House in Monarch’s Bluffs

I’ve written a few different posts about New World already, but last night I finally decided which town to buy a house in and ultimately made the purchase of one of the 2000 gold offerings. I have been splitting most of my time between Monarch’s Bluffs the zone that I started in and Everfall a zone nearby. Monarch’s Bluffs has this whole pirate shanty town vibe which I dig heavily, and Everfall largely reminds me of Westfall from World of Warcraft. The key deciding point however between the two is the fact that the company that owns Everfall has cranked up the tax rates to the maximums and the company that owns Monarch’s Bluffs has lowered them to the minimums. This means that my weekly housing tax is only going to be around 50 gold, which seems like a really good incentive to get players to use your town as their primary hub.

I crafted some very basic items and now have a bed and end-table and a pantry sort of thing. I’ve always picked up various random items out in the world including the two windchimes that I have out on the porch area. That is ultimately why I chose the house that I did, because it had a really large deck area that seems to be a place where you can build on. Additionally it was beside the trading hall, near the walkway up to the town project board and my faction vendor, and near the crafting machines. Seems fairly ideally placed. The housing controls are fairly rudimentary, but I would take basic housing over no housing.

Fast travel does exist in the game, and you can travel to your house I believe once per day, though having just purchased this I am uncertain of what exactly the cooldown is. You can bind an an inn and travel to the inn once per hour. So right now my theory is I can have a house in Monarch’s Bluffs and get to it quickly and bind in the inn at Everfall so I can move between those two areas rapidly. That said it isn’t really a long run between them anyway which is ultimately what I have been doing thusfar. There is also fast travel to any hub, but that consumes Azoth which is currently a relatively limited resource.

Another thing that I did this weekend was roll an alt on another server instance. Largely since my friends lean heavily towards team purple, I wanted to be able to see what the gear and such for that faction looked like. So I created a new character and leveled it up to the point of being able to make a faction choice. I decided to go with Two Handed Hammer this time and went for the more defensive of the two paths. It is really fun and actually makes the game feel a little bit like playing a great sword in Monster Hunter.

The furthest I have made it into the game is Weaver’s Fen, which is a swamp area also held by the same company that holds Monarch’s Bluffs. This is in theory the place you need to go for oil, which seems to be the resource in the game right now that is in the highest contention. I am hoping that they add oil to other areas, because right now every single node I have found is effectively camped. It seems to have a 15 minute respawn and I have managed to get to one of these spawns before anyone else did. Unfortunately this negatively gates the crafting system, because you cannot craft steel without oil. So I am hoping as they move further into the production cycle they fix this slight problem and make it a little more prevalent.

I also spent a little bit of time trying to do some of the corrupted content. This seems to be where the group content lives in the game, because I absolutely should have come in with a group. As far as I can tell you have a corruption resistance that ticks down while you are in the rift. When it ticks to zero you take a chunk of damage and get another 60 resistance. So if you want to stay in for long you are going to need some form of reasonable healing, or maybe you can buff your resistance with items. I am not entirely certain how this works, but it would be interesting to go there with an actual group and figure it out.

For now however I am mostly just poking around and enjoying myself. I am however going to be a bit sad when the event ends later this week. I’ve been playing pretty much nothing but New World and according to steam have played 54 hours with 40 of those taking place in the current test. I wish I had more permanent access to the game, like being part of the testing group. Alas however that is not a thing that ever happened and I will have to wait for the next more public test. Maybe we will get lucky and closed beta will start immediately following this preview. Regardless… I am absolutely hooked and looking forward to whenever this launches.