Games

Yesterday both Eliyon and I ended up at the same pond in Everfall gathering water to turn in the collect 250 Water quest. This is one of those things that I always do if it is available because it is so brain dead and simple that it is effectively free territory standing and a few gold for next to no effort. I just found it funny that we were both doing it at exactly the same time. This morning I had a lot of thoughts about what I would say, especially given that the economy in New World is effectively disabled right now due to a gold duplication bug. That means coin cannot be traded between players and if I had to take a guess… this is more than just a gold duplication bug and instead also related to the army of gold farmers creating level 1 characters, pushing through the early quests and then handing that gold over before deleting that character and starting again. The starter beaches are full of randomly named drones slaving away and harvesting gold from the Amazon overlords.

Over the weekend a reader of the blog and listener of the podcast, made a comment over on YouTube that got me thinking. If you are sitting out there on the outside trying to determine if you want to play New World, I guess that my rolling commentary could be a wild roller coaster ride of highs and lows. So this morning I think I will talk a little bit about some of the various aspects of the game and the good and bad about each. Ultimately I am never trying to sell you on a game, but instead sharing my experiences with it. If I am excited about something I want to share that joy with everyone around me. If I am frustrated by something, I have to admit there is part of me that wants to watch the world burn. The thing is… everything on this blog is my opinion and more than that the opinion at the moment I sat down to write it. This means that over time that opinion can shift and change as I have new information to base my decisions on.

The World

The Good

If you love exploring the world in video games, then New World might possibly be the best game to just roam around aimlessly looking for adventure. The zones are atmospheric and the engine renders them in loving detail. There is a story happening in this land and it is told to you in the Destiny style via scattered journal pages that explain how things got to this state. What is even more interesting though is the set design of the world, which ends up being unique enough that once you eventually learn the lay of the land you can very easily navigate your way between zones because each of them feels unique.

The Bad

The world is extremely large and takes a long time to traverse. There is a fast travel system but this requires a currency called Azoth, which means you are going to be needing a constant source of getting this back either randomly through combat or through special gathering tools that have a chance of extracting Azoth while collecting materials. Needing to go several zones away has a time cost with it and since there are no mounts and no taxi system… this means you are going to have to get really good at sorting out how to get from one location to another.

Crafting

The Good

Crafting in New World is honestly one of the best crafting systems I have experienced. It feels great to go out and roam the world looking for resources and then equally great to take those resources back and craft something useful. For years what tradeskill-centric players have wanted was the ability to create some extremely unique items that held value and ultimately a path to creating the most powerful items in the game world. This system absolutely does this and right now it represents the best way to get the highest quality items in the game with the best possible statistic packages.

The Bad

The negative however is that crafting in New World is incessantly grindy past the first 50 to 100 levels. When you start the game it is very easy to keep yourself outfitted in the best possible gear you can get, but if you are at all splitting time between crafting and adventuring you are going to quickly reach a point where nothing you can craft is valuable to your progression. Then there is the problem of different tiers of gear requiring you to craft the previous tier before. Right now I am needing Orichalcum to craft items, which requires Orichalcum Ore and Starmetal Ingots… which require Starmetal Ore and Steel Ingots… which require Iron Ingots and Charcoal… which requires Iron Ore. As you go up, the amount of time spent gathering becomes exponential which means that an hour of gathering and refining MIGHT get you a single skill raise if you are lucky.

Combat

The Good

One of the really interesting things about New World is how different each of the available weapons feels. Your character progression and weaponskill progress are split from each other, allowing you to effectively “level up” every single weapon in the game and swap between them as needed. Using a Sword and Shield feels completely different from using a Hammer… which feels completely different from using another Twohander the Great Axe. Combat is going to seem a lot like an Elder Scrolls game but feels like it has more weight to it and combat interactions feel considerably more fluid and purposeful. Killing monsters is extremely enjoyable and you can reasonably fight multiple things at the same time depending on how good you are at utilizing all of the abilities.

The Bad

Because Character Progression and Weapon Progression are split, this means you can build out your character in such a way as to make certain weapons completely useless. For example I have focused on Strength and Constitution which means that if I pick up any sort of magical weapon I am going to be next to useless with it. Similarly I can’t really swap to Bow or Musket without needing to respec my character… which costs me 500 gold each time I want to do it. The game really needs a more holistic “spec” system with the ability to swap between them easily where you can have maybe three saved specs and shift between them as needed. The respec costs are rather prohibitive because while there are a ton of gold sinks in the game there are not too many gold fountains.

