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.