New World Has Improved Significantly

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I ticked something off my New World bucket list, and bankrupted myself in the process… but that is beside the point. I finished leveling Armoring to 200 and with it utilized the resources I had been gathering to craft a full set of item level 600 Voidbent armor. This is by no means the best and most optimal gear available in the game, but it is also the only gear that can be crafted at 600 by default without requiring you to have a full set of armoring gear and three armoring trophies to get that item level up there. It serves as a great option for tanking and also has a ton of luck on it, and I am already noticing a difference in the items I get as a result. While it cost me roughly 45,000 gold to finish leveling armoring and craft this, I consider it well worth it since on the open market each of the individual pieces goes for around 20,000 gold. Now that I have gone through this process I can now also craft it for anyone that provides me with the materials which is a side bonus.

I’ve been an extremely harsh critic of New World because quite honestly the game broke my heart. I was an alpha and later beta tester of the game, and I saw how much potential it had. Then I watched as it was mismanaged at every step throughout the launch with some exceptionally short-sighted decisions made along the way. I’ve written my concerns out many times through that process and have effectively been gone from the game for five months. We are now in a state where essentially the vast majority of PVE players have left, and the only folks remaining are the PVP diehards. However, after a few days back, I have to give credit where credit is due and tell you all that the game has made some pretty significant improvements.

One of the core problems remaining however is that the game has done a pretty awful job of actually telling players about them. Prior to sitting down to write this post I crawled through the patch notes and found no mention of the features I am going to talk about today. One would think that it would deeply benefit this team and the game that they represent if there were a running log of improvements since launch, or at least having them featured at all in the patch notes. The notes seem entirely focused on bug fixes and are hopelessly vague, completely missing any of the huge quality of life changes. So in this morning’s post, I am going to do my best to talk about some of the things I have personally experienced in the last few days.

Significant Fast Travel Improvements

Since the launch of the game traveling around the map quickly has required an expenditure of Azoth, a currency accrued and used in several different ways. The cost of azoth required for the teleport had multiple different calculations that scaled its costs including the distance of the teleport and the weight of your current character. The end result was that if you were at all heavily loaded down you could burn through literally ALL of your azoth in a single teleport. This also meant that you spent most of your time running around the map instead of actually doing the things that you wanted to. Folks used to use azoth vials like a fiend in order to fund their adventuring… which drove the price of those up to around 200-300 gold each.

Unfortunately, the azoth vial market has crashed, due to the fact that teleports are ridiculously cheap now. All teleport as far as I can tell regardless of distance or your carry weight is a flat fee of 20 azoth. You can get back twenty azoth trivially by killing a few mobs, harvesting a few nodes, etc. This means you are likely going to be near permanently capped at 1000 azoth, which leaves the only quality of life that I would love to see as a way to disable the “near cap” warning. I cannot fully explain how much this one change has improved the game for me because I no longer feel quite as chained to a specific location as I was previously. Additionally, house placement no longer needs to be near as strategic as it once was.

No Cost to Access Remote Storage

The Storage Shed was an interesting method of physically located storage, but it caused a lot of problems. Originally the design was to incentivize conquering adjacent territory but allowing players to transfer items between storage chests for territories that their faction held. In practice for any player that was not directly involved in the PVP nonsense, this felt awful, and as a result, was yet one more thing completely out of their control. Even if you happened to hold adjacent territories, the cost of gold required to transfer a stack of items became exceptionally cost prohibitive. The end result is that every player tried to build out as much storage in a single location, and the limited most of their activity to that one hub, causing Windsward, Everfall, and to a lesser extent Brightwood to be the ONLY viable crafting hubs… making all other territories feel empty.

This next change is massive, but you can store items in any storage chest and withdraw or despot freely from any other storage chest. If you are in Ebonscale Reach and need to pull a potion from your storage in First Light, you can do so easily and without cost. This means that every single player in the game now has increased their total storage footprint by massive amounts, making everything in the game feel so much less stressful. That is not even a complaint that I really dove into, but I felt like I was constantly having to micromanage my storage which made any sort of large crafting project feel cumbersome bordering on impossible. Now I am utilizing currently empty banks for bulk storage of resources so that I can batch craft my way to push up some of my other trade skills leisurely.