Town Systems

The Good

Towns in the game are upgraded by the users through the use of Town Board quests, which serve as a reasonable source for small amounts of gold and an excellent source of experience. Each town can have four different projects active, and over time it is interesting to watch the impact of those projects. The ones that are especially felt are the upgrade of crafting machines to higher tiers and the projects that provide everyone in that town a buff. Each town feels fairly unique as a result and you gain Territory Standing which eventually unlocks the ability to buy houses in that town. For me at least it gives me the feeling of “living” in the game world, and I have found myself gravitating towards and memorizing specific towns my time playing.

The Bad

Town ownership is controlled through PVP, and with it goes the spoils of war… the ability to set taxes, choose projects, and collect any proceeds. The problem is that not all towns are profitable, and the company that owns it is forced to choose between paying gold to start projects to upgrade the crafting machines or to upgrade the defensive emplacements. There are also companies that end up being slum lords of a sort, that never upgrade anything and instead funnel any meager profits they get into their own war effort. As you progress through crafting you end up needing higher tiers of crafting machines, and if the town you first chose doesn’t have these… you need to ultimately “move” somewhere else that can support your crafting needs. Then there are invasions which I will get into later… which ultimately can wreck a perfectly good territory.

Territory War

The Good

Please note this section is coming from me… a PVE player who has never participated nor actually WANTS to participate in a Territory War. From the outside however, we spend a lot of time focused on Wars because they have some serious potential ramifications for the factions and by nature those of us just existing in them. I guess one positive is that Zone control is a fairly structured process of running a bunch of faction quests be it PVE or PVP in a given zone until you place the zone in conflict meaning a faction has gained more influence than the one currently holding it. This allows any Company Governor of that faction to declare war… which yes means that I get a lot of pop up boxes when zones go into Conflict asking if I want to put in a bid for the War. This is all pretty predictable and you can tell when a zone is about to go into conflict and the war is chosen based on what the defender has listed as their available “War” times.

The Bad

We have yet to see a “clean” war won without the use of some sort of exploit… with a constant fevered debate over whether or not the use of those exploits were intentional. For example the Hatchet exploit happening right now, doesn’t require any strange behavior from the player… simply just using the weapon over time will stack up a buff causing you to deal upwards of 300% more damage than you should be. This creates an arms race where if one team doesn’t utilize these tactics they are very likely going to lose. Even worse for the players who are not connected to any of the PVP systems… when a zone flips it locks off access to the bank from other faction controlled territories and can potentially cause your House Rent to go up significantly. When First Light first flipped from Syndicate control… the Marauders jacked up the Housing Taxes in order to “punish” the faction that previously held it making life pure hell for anyone who bought a house during that time.

Invasions

The Good

Invasions are this super fun “mock war” that takes place against the force of corruption as they try and invade your territory. Effectively it works the same as the later phases of a territory war, with the players defending the fort against an onslaught of multiple waves of corrupted. As players it is well worth signing up for these because they only take about thirty minutes in total and reward 630 gold and a box of loot that has the chance of being something useful. I’ve now been in four of these territory defenses against Invasions and functionally it is a time when all factions can band together to defend the territory.

The Bad

Invasions happen about once a week and right now they are effectively “unwinnable”. There are rumors that somewhere out there on an Eurpoean server, someone has actually won one of these. Without a doubt no one has ever won an invasion on Minda, but the Blades of DaTang are trying their asses off to be the first. What happens when you lose an invasion is that a random assortment of upgrades you have previously bought for your territory are rolled back. This could be a crafting machine dropping down a tier or your fort losing specific upgrades you have chosen. The further progressed your territory, the more upgrades you lose from an invasion which has a direct gold cost to the territory holder in order to upgrade the territory back to the levels it previously was before the invasion. For the players just trying to play the game… it may mean that once again the town you were crafting in becomes no longer viable for awhile.

Gearing

The Good

Gear drops in New World are extremely plentiful, and pending you manage to stay up on your quests you are going to be likely to find upgrades as you move up through the theirs of zones. It uses a Diablo style random stat system, which means most of what you find is going to be trash… but the sheer amount of loot that drops eventually lets you cherry pick some upgrades. Every ten levels or so a new set of gear shows up on the faction vendor that allows you to “catch up” if you managed to fall behind the curve in the zones you were questing in. Because so much loot drops, it is relatively cheap to pick up some upgrades from the player driven market place.

The Bad

However because so much loot drops… nothing is actually of any value when it comes to trying to make back your costs through selling things on the market board. The gear from the faction vendor requires tokens and an amount of cash… that is completely unrealistic given how cheap an equivalent item is on the market. It is rare that you are going to have to spend more than 5 gold per item for upgrades at lower levels, and the first tier of faction gear is a couple hundred per item. The real problem however is the “Item Snapshot” system, which starts when you hit level 60.

