morning added a large amount of new content and teases of what might have been if development had continued.

The up-leveling of the Reekwater zone teased in the roadmap a few months ago is now live. Similar to what happened to Cutlass Keys during the Aeternum relaunch, this doesn’t fully redesign the zone but adds new quests, increases the level of enemies, and revamps the zone’s elite strongholds. It also features new rewards from a dedicated vendor, including a cosmetic armour set and new mounts that appear to be Día de los Muertos themed.

The patch also includes an unfinished version of a new weapon, daggers. The skill tree is visible, as are some crafting recipes related to them, but it’s not possible to learn those recipes or otherwise actually acquire daggers. According to comments on Discord that were then relayed via Reddit, there is a chance that daggers may be made usable at some future date, but it’s far from certain. [Update: Now they’ve hotfixed in the ability to use the daggers too. Have fun!]

If they are implemented, the current skill tree shows daggers as a dexterity weapon with weak secondary scaling from strength. They utilize a combo point system that should make World of Warcraft rogue mains feel right at home, and they feature one skill tree devoted to stealth and another focused on poison DoTs and lifesteal.

The Reekwater content also shows signs of being somewhat unfinished, such as lacking voice acting for the quests, so it seems likely this was all intended to be season 11 content that was pushed out early as a final treat for loyal players.

The remaining New World skeleton crew also plans server merges for later in the week, which should help consolidate the game’s remaining population.