The Winter Convergence event was active for most of December and January in New World. It was a total blast! The event includes three main activities – a quest series involving helping the Winter Wanderer and fighting the Winter Warrior, collecting presents found on the ground or floating in the air, and looting Trees of Light in cities as well as completing town project board missions to upgrade them. There are free armor appearances for everyone, weapons and armor you can buy from the event, armor appearances you can earn, and armor appearances you can purchase with real money.

In the screenshot above, I’m wearing some Winter Convergence clothes and standing with gem outside one of the four Winter Villages, which is where you pick up and turn in quests as well as spend the event currency.

Here you can see how some of the cities are decorated!

The Winter Village had this little rabbit with a winding key on its back. The flavor text on one you can purchase points out that it’s a real rabbit wearing a sweater with a winding key to make it look like a wind-up toy. I especially love this considering our company name is Automaton House and a wind-up toy is also known as an automaton toy.

Just look how cute and pettable it is!

Here we are with the Winter Wanderer! He’s a friendly yeti!

Here’s a pile of gifts that you can find along with the northern lights behind me! The collected presents can be turned in at Winter Villages for currency to purchase items. I bought a pet rabbit with the winding key for my house, a gift-giving emote, a back appearance, multiple max level weapons, a full set of max level armor, and a ton of furniture.

You can also find floating gifts that can be shot down. These are worth a lot more than the gifts on the ground.

Speaking of gifts, here’s the /gift emote in action!

The coolest part of the event is gleamite! In the video above, you can watch us as we hear a gleamite meteor. It’s hard to tell where it is, so I spin the camera around looking for it. At this point, I had heard them previously but never managed to see one. It shoots across the sky as a meteorite, then shatters into pieces that fall to Earth. If there are trees around, the trees will be flattened. The video shows a few gleamite meteorites: the first in the recording is the first one I saw (unfortunately it didn’t flatten trees), the second is one I caught very clearly as it went across the sky, the third flattened trees, and the final one was during the last couple hours of the event!

If you didn’t watch the video, here’s one streaking across the sky.

And here’s a meteorite just before it explodes, but I really recommend watching the video!

This is a gleamite chunk on the ground.

Restless Shore settlement even decorates the pirate ship!

This is a Tree of Light in one of the cities. gem is standing in front of the tree.

Here gem is checking my new rabbit friend before I fully redecorated for Winter Convergence. (Because I spent the duration of the event farming the currency to buy the rest of the furniture, it wasn’t decorated until the end.)

Aw, she’s petting the rabbit!

This is my house decorated for the Winter Convergence Festival! I have ice themed furniture and ice sculptures of a stag, boar, and rabbit. You can also see my pets – two dogs and a rabbit! You’ll notice the rabbit changes spots; I couldn’t get the petting animation to work with his original location when I started recording.

Lastly, this video shows the final quest in the Winter Convergence quest series. The quest tasks you with killing two yeti enemies for items used to summon the final yeti, the Winter Warrior. The recording includes picking up the quest and then jumps to us going after the final yeti. We weren’t max level yet, and getting through max level areas was really tough. I included a bit in the recording of us “leapfrogging” camps. A camp is a respawn point, but you have to be bound to it, can only be bound to one at a time, have to unbind before making a new one, and can only respawn if you’re close to it. If you unbind from your previous camp and die trying to make the new one, you’re out of luck. The only way for us to run through the high level zones was for one person to hold aggro while the other put down a camp, ensuring that the person who had aggro could respawn if killed.

This took hours. The final yeti could kill us in one hit. We died many times. We lost our camp and accidentally respawned far away, forcing us to do the whole trek again. We survived fights against the yeti thanks to others being there only to realize we didn’t do enough damage for the kill to count. Eventually we asked if we could group with someone, explaining the issue. MissDemeanor invited us to her group and saved the day! I told her I would sing tales of her greatness, so I had to at least mention her here! She’s also talked with me after this and helped me out more.

I loved snowy areas, fighting yetis, the friendly Winter Wanderer, the ice furniture, and especially the gleamite meteors. I can’t overstate how exciting it is to see it in game when you’re not expecting it! The event was also great because if you didn’t care about collecting things, you didn’t really need to do any grinding. As for me, I did a ton of grinding and had a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to future events!