Similar to Destiny, the gear that drops increase slowly over time as you find higher level drops. Essentially each item slot has a snapshot for the highest level version of it you have found. In Destiny however you can juice the system and your “snapshot” is based on an average of the total gear you have currently equipped. In New World the only items that count are items that you have physically had drop for you either directly off a monster or from a loot box from one of the end game activities. This means that running a dungeon for example is going to reward awful gear for awhile after hitting 60 until you have slowly ground this snapshot up a bit. Crafted gear and gear bought from the Faction vendor do nothing to raise this snapshot meaning you are going to spend a lot of unfulfilling time grinding for drops that are useless before you start to get something good.

Dungeons

The Good

Dungeons in New World are extremely enjoyable and often times have repeatable quests leading into them, which makes them an excellent source of experience and gear. The Mechanics are simple enough to allow for a pug group to complete them successfully, but just challenging enough to keep from being boring. They also have a story associated with each of them, that is told through the notes found in the zone to help explain why this zone exists and who the people in it are that you are fighting. As far as drops go they are plentiful with a number of chests that give a lot of resources and bind on equip gear along with some very unique boss specific drops that are bind on pickup. They are fun enough that I am always down for running even the very lowest dungeon for folks that need it.

The Bad

The Dungeons are at a fixed level which means every drop that you can get will always be at that level and there is no scaling meaning you have a very short window when the encounters are actually viable. To make it worse running a Dungeon requires one of the players to spend a key. This is pretty easy when four different quest chains give you a key for Amrine, but more tricky when the later dungeons have a single free key that is consumed upon entering the dungeon. Crafting these keys requires you to have high level Stone-cutting abilities as well as farming a decent amount of rare materials. The keys themselves are bind on pickup, which means that you can’t even craft a key for someone else and trade it to them. Worse yet… the level 60 dungeons are constrained to the gear snapshot system which means that you need to run them in order to finish the story… but you are going to get absolutely useless drops when you do the first time.

The Story

The Good

The game has deeply atmospheric zone design and this hints that there are things happening behind the scenes. It feels like there is deep lore behind all of the factions you encounter and as you roam around what are very obviously failed colonization attempts from the past. There are a lot of strange things happening on this island and it allows your imagination to run wild.

The Bad

The narrative of New World is an afterthought. It is a game with some rich lore but no real overarching story to carry you through the game. Sure there are little tidbits here and there as you go through the quests, but there is nothing really telling me the larger story of the setting and why we are fighting for it other than that Azoth is important. The thing is I only know this because of the scattered journal pages that tell interesting anecdotes but not really a strong narrative. This is exactly the problem that Destiny had for so long and the key difference here is… I don’t feel as much desire to dig for this story as I did to understand what exactly was going on with the Hive. I am hoping eventually someone who cares about the story more than I do pieces it together into an epic 4 hour YouTube video like was done for Destiny. There are a lot of neat set pieces in this game, but no real story to speak of even though there is a main quest that leads you through the game.

A Deeply Fraught Game

There you have it. Reading my blog about New World has been a roller coaster in part because PLAYING New World has been a roller coaster. What you have is a game that is absolutely brilliant at times, and crushingly depressing in others. It is a game that tries to appeal to both PVPers and PVEers but isn’t quite PVP enough to satisfy those diehards and is just enough to scare off the committed “CareBears”. It is a game that doesn’t quite fit the expectations of any one group of players, but still offers enough there to make most of them at least somewhat happy… for a period of time. I both love New World and get endlessly frustrated at some of the decisions that were made during its creation.

It is a game that works under certain circumstances on a spreadsheet somewhere, but needs to change wildly in order to live up to its full potential. It is a game made up mostly of bugs that are held together by just enough connective tissue in the form of fun game play to keep us engaged. I know personally it has until November 19th, and then I am walking away from it for awhile because Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker launches. I am hoping in the time spent away from the game it improves because they have a lot of work ahead of them to get this into a state where it is the game it SHOULD be. There are moments of sheer brilliance here… and moments of facepalming hubris and idiocy.

All of this is why I have struggled to give you my readers a firm yes or no on whether you should be playing. All I really want is to get enough sixties together to start doing some of the big open world content and farming loot drops. We have three of us, but I am starting to doubt how many more are going to actually manage to make it through this gauntlet. I’ve come to love the server we play on, but this is a situation that spans far beyond any one server and is instead rooted in fundamental flaws in the games design. If these can be fixed and if they can start cranking out new content… I think maybe just maybe they can pull out of this generally frustrating launch.

