Zwift adds Neokyo routes to Makuri Islands, improves home screens, and adds Clubs features
Zwift adds new routes to the recently added world, while improving the home screen presented when the game starts up.
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It is always night, but brightly lit and full of life in Zwift’s extension of its Makuri Islands virtual world. The new routes in cycling’s most popular virtual training platform should be ready for release in a November update to the game.
Neokyo city is an expansion of the Japanese-inspired Makuri Islands that connects with existing Yumezi routes. The newly added routes look to be flat and fast, with several sprint points and neon lights lining the virtual roads.
Improvements to the home screen
In November, Zwift will also roll out improvements to the home screen to a segmented group of users. Zwift wants to reduce the time it takes for you to go from launching the game to riding in it, as well as making it easier to be more social in the game.
Once you’ve logged into the game, you can view events that will be starting soon, filter them by effort (categories A-D), event type (races, group workouts, and group rides), and more.
The newly updated home screen also promises easier navigation to the hardware pairing screen, the garage (in which your virtual cycling apparel and equipment is stored), a list of routes completed and badges earned, schedules and event calendars, and other improvements.
In early 2022, these improvements will be made available to all game users.
Clubs feature added
Zwift will add a Clubs feature, in a product release slated for some time in November 2021.
As with the update to the home screen, the Club feature will be a phased release, with it planned for wide availability in early 2022.
The Clubs feature will require Zwifters who want to create a Club to be level 20 or greater, but anyone can join a club once it’s created. Once you’ve created a Club, you can add events, and invite anyone to join them.
Club events can be set to private or public and can be shared with anyone. Zwift plans for Club-based group workouts, and also a discovering Clubs feature in future releases.
