Watts New in Watopia: Updates on the Way
A few days ago, Zwift outlined many changes to come for what they are considering the next season on the gaming platform. You have likely come across these details covered in other outlets. For example, DC Rainmaker, as always, offers comprehensive coverage of the new Zwift announcements.
Rather than repeat these details from Zwift that have already been covered, we thought we would offer some highlights here and share what excites us about these new updates.
New Hub World
To date, Zwift has had one hub world, Watopia, where most of the contiguous worldbuilding and route expansions were evolving. Zwift announced that Makuri Islands will become the second hub world, which means that we can expect to see many new areas of the archipelago open up for exploration. Our best guess is that eventually both Watopia and Makuri Islands will be persistent worlds that are available every day.
The first expansion of Makuri Islands is Neokyo, a reimagined Tokyo rendered in bright neon at night time. The cityscape looks amazing with tons of small details to check out along the route.
A close look at the new map features routes with many twists and turns through narrow streets and alleys. Our guess is this world will have a comparable feel with Crit City with tight turns, which for many of us who are old crit dogs this promises to offer some of that feel of divebombing corners. With steering options on the horizon, you have to wonder how much choosing the right line through a corner will matter as much in game as it does in a real crit. We can’t wait to race in Neokyo.
New Way to Select Routes
The user interface will be getting an update that promises to be more than cosmetic. The new interface combines workouts, races, and events in one place and makes it easier to sort and select them based on date/time, distance, elevation, and route. What’s new is that you will also be able to sort based on estimated duration (based on how long it would take 85% of Zwift users) and difficulty (labeled as effort in the pull-down menu). These new metrics will be of great help with deciding if you have enough time for a route and how difficult it will be (on a scale of 1 to 5).
These are features that are much needed and long awaited. The difficulty scale promises to improve on Zwift Insider’s Zwift Routes by Difficulty chart that rated routes by number of water bottles (or bidons).
New Feature to Create Clubs
Zwift teased the feature of creating clubs a while ago. If you were there at the beginning on Jarvis Island during beta, you may have received an invite to join Club Jarvis as part of FutureWorks. However, all this really did was give us a sneak peek at some of the club features like club chat, club stats, club events (there weren’t any that I could remember), and club member activities. Zwift is turning over the controls to all of us soon so that we can make getting our buddies together on Zwift even easier than scheduling a meetup that was dependent on a single user.
If you live in a place with inclement or unpredictable weather, moving the local outdoor group ride inside on Zwift is very appealing. Add to that a whole other host of reasons that you would want to sustain or build community within a club structure, and this new feature promises to make organizing our friends and teammates so much easier. Like the meetup feature, you will be able to host your club runs and rides on a private instance of a world, which means keeping the group together will be easier.
Zwift has also hinted at adding custom workouts to the club feature. This may be particularly appealing to coaches, who could offer to lead specific workouts for groups of their athletes. With the rubber band feature, the coach could keep their athletes grouped and talk them through a set of shared intervals. There’s a ton of potential for this much needed club feature.
When Will This Be Released???
Neokoyo is coming very soon; sometime in November. No doubt there will be new route badges to pick up as you explore this new part of Makuri Islands.
The release of the New User Interface is less clear. Zwift stated sometime in early 2022, so we have some time to wait before this feature improves our Zwift experience.
The New Club Feature will roll out as a limited release sometime in the next two months. Does this mean that those of us staring at Club Jarvis in our Zwift companion app get it first? No way to tell. Full release will be in early 2022, which can’t come too soon for organizing indoor club group rides.