Good Morning Friends! I cannot fully explain to you how freaking good it is to see Everfall in purple once more. Huge props to the folks who fought in the Everfall War and the defense of Restless Shores yesterday. Thanks to streamer Vellum670 I was able to get a front row seat for the battle, and also thanks to them I was able to see just how bad the hatchet exploits were. For those who don’t know there are a few glitches going on right now with the Hatchet, first off if you use Berserk it never actually falls off and just stays active permanently even if you swap weapons. The second problem is with the against all odds perk which increases your damage by 10% for every mob in range of you. This is a great perk, but the problem is that the stacks are never falling off and essentially over time of using the hatchet you are going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300% damage. You can check out this video to see the exploit in action, but right now… knowing it is a thing it seemed like most of the enemy team in both Everfall and Restless shores were using Hatchets for this reason.

You can also just watch the Twitch VOD of the War and you will see at many points the player taking single hits for each damage to kill them in one shot. At one point both Eliyon and I saw him take a single hit for around 22,000 damage and there is nothing that could withstand that. What is even more impressive however is that they managed to push back against this behavior and still win. For those who are not familiar with a War, you have 3 points that you need to capture outside of the fort which will give you access to the fort itself. After that you need to break down the doors and get a team inside that can stand on a point in the center of the fort and capture it. They managed all of this with about a minute left on the timer. On the flip side the same streamer participated in the defense of Restless Shores and through the hatchet exploit they burned through the teams on the three defensive points and Syndicate spent fifteen minutes standing on the point and defending it inside of the fort. There were several times I thought the battle was lost but they managed to push through.

It is odd how streamers have become almost the battle correspondents of this game, embedded with the troops and reporting back on the nonsense that they are seeing. I would love to see a VOD from the Marauder perspective on these wars and see specifically what that team was talking about. In truth I think it is a handful of bad actors, that often times are the folks most vehemently claiming there was no cheating taking place in public chat. It is my hope that this will eventually evolve into an honor system for battle on our server, with all three sides accepting proof of exploiting that will exclude these bad actors from future wars. However there is a serious lack of trust between the sides because everyone assumes everyone else is going to drop the nuke… so they bring their own nukes to the battlefield. I am pretty proud however what I have seen from the Syndicate side because it does not appear that our folks are blatantly using the same tactics.

My other big takeaway of the weekend is that apparently I actually do enjoy PVP in this game, or at least in the form of Outpost Rush. For those not familiar with the game mode, Outpost Rush is a weird love child of something like Alterac Valley in World of Warcraft and Summoners Rift in League of Legends. The end result is this sort of mixed PVE and PVP experience where you can fortify your base and summon monsters to fight on your side, but also can just rush the enemy and capture the points as fast as humanly possible then spawn camp the graveyard. The mechanic that seems to matter the most however is a spawn that shows up roughly ten minutes in to the match called Baroness Hain, which is a clear reference to the Baron from League. She grants the team a health regeneration and defensive buff and also freezes the enemy score for three minutes.

This freeze allows a team time to catch up, or to really snowball the score while the enemy team cannot effectively make progress. However what actually makes the mode great is that win or lose you get a stack of coins and a loot box with three items that are capable of bumping up your gear score snapshot. There are a bunch of weapons that are unique to Outpost Rush, and you can see me getting one of these a spear that I am currently using called Weedkiller. Generally speaking you get around 300 coins for playing the game mode with slightly more if you win, but not a large gap. The hardest part is usually getting the match started because it is currently limited to only players from our own server, but I can see at some point in the future them opening this queue up to be all of the players. The battles seem rather incestuous at the moment with the same forty players swapping back and forth between different combinations of teams.

The other big news for the weekend is that thanks to the buffer of coins that I was getting from Outpost rush, I became comfortable enough to actually buy a Tier 4 house. Given that I mostly withdrew my business from Everfall while it was Green, it got me spending a significant amount more time crafting up in Brightwood. I have to admit I have slowly fallen in love with the town and its easy access to the Northern unclaimed territories. My abode is rather humble at the moment, but I did the important things last night which was craft a set of four storage boxes and equip it with five trophies. I figure I will spend some time crafting items and placing them in my home so it can look a little less spartan. However now that I have done this… there is a big war taking place in a few days that might decide the fate of that territory. The Blades of DaTang seem to be more than capable of defending it however, and given what was experienced over the weekend I feel like they are going to come prepared for some shifty behavior.

