Zwift CEO Eric Min has traditionally posted a Strava activity on new Zwift roads within a few days of their release, and this morning he rode Neokyo, the Makuri Islands city addition which Zwift has been talking about for the past few weeks.
See his Strava ride here. You can also see his activity on Zwift.com or Garmin Connect.
What We Know About Neokyo
Here’s everything we know about Neokyo, based on various teasers from Zwift and Eric Min’s ride today.
Neokyo is a new map within the Makuri Islands world. It is connected to the existing Yumezi map by a single connector road.
Neokyo has 4 sprint segments, 1 KOM, and a set of start pens. Eric’s ride today covered three of those sprint segments, which are labeled on his Zwift.com activity (thus our labels below). Presumably, these sprints go in both directions.
The KOM ends where you see the mountain icon (bottom-right of the map). It appears to be a ~55 meter climb over ~2 kilometers, based on Strava’s elevation profile (see below – Eric rode the KOM twice).
Eric ride didn’t cover all of the roads shown below, in the full map but it appears the roads are quite flat except for the KOM section at the bottom-right.
Zwift launched a homepage for the new map last week (zwift.com/neokyo) which says there are “eight new routes across approximately 13 mi // 21 km of new roads in Neokyo”. The route Eric rode today is called “Railways and Rooftops”.
The updated map can now be seen in the Companion app (of you view a Makuri Islands activity) or on Zwift.com activities. This gives us a view of the size of the new map, as well as its location relative to Yumezi roads:
Meetups, Events, and Free Rides
Zwift’s FAQ says, “At initial launch, Neokyo will only be available for free rides. We are hard at work making this new map available for Meetups and Events. We’ll update this FAQ when that happens.”
But When?
Zwift says Neokyo will go live in the November game release. So when is the November game release?
Releases have been coming in the second half of the month lately, but Zwift had Makuri Islands scheduled as a guest for November 10-17th, so we figured that meant a release was planned for this week. And indeed that seemed to be the original plan, but this was posted on Zwift’s forum today:
We hope you’ve been enjoying our eye-popping teasers for Makuri Island’s latest expansion, Neokyo. We can’t wait to jump into the bright lights and fast roads of this neon city. We’re installing the final neon signs and will be opening these roads later this month. To prepare, we are shifting the current world calendar a bit so you can get your daylight fill before the sun goes down and the Neokyo lights turn up.
As soon as the guest world schedule is posted, we’ll add a link to it here.
Shuji from ZwiftHQ
So it looks like the release has been pushed off to next week, which (incidentally) was the original date I guessed for the Neokyo release. Prescient!
Zwift’s guest world calendar has just been updated (see it on our schedule page) and the week-long Makuri Islands block is now scheduled for November 17-23rd.
So my guess is Zwift’s next update will arrive on November 17th or 18th, and Neokyo along with it. Can’t wait to ride some new roads!
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