The overall purpose of replacing old launcher is mainly to address key points:
1) Make installation convenient.
Installation, which is end-user experience, is cumbersome, especially to newcomers. Unfortunately this is compounded by the lack of availability of the base game itself. The new launcher is similar to what you'd have for various other games: a downloader, installer and basic configuration utility in one package. This also means you won't be able to play vanilla game with it because the mod won't have essential assets.
2) Make patching convenient.
On a developer and server admins side of things mod patching can be equally cumbersome. The new system is largely designed to automate most steps and more closely resembles something like a Dropbox where launcher is synchronizing your installation with the latest build image stored on server.
This also opens possibility for supporting multiple servers and launcher maintaining separate installations for reach. Private and public test servers for example.
3) Make essential player information available in launcher.
News, server rules and getting started help page will be pulled from the server into launcher through its web API. Story team will be able to make in-universe news posts that will be published and displayed in launcher. Admins/mods will be able to publish server rules, FAQ page and whatever else that might be useful for players to know without digging through forum labyrinth.
For security reasons launcher won't display any external web pages. There'll be links to forum and discord, but they'll be handled by your default browser and discord desktop application.
For account management don't expect anything particularly new at the launch, it is meant to have the same functionality you already had before. There are a few ideas on how to improve (like customizable icons in grid layout, border colors, etc) it but that'll be reserved for later. Accounts can be imported from current launcher. Cloud account storage might be possible as well but not initially.
For modding support there are some ideas but it won't be available at launch, meaning that each patch will wipe out any modifications made and reset discovery installation to clean state. There are some ideas how to make it work with some modifications but that'll probably come later.
