As part of its preview of New World’s upcoming hardcore seasonal world, Amazon has sent along a new Q&A-style dev blog explaining the studio’s reasoning for the planned ruleset. As we’ve been covering, season 8’s seasonal server effectively flattens the game’s leveling curve so that PvP players can zip from “zero to endgame-ready in just a few hours” – in other words, they can get past the MMO leveling stuff and get to the PvP. Of course, if they die, they’re basically booted off the leaderboard, so they’ll want to reroll and try again.

“Our approach began with a desire to shake up the overall experience of playing New World: Aeternum,” Amazon’s Joel Clift says. “We’ve seen hardcore modes be successful with other games, and wanted to emulate some of that re-contextualization of the core experience. We never really had a specific goal to make a hardcore mode[;] our major goal was to provide a new way to have fun in New World: Aeternum.”

In fact, the speedy new main quest line actually provides new PvE content for those who do partake. “One of our major goals here was to ensure that you wouldn’t just be doing the same questlines and the same actions as a previous leveling experience, that kind of repetition gets kind of boring,” Clift explains. He also warns players that they’re likely to die – a lot – until they pass their knowledge checks and learn to roll with a team.

“The other major thing to keep in mind as a new player, is that something we are experimenting with here is providing ‘rough edges’ to the experience. Not everything is intentionally highly polished. We want you (and especially much older players who are more seasoned) to encounter a weird, new type of problem, and then find a way to solve it. And that way to solve it might be to just die and come back, but it could also be to go get a useful item from somewhere else that you know about, or to work together with some other players to crush an encounter through sheer numbers, or to even just go to a different location because you know more about the enemies there. We’re hoping that these kinds of rough edges in the experience are going to push everyone to solve problems in ways they haven’t done before (or at least haven’t done in a while).”

The new hardcore season world arrives on June 3rd and stays open through July 8th.