The other side effect of this change is that it more or less means that every single territory is now viable. Folks can spread out a bit and craft wherever they happen to be rather than relying entirely on one of three towns. This makes the world as a whole feel way more alive because between this and the fast travel changes, folks can move around more freely without feeling like they are giving up something significant. This also means that for purely PVE players… the whole territory conquest game has little to no impact on them anymore. You are no longer greatly limited by the faction you belong to.

Out of Combat Regeneration

This one is another massive quality of life improvement, but previously in the game, I used to constantly consume food in order to lower my downtime. It was the only really reliable means of healing back quickly after combat in order to prepare for the next encounter. Now when you are out of combat ability is triggered called “peaceful regeneration” which quickly heals back all of the damage that you have been dealt. Additionally, I noticed that my survival as a whole when it comes to higher-level encounters seems to be better. I am uncertain what other changes might be factoring into this, but I can happily clear camps in higher-level non-elite areas and farm resource chests again to try and get materials needed for crafting.

Easier Access to Dungeon Keys

I still feel like the whole dungeon key concept is bad, but it feels like they are married to it. Previously it was ungodly resource heavy to craft any of the higher tier keys. This led folks to have 2000 gold or higher buy-in in order to get into a group running a dungeon. This felt awful and while I believe some of the crafting requirements for keys have lessened a bit, the bigger improvement is that you can now purchase these keys on your faction vendor. The keys are around 500 gold, which sounds like a lot… but I have also noticed that in general the amount of gold that I am making has significantly increased. Just running around and killing stuff in the world netted me almost 2000 gold last night, and I was not purposefully farming anything of significance.

I’ve also heard rumor that all of the open world camps that had been broken with patch 1.1 are now viable again, but no one seems to be running them due to the ease of access to dungeon keys. For whatever reason, the New World team really wants folks to be running dungeons and has heavily incentivized them by flooding you with loot. Given that I am playing by myself I do not have a team to actually go test this theory out about the open world camps. The community is doing what all communities do… and optimizing the highest chance of getting drops which seems to occur in dungeons. Maybe if I stick around long enough I will try to pug tank again.

Expertise System

I still think that the Expertise and Item Snapshot system is a bad design. However, with the addition of the Gypsum Orb system, it has become pretty easy to get multiple guaranteed improvements each day. You can purchase an Orb from your faction vendor for tokens, you can get 3 special loot bags a day which gives you diamond gypsum, harvesting resources gives you emerald gypsum, and if you participate in two Outpost Rush per day it is trivial to get ruby gypsum. In an hour or so of game time, you can pretty easily get four item slots daily upgrades. The items that you get are not great, which means you are still going to need to be farming up equipment in another fashion. However, getting your expertise up does manage to open up other avenues like purchasing gear on the market board.

Outpost Rush From Anywhere

Outpost Rush was an interesting game mode option, but ultimately AGS made it less than viable. The problem was that you had to queue up for the game from a town, namely your faction merchant, which lead to players just not queueing up very often. It was really hard to go do anything in the world, yet need to be back in a town to queue up again after the match finished. This has thankfully been improved and you can join a match from anywhere in the world by opening up the game menu and choosing modes. I am guessing this is also where the 2v2 and 3v3 duel modes will eventually be added as well. Win or lose you end up getting some Umbral Shards and Ruby Gypsum so this makes the process way more viable. I’ve not really talked about Umbral Shards yet but that is a currency used to upgrade gear from 590 to 625, and obtained through “endgame” activities.

[Edit] – If you get rolled hard… you can absolutely get zero rewards still. This is a massive problem and needs to be fixed. So essentially undo anything I said about being a good source of Umbral Shards or Expertise because it is unreliable. PVP has to be rewarding win or lose to pull players like me who don’t really like PVP into the equation. Basically one loss over lunch and walking away with nothing but my time wasted, means I am never going to queue for it again until there are significant changes in the rewards structure. I PVP in Guild Wars 2 because I know regardless of my success it is going to be worth my time spent.

