Numerous New World main quests are unplayable following expansion launch

New World’s first expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, was released earlier this week. And although many of the game’s experienced players have jumped straight into the new content found in the Elysian Wilds, many returning players have been scratching their heads as they try to work around a prevalent, borderline game-breaking bug. 

The launch of New World’s first expansion has inadvertently made nearly a dozen main story quests unable to complete or be progressed through, and in some cases, story quests have disappeared entirely from players’ journals. You could have gone to bed the night before the expansion launch progressing through a specific quest and logged in after the Angry Earth launch to find that whatever mission you were working on is gone without a trace. 

Thankfully, Amazon Games is aware of this issue and has posted a list of all of the currently broken quests to its “Known Issues” section of its customer support page. The affected quests are listed as follows: 

• A Shadow Falls
• Rage of the Mammoth
• Secrets of the Heartgem
• Brimstone Sands
• Azoth Staff V
• Presage Pier
• Covenant Paladin Tier (from five to six)
• The Invasion of Artemis
• A First Step of Many

In our experience, we also found that the quest “Into the Depths” was removed from the journal. Personally, I had been leveling a new character to level 60 in preparation of the new expansion and had left off just before progressing through the Depths expedition. When I logged in post-launch, that quest was gone from my journal. It’s likely that I wasn’t alone in this experience, and it’s even possible that other quests that AGS didn’t list on its support page were also affected. 

“On some level, I can sympathize with the devs, because it’s difficult to perform regression testing on every possible quest step a player could be on when they integrate the new [main story quest],” a New World player named Randrogynous said in a thread on Reddit. “But at the same time, if they’re going to devote so many resources to reworking the MSQ from scratch and making major changes to territories & factions/NPCs/etc., making sure that all players have access to that new/modified content should be a high priority.” 

The sudden disappearance of some of the main story quests has left many returning New World players in limbo as a certain subset of the returning player base has found that the quest they left off with has inexplicably vanished. In my experience, I was forced to pick up the revamped Great Cleave quest chain and transitioned seamlessly into that zone, but I’m still left without access to the main story quests that I had been working on pre-expansion. 

A timetable for a fix to the New World main story is currently up in the air, although the game’s developers are working on a solution. It’s likely that players will regain access to whatever quests they were working on at some point within the next week, considering a strong contingent of returning players have been hung out to dry with little content to push through.