New World's Arenas mode is now live

Arenas mode has finally arrived in New World.

Amazon Games revealed the 2022 roadmap for its fantasy MMO, New World, back in March. The roadmap said that spring 2022 (or Q2 for our friends in the southern hemisphere) would bring the Tempest's Heart expedition, the Blunderbuss, as well as 3v3 PvP arenas and a PvP reward track. 

In a "Best-of-5" contest, Arenas tasks you to be the first team to win three rounds and secure the match. Rounds typically last two minutes, but things heat up after that - literally: "A deadly ring of fire will push players to the center of the arena, forcing combatants to engage or die!"  

You won't be able to play if you're under level 20, though, or if you've yet to permit on-demand PvP from anywhere in Aeternum in your Modes menu. 

"Step into the Arena to test your skills against other combatants!" Amazon teases in a new update on the official Steam page. "3v3 Arenas are a new small-scale PvP game mode where teams of three can face off for fame, glory, and riches. You might even win a few unique housing items."

For more information, head on over to Steam. There you'll find a detailed rundown of the new PvP rewards track, as well as Return to the Depths, a new challenge for end-game rewards that is part of the weekly expedition mutator rotation, along with three others: Overgrown, Barbaric, and Fiendish. There's also a new Varangian Knights quest chain, too.

Other updates planned for New World in summer/Q3 include the introduction of the Barnacles and Black Powder expedition, an expedition group finder, and an unspecified "summer event".

Have you been spending any time with the latest game published under the Amazon Games' banner, Lost Ark, which is already one of the biggest games to ever hit Steam? Within 24 hours of release, it clocked up so many players that it now boasts the second-highest concurrent peak ever on Steam, so if Lost Ark's phenomenal success has taken you by surprise, you may find Ali's article, What is Lost Ark and Why Is It Blowing up on Steam? a helpful read.

ICYMI, Lost Ark players without verified Steam accounts "in good standing" may find their accounts restricted as part of Smilegate's ongoing battle against bots. Smilegate has "been hard at work on crafting effective tools and methods to identify and remove bots from the game", banning over a million "bot" accounts from its servers in March, and earlier this month, it released Valtan, Lost Ark's first Legion raid, onto western servers.

Here are our picks of the best MMORPG titles you can play in 2022.