Easier Access to Unobtainium

I specifically called out that one of the core problems with the game previously was that there were a number of chase resources that were exceptionally difficult to get. This led to overfarming of resources in the vague chance of getting the one item that was useful… and more or less throwing away the bulk of the product or flooding the market with it cheaply. I specifically compared this to the scene in Willy Wonka where Veruca Salt is surrounded by workers unwrapping chocolate bars as fast as they can looking for the golden ticket and then throwing all of that chocolate away. There was never enough of these high-end resources to make crafting with them viable.

Since I last played they put in a system called “Aptitude” which kicks in when you max out your skill to level 200. Every third of a level bar gained after that point earns you a cache of materials. The above screenshot is an example of a cache that I opened for mining, and I got both Cinnabar and Tolvium, the materials required to craft higher rarity items as well as a few other baubles that might be useful. Not pictured is the fact that I got around 200 gold for opening the cache as well, which leads to a constant flow of coins for those who are harvesting regularly. This has balanced the market for high-end materials and is in part what lead me to be able to craft my Voidbent armor set from the top of this post. The first of these caches that you earn per day rewards you with an Emerald Gypsum, which feeds in to the Gypsum Orb unlock system as well.

Ammunition No Longer Required

This is a weird one but I just found out about it last night. You are no longer required to use ammunition when using Bows, Muskets, or the newly added Blunderbuss. This was honestly one of the parts that made using these weapons awful is that it required you to constantly be either crafting more ammo or buying it at a pretty hefty loss on the market. They changed completely what ammunition does, and now it simply adds bonus damage to your weapons instead of being required to use them. This means that you can carry around a stack for specific fights, but also if you run out it isn’t the end of the world. For farming materials or questing, you can run around without ammo and be just fine. I wish I had known about this before burning through my first stack of ammunition leveling Blunderbuss.

Improvements Across the Board

The thing is not a single one of these on their own is significant to make the game feel better, but taken collectively… it feels like maybe the game has a chance. What worries me though is that MMORPG players tend to be a fickle lot, myself included. Once we get a bad taste in our mouth about a specific game, it is exceptionally hard to turn the tide and convince people to give it another shot. I still am not entirely certain what lead me to install New World and give it another chance. I am thankful that I did because the game really has improved significantly. The only thing that really needs to happen now is to have an influx of PVE players drown out the edgelord PVP community that has remained. I am not sure that is going to happen, however.

I have hope for the first time in six months about this game. I think maybe the team at Amazon Game Studios has learned some hard-fought lessons and has backed away from some legitimately bad decisions made along the way. I hope they can pull it off and I hope that players are willing to give the game a second chance. I will say that if the state in which the game is today, was the game at release… we might be having entirely different conversations about New World in general. I still think it has a lot of problems, but the game feels way less openly antagonistic towards its players. If you have the game you might give it a reinstall and check out the things that have changed. I am glad that I did.

A Brand New Jade Mech

Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.

As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.

In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.

In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.

In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.

Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.

Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.

Kickstarter Guesstimates

Good Morning Friends! I am about to take you down a rabbit hole, because yesterday without really meaning to… I absolutely dug one. I am not exactly sure what causes my brain to travel the pathways it does, but like so many things in my life, it started out simple enough.

I had seen some news scroll across my feed about Ashes of Creation and I logged into Kickstarter to try and remember during what phase of testing I would be getting access. For those who are curious, we are in Alpha 1 still and have Alpha 2 and two phases of closed beta before I get access. Granted I knew I was backing a slow-moving horse when I chipped money in to fund this project, but what I did not remember is that every single project has an estimated delivery date associated with it. These are wildly inaccurate, but it planted a seed in my brain as to exactly HOW wildly inaccurate they were.

This of course led to me pulling a google sheet, logging the projected dates for all twenty-five software projects that I have backed since the launch of Kickstarter. After that, I spent the next hour googling to find release dates that map up to each product giving me the above table. I guess I should talk a bit about my methodology because I was trying to keep things simple I logged the month and year for each project and then did some “datediff” math to figure out how many months late a given project was when it released. There were a few projects that have never been released, and for those, I have currently plugged in June 2022 even though I know it is equally wildly inaccurate. Of those projects, one had an updated release date so I used that instead. I get that my methodology is not perfect but this is just to create some general trends that we can talk about.

