New World team reveals new Blunderbuss weapon for Heart of Madness update

After briefly teasing the Blunderbuss weapon on social media, New World officially unveiled it in a preview for the upcoming Heart of Madness update. The new weapon will arrive alongside a swathe of bug fixes and gameplay improvements, as well as more endgame content and open-world encounters.

As its name would suggest, the Blunderbuss is a shotgun-type ranged weapon, albeit with a much shorter effective range than the Musket, and a drastically different skillset. It comes with two skill trees: Containment and Chaos. Containment’s abilities and perks would allow players to close in with enemies faster in order to take advantage of the Blunderbuss’ close-quarters firepower. The Chaos skill tree is the polar opposite, offering players ways to pester and damage enemies from range without ever coming in close contact. Naturally, New World players will also get a new quest chain to play through in order to unlock Legendary Blunderbuss variants.

The Heart of Madness update is expected to arrive in New World later in March and will continue the positive trend of adding more playable content to the game. That includes more endgame activities in the form of Dungeon Mutators, and more enemy encounters in the open world for the players still working toward reaching the endgame.