The other big change of the weekend is that Covenant aka Yellow now has a territory. Ultimately I think this was a case of us being unprepared for what was about to unfold. Reports from those in the war indicated that the majority of the players fighting for Covenant were actually the Marauder battle hardened A Team. That means that maybe we didn’t stack the deck in quite the same way, and as a result the territory was lost. That said I am mostly okay with it. This means that Covenant now has a territory and quite honestly other than people just not liking the swamp… Weavers Fen is a pretty freaking great zone. It has among the best chest farming available in the game, and my hope is that more Covenant players will gravitate towards viewing it as their new home… which will make the fact that I have a house there useful. The Syndicate have Everfall as our capital city, The Marauders have Windsward, and I am hoping that maybe just maybe our Covenant will start to see Weavers Fen as the same making it a market hub.

Good Morning Friends! I spent quite a bit of time running around Edengrove yesterday and it is freaking gorgeous. So much of the island feels corrupted and sinister, and this is a whole other kind of dangerous. Think about the various Green Magic the Gathering cards about rampant growth and nature taking over in dangerous ways… and you have Edengrove. It is the bastion of the Angry Earth faction and there are so many different varieties of plants in this area. At first I got excited because I thought all of these were Ironwood trees… but alas they are just zone specific versions of Young and Mature trees.

I know I already talked about this before, but weapon experience is greatly increased after level 60. Proof of this is the in leveling to 60 I managed to finish off a single weapon and that was Sword. In the time since leveling to sixty last week I have finished off Great Axe, War Hammer, and as of last night Hatchet. I have switched over and am now working on Spear which is pretty enjoyable. I am not certain if or when I will ever level some of the ranged or magic weapons. Probably at some point I will start working on Life Staff since I had already gotten it to level 7 previously. Right now I have been able to just level weapons while doing content that is relevant to me, but for things like ranged I would probably need to drop down a bit until I picked up some abilities.

Earlier this week I talked a bit about the trading post and how everything was cheap… that may not be the case anymore and more the case of things just not being available for awhile. Yesterday with Patch 1.0.4 a really awful bug went into the game. Basically if you are offline, you will not get gold from anything that sold. There are some complete horror stories of folks posting high end chests, selling them, and then being short like 24k in gold. Right now this means I am dragging around with me anything that might be something I want to sell on the market. So my bags keep getting more full and I am hoping that they apply an emergency patch soon. This also means that folks are selling way more stuff in open chat than previously, which makes me realize that this game really needs a /Trade channel.

Last night I did my first zone invasion and it was super fun. It was more than a little hopeless especially given that we did not have a full group of 50 players available. People had been waiting all day long for Outpost Rush to open back up, and it did so roughly an hour before the zone invasion it opened up. That meant there were not a ton of folks available and I think we ran the invasion with 48 instead of 50. I am super interested in doing some more of this. I more or less blended into the crowd and given that I was placed in an area with a very clear objective I think I did okay. I was sword and hammer and spent most of my time as hammer for the stun and if things went really south I would swap to sword and taunt things. I probably need to get a carnelian in my hammer so I can properly tank with it.

For those curious, this is what a rewards box looks like from an invasion. We absolutely lost and died somewhere during the sixth wave. On wave five the doors were broken down and in wave six we had to mostly deal with everything on the inside. For about thirty minutes total it was well worth doing because there are few other things that reward 630 gold coins. The box of loot was blue quality and seemed to be capable of rolling higher based on snapshot. I ended up with I think some 505 boots that were not that useful to me, but it did bump my snapshot up a bit. The other rewards are pretty great as well with 350 Azoth mostly going wasted on me because I was already close to capped. At the end of the match it ranked players and I was 24th out of 48 which is firmly middle of the pack. Not bad enough to get kicked but also not good enough to really get noticed by anyone. I feel like that was reasonable performance for my first invasion.

I closed out my evening running faction missions in Reekwater because we were extremely close to flipping that zone. I am guessing with everyone doing Outpost Rush, no one was really paying much attention to the zones either. There was a swarm of purple players all running back and forth between the territory and objectives. I only really had time for five rounds of quests but I at least contributed a little bit to the total. Running faction quests doesn’t really FEEL like PVP since most of the time you don’t actually encounter much opposition. This feels more like clerical busywork associated with filing a declaration of war and I figure it is something that I can do to help out the faction as a whole if I am not doing anything terribly pressing. If they push to flip Everfall when I happen to be available, I am going to participate. The interesting thing about Everfall turning, is that it has introduced me more to Brightwood and I think in all honesty I would rather buy my third house there given that I am spending so much more time in the unheld territories of the North.