Abandonware

Riding the way of “pretty Minecraft” games was TUG, an open-world survival builder MMORPG by Nerd Kingdom. TUG stood for The Untitled Game, and honestly, it looked really interesting to me because at the time it was trying to do something that nobody had really pulled off. In the years to follow the launch of this project, however, it has been done over and over again and pulled off successfully. To date, this project is 89 months late based on the original estimate, and the last update to the Kickstarter was in March of 2017. We know this is a dead project but no one has been willing likely for legal reasons to actually just come out and say it. In the comments, you can even see someone going as far as trying to start a class action lawsuit against the company. I gambled some money and I lost, and I am largely okay with that.

Best In Class

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mages of Mystralia from Borealys Games that not only met the original Kickstarter delivery estimate but beat it by one month. Granted this is maybe not the fairest example because before the Kickstarter launched, I had already played a very polished demo of the game at Pax South. However, I feel like they need to get credit here for beating the Kickstarter estimation game and actually being able to deliver on a project ahead of time. I also feel like we need to give credit to the mobile game Cockatilt and The Wonderful 101 Remastered which were both released within a month of the original estimate which would simply account for the natural shift in a schedule.

The Worst Offenders

Of the games that have actually been released, the worst offender in the delay is Crowfall. This is not shocking given that MMORPGs notoriously take about twice as long to produce as the original estimates. By the time Crowfall was officially released in 2021 it was 55 months later than the first estimate, so just over 4 and a half years late. Granted there is part of me that would prefer that the game still is in testing so that maybe it could turn into a game that I was actually interested in playing. It was a game with some interesting concepts that coalesced into something that I was wholly uninterested in and I am not sure I have logged into the final released version. That is part of the risk of backing a project that is only funded on some pretty prose and a few bits of concept art.

The Full List

I realize that I posted an image of a spreadsheet, but for sake of those with “old eyes” like myself, I am going to actually share the information in text form. Here is the full list of the twenty-five projects I have backed throughout the years sorted ascending based on “months late”. If you are so inclined I have shared the raw spreadsheet here.

  • Mages of Mystralia – 1 Month Early
  • Cockatilt – 1 Month Late
  • The Wonderful 101: Remastered – 1 Month Late
  • Ravaged – 3 Months Late
  • Warmachine Tactics – 3 Months Late
  • Hamsterdam – 5 Months Late
  • Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance – 5 Months Late – Projected Release Date
  • TemTem – 6 Months Late
  • Sunless Skies – 8 Months Late
  • Wasteland 2 – 9 Months Late
  • Divinity: Original Sin 2 – 9 Months Late
  • Amplitude – 10 Months Late
  • Battle Chasers: Nightwar – 10 Months Late
  • Battletech – 11 Months Late
  • Dead State – 12 Months Late
  • Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey – 19 Months Late
  • InSomnia the Ark – 22 Months Late
  • Boyfriend Dungeon – 25 Months Late
  • Torment: Tides of Numenera – 26 Months Late
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 27 Months Late
  • HEX TCG MMO – 30 Months Late – Now Defunct but did release
  • Ashes of Creation – 42 Months Late so far – No Release Date
  • Crowfall – 55 Months Late
  • Curse of the Deadwood – 66 Months Late – No Release Date
  • TUG – 89 Months Late – No Release DateNo Updates since 2017

The Kickstarter Gamble

I think one of the challenges with Kickstarter is the interface and the way that the project pages are designed to make it seem like you are purchasing a product. In actuality, you are gambling on an idea that someone out there has, and hoping that maybe just maybe it comes to fruition. You are investing in the future of a product, and like with all investments… sometimes things go off the rails completely and you lose all of your money. For the most part, I have done pretty well thus far with my video game Kickstarter, though the long-tailed nature of them has led me to plunk my money on the line far less often than I did in those heady early days.

