Friends, I think I might be winding down my playtime of New World again. In my time playing the game I feel like I maybe understand what is wrong with the experience. Sure there are technical hurdles like the fact that the game was designed to be played like Ark on rented servers, but instead sold itself as an MMORPG. However, the core flaw that cannot be easily fixed is that the game feels progressively worse the longer you play it. For the first few dozen levels, everything feels fresh and new. It feels as though literally anything in the game is rewarding and just running around and clearing out towns gives you meaningful rewards. This changes as you start narrowing the scope of what exactly you need to be gaining anything feeling like meaningful progress.
Crafting in the early game feels phenomenal. You can walk outside of town and find a bounty of resources at your disposal to craft until your heart is content. However, once you move into the higher tiers of materials you put yourself in contention for the same resources that everyone else playing the game on your server is hungrily seeking. Sure there was what felt like an Iron shortage, but every single zone has two or three good Iron routes and if one is being farmed down, you can move over to a new area that is in less contention. When you get to Starmetal, Orichalcum, and Ironwood… there are literally two or three good routes in the entire game all of which are heavily farmed.
This leads me to the last week or two of my life as I have run a route in Brightwood that takes me past four spawn points for Ironwood, four spawn points for Orichalcum, and a couple of different spawns for Wyrdwood. I don’t really mention Wyrdwood as being a resource in heavy contention because if you are desperate enough there are ways to get an infinite amount of it by just farming mobs that can be harvested for it. A pack full of 3000 Ironwood or so, would end up netting me a half dozen skill raises, which is the byproduct of farming for hours. The problem is while doing the loop I was regularly in contention with four or five other players, hoping to arrive at exactly the right time for the “big nodes” to be respawning giving me the maximum yield for my harvest.
A had a few goals coming back to New World, and most of them were crafting-related. I wanted to push up my armoring skill and craft a full set of Voidbent Armor. This was accomplished and gave me a good suit of gear to run around and cause trouble in. The next was to push up my engineering to 200 and be able to craft at least one level 600 weapon, namely the hatchet. My last few weeks grinding away on the Ironwood trade, paid off yesterday allowing me to craft the Axe of the Abyss. Now unfortunately I am not sure what is left for me to do. I like a good grind but the grind has to be within reasonable reach, and as I survey my options I am not seeing one of those.
When I left New World my Furnishing was sitting at level 121 after a copious amount of grinding. This in theory would be my next target but it does not really seem terribly reasonable. There is a website that keeps a fairly accurate count on what it would take in resources to level crafting, and a suggestion of the cheapest path to get there. When I plugged in getting from 121 Furnishing to 200 it returned this. Pending that I had no resources saved up going into this, it would cost me something in the neighborhood of 88,000 gold to level this to 200. I have no interest in purchasing or farming 45,000 Pure Solvent, which only drops from a handful of level 55+ camps in the entire game.
What felt amazing at low levels just kept feeling worse as you climbed the crafting tiers. It would not be so bad if you were just contending for those high-level resources, but that is not the case. You still have to spend countless hours to grind your way up from the lowest level resource which is used in the crafting process of each additional tier. If my math is correct getting a single Ironwood Plank takes:
- 8 Ironwood
- 12 Wyrdwood
- 16 Aged Wood
- 64 Green Wood
- 7 Sandpaper
All of those resources are reasonable enough to farm, but that sandpaper requires just going out into the world and roaming around looting boxes. Beyond that, it requires you to be lucky that the reagent that you get is the one that you actually need. If it is not the one you need… then you have to grind faction tokens in order to buy converters to switch it into the reagent that is useful to you at a significant loss in quantity during the conversion. So when I look at the nonsense required to level Weaponsmithing, the other trade that I would find useful… it is again a big freaking no. Either I farm up almost 70,000 flux or I shell out roughly 246,000 gold in order to pay my way to level 200.
Farming resources are now enjoyable honestly because you end up walking away with a big stack of aptitude caches. However, they recently nerfed the number of materials that return from each cache, so again… lowering the amount of fun and increasing the amount of grind. I just don’t feel like the team that is working on this game understands what would make their game fun to play. They continue to double down on PVP as a focus, making me lose more interest in the game as a whole. They made a significant number of quality of life improvements, but I also feel there is a flawed core to the game experience once you reach the endgame.
The only other goal that I really have left is that I would still like to be able to say that I got my expertise up to 600. However, I can do that by playing for about fifteen minutes each day and earning a few very easy gypsum orbs. I think for the time being that is probably going to be my interaction with New World. The other track for expertise is grinding dungeons, which everyone seems to be doing. The end result is there is a flood of less than perfect level 600 orange weapons on the market board going for as low as 500 gold. I now have most of my slots filled with cheap cast-off weapons, and I really don’t see any point in attempting to get “good rolls” until I have maxed out that expertise score. If I could coax a regular group of four other players into having a dungeon night I would be game, but I am not going to subject myself to the generally awful community when I know everything I get will be disposable.
I’m probably missing the finer nuances (never having played New World) but the part about the Sandpaper reminded me of Ascended Armor Crafting in Guild Wars 2. If I had most of the mats and was just missing a bit of Elonian Leather or the cloth thing (forgot the name) because I needed 2-3 of them for my Heavy Armor… I started opening my assortment of Ascended Crafting material boxes I had accumulated until I had enough of what I needed, and of course then I always got the wrong ones and had 10 more Deldrimor Steel. Maybe the difference is that I have access to that stash of boxes (from doing login rewards for months) and/or I could have bought them on the AH instead of habing to strictly grind them? Are these Sandpaper item Bind on Pickup?
Elonian Leather is actually a good point of reference. So imagine that ALL tiers of crafting work like Elonian Leather in that they require all of the previous tiers to go into them. The Ironwood Planks that I used as a reference would be something more akin to Elder Wood Planks, not the true “endgame” material. So instead of needing 20 to 50 maximum to craft whatever you need, you need something more like making 10,000 Elonian Leather. The equivalent of sandpaper is something more akin to Thermoclastic Reagent which you would just buy off the vendor for 1.49 silver each. However there are no real vendors in all of New World and everything is player-to-player trade, as a result, the price of the reagents fluctuates wildly. I just hopped on and check market prices for the highest tier of crafting reagents right now.
sandpaper – .83 gold per
tannin – .59 gold per
flux – 3.05 gold per
weave – .64 gold per
solvent – .75 gold per
Like I said these are gained organically through looting treasure chests out in the world, and since they nerfed a lot of the outdoor farms… there is nowhere near the number entering the economy that there once was driving the prices up. There is a higher their of crafting resources that are time gated that are the equivalent of Elonian Leather/Deldrimor Ingots and in order to craft legendary items you also have to farm specific components that drop from bosses (or buy them from the AH). So the example I gave was just for bog standard run of the mill leveling crafting, not some sort of endgame crafting.
Ah, so I went astray when I thought you were talking about ‘endgame crafts’ and not EVERY craft, thanks for the explanation!
I may sound like a fanboy here, but after experiencing GW2’s “instanced” gathering system, I don’t ever want to go back to competing for resources. There is nothing fun about fighting your way to a resource node only to have some chucklehead or bot swing by and “steal” it. Nor, at least for me, is there much intrinsic fun in playing the auction house for profit or cornering the market on unobtanium.