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.
Very nice, well thought out, detailed summary. The thing is, while I agree with virtually all of your “Good” points, almost everything you list as “Bad” I also would call “Good”. I specifically enjoy the lack of fast travel and long distances. Ihardly use the Azoth travel system at all, other than at the end of a session when I want to go somewhere to log out. Apart from that I happily go cross-country from Mourningdale to Monarchs Bluffs via Brightwood and come back through Everfall and Restless Shores just to do some quest hand-ins. The travel is the game because everything else I need to do happens as I go. I did the survey Amazon have up at the moment and described travel as “too fast” (along with levelling and skill increases – all too fast).
I like how you can’t be good with all weapons because of the stats requirements. The idea of one character beng great at everything is something I find offputting in any game. I wish they’d give us more character slots though, so we could make different characters for each weapon combo we wanted to specialize in.
On the topic of the Wars and Invasions, I hear people talk about them but so far I have never seen one. They all happen when I’m asleep. My faction only owns two territories, neither of which I plan on living in and neither of which I use for storage at the moment, so I have also never experienced the connected storage or its loss. What you never had you don’t miss. As for the loss of facilites following an Invasion and also the possible apathy of players in restoring them, It would be a problem later on if no towns at all had higher level crafting stations but so long as someone does I’m more than happy to travel to use them.
None of the main gamestopping bugs has affected me yet – I haven’t even seen one in action. The hatchet bug is currently making my character crazily powerful bacause hatchet is the only weapon I’ve used for about 30 levels. It’s fun while it lasts but I was happy with the hatchet before. The bug that I’ve most disliked was the map bug that meant quest markers vanished but that seems to have been fixed. The one that doesn’t give you any option when you die other than to go to the town where you’re bound to the Inn is annoying, too. Honestly, though, I’ve seen worse in other mmorpgs at this stage, specifically Vanguard and GW2, which just happen to be two of my top-five mmorpgs of all time, so I may be operating with different expectations to most people!
All in all I’m more than satisfied. My main concern is that Amazon will react to the feedback I’m imagining they’re getting by making the game much more of a theme-park, video-game experience. Currently its refreshingly ramshackle and make-do-and-mend, which is just how I like my mmorpgs. It won’t last, sadly, so I’m enjoying it before they smooth off the rough edges and turn into a bland version of itself.
I’m pushing 52 and fully intend to push to 60, so I’d be happy to join the groups you want to put together… but I’m playing mage, so I’m completely broken right now 🙁 I’m using a rapier right now so as to still make use of my INT stat, at least. And my light attacks work from my magic weapons, at least, and do pretty good damage so I’m not completely useless.
I’ll keep pushing to 60 though, and hopefully my abilities will be fixed by the time I get there.
Kinda reminds me of Dark Age of Camelot, a game I started for PvE and ended up enjoying PvPvP. It eventually transformed from an open world realm vs realm to an instanced forever war that people could just teleport to without usually entailing invasions into another realm’s PvE zones.