The first project I ever funded was Wasteland 2 in 2012, and the last project that I funded was Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance in 2022. The last one I am not even sure I am that interested in the game, but wanting to help support more Fallen London nonsense to exist in the world because it is a phenomenal setting. Granted my sample size is small with only twenty-five games backed over a ten-year span, but there is definitely a trend toward games coming in late. Given that the average on my list was just shy of twenty months late, and the median was ten months late… you really need to take that estimated delivery date as the complete nonsense that it really is. If you are backing a Kickstarter you are gambling on the future of a franchise and the hope that maybe just maybe someday you will get to play it.

Does this impact my likelihood to back a game on Kickstarter? Somewhat to be honest, but I had already reached that conclusion before looking at the data. The types of Kickstarters that I now back are less about me wanting the product and more about me wanting to help support and fund the product. For example, I thought Boyfriend Dungeon was a worthy cause and was a game that should exist in the world, and even though I have yet to play it… I was more than happy to plunk some money on the line knowing at some point I would walk away with a discount copy of the game. Other games like Crowfall or Ashes of Creation were essentially just me getting a cheap copy of the game and a space in line for the alpha/beta process if they turned out to be phenomenal. There are folks who have an ax to grind with how inaccurate these estimates end up being, but I am not one of them. I just abused it for a blog post.

Revisiting New World

Good Morning Friends. I regret to inform you that there is no Mixtape Monday this week because I have not felt like fiddling with them over the weekend. I have two that are in progress but neither of them is really ready for primetime. I am playing the “is it allergies or is it covid” game right now as I had to attend high school graduation on Friday and just based on the statistics, more than one person in that crowd was a carrier. However, at the same time, the cottonwood is in full bloom which I am deathly allergic to, so more than likely… it is just allergies given a “general awful feeling” and “lethargy” are my only real symptoms so far. Aligning to my already strange mental state, I apparently booted up New World over the weekend and spent a little bit of time roaming around it.

My Character now apparently lives on Valhalla and I am not sure how many merges have taken place between our origins on Minda and the first merge with Frislandia. Whatever the case it appears that team purple is outgunned, though last night they did manage to take Everfall. In truth, a sequence of changes has more or less made it that I no longer give a shit about the faction balance. At some point the costs of teleports were reduced significantly, and also no longer take your inventory into account so if you are so inclined you can bop around the map at will. The other significant quality of life improvement that I noticed was the fact that there is now “peaceful regeneration” which turns on quick life recovery any time you are out of combat. I would say MOST of the food that I went through was trying to regenerate my health so I could get back into the action, and now there is just a buff that does that for me.

As far as combat in general, as heavy armor, sword, and shield tank… I feel much sturdier than I was previously. I need to do some more tests here but I spent a bit of time running around in Edengrove and fared far better than previously against everything there. I was also able to easily take single pull elites in Shattered Mountain and even managed a few two pulls. Like I said I need to get out into the world and try a few of my haunts that I was clearing regularly when the hatchet bug was in place, to determine just how viable open-world farming is again. If nothing else it was fun to do a good number of the lower level towers in Edengrove for materials.

I made a quick visit to Adjorjan and he still appears to be dropping decent stuff, though I am not sure what level of watermark he is capable of dropping. I only stuck around for a single kill but I got a purple bow around 550, but also did not get a watermark upgrade from him because there is now an animation that plays when that happens. As far as watermarking there seem to be a few reasonable ways to get daily progress namely in the way of bags that drop containing diamond gypsum. The other big change I noticed is that the bottom has fallen out in some of the rare materials. When I last played Void Ore which is a rare drop from Orichalcum, was selling in the neighborhood of 10k gold each. I just bought five of them on buy orders for 150 gold each. Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the skill level required to make a full set of Voidbent armor, but I had contemplated trying to convert my cash stockpiles into armoring levels.

The community seems to be hopping in spite of being MUCH smaller than it was and seemingly gone is the era of the “2k buy in” for a group. I am not entirely certain what quality of life changes lead to this but so far the game seems to be much more playable than it was when I last left. I doubt I will be spending a ton of time in the game, and the crafting system in its current state still feels awful… but maybe just maybe it has found its niche and can slowly start moving the needle in the positive direction. New World was a really fun game up until the point it abruptly stopped being fun, so a few tweaks here or there might be enough to save it. I will of course let you know if I continue to play from time to time and how that process is going.