Signs are starting to point to it being the time to dust off those copies of New World and return. At the tail end of August, the New World team released a list of things that would be coming in the Brimstone Sands update to the game, and now that update is available on the public test realm. Last night I spent a few hours roaming around the updated new player experience and found it all shockingly improved. From the moment you start the tutorial, there are a lot of things that have changed. For starters, you are no longer fighting generic drowners, but instead corrupted mobs. There are some much upgraded visual indicators of what you should be going to next, and once you land on the beach… almost everything has been revitalized.
An immediate staggering example is a fact that gone are the generic shipwrecks that all looked interchangeable. Instead, each of the four ships you visit during those first few quests has its own look and feel. This one for example has been damaged by corruption, but there is also one that looks like it was attacked by the Angry Earth, though none of them are present. That ship is filled with boars, reminiscent of Edengrove, and gives a bit of flavor of what happens when nature takes over. Most of this is cosmetic, but what is completely new is the fact that Isabella is introduced and is whispering to you through corruption very similar to the Old Gods of World of Warcraft. This ties up so many loose ends as to what exactly happened when Thorpe blasted us with that bolt of corruption in the tutorial and introduces players to Isabella rather than having her pop out of the woodwork later on.
There seem to be a number of “quality of life” improvements as well. For example, there are stray weapons laying all around those early shipwrecks giving you quick access to seemingly every weapon. The Greatsword for example is brand new to this patch, but I found one laying on the beach ready for me to use. The weapons themselves have a slight glow to them in order to make them easier to see for new players. This is huge honestly because previously it could take a dozen or so levels before you would find one of the weapons you were wanting to use as your primary. This whole setup reminded me quite a bit of Coldharbour in Elder Scrolls Online and the room that effectively had one of every weapon type ready for the player to pick up.
Then there is Monarch’s Bluff, which is no longer a ramshackle town and is instead a properly fortified outpost. This change alone is staggering, and instead of generic conquistador types… this town is following the Arthurian story that they added into the game since the release of the game. Supposedly Everfall has also had a significant facelift, and more towns are planned for future patches. The goal is apparently to make each town look truly unique and have its own merits rather than just the central location. This plays into other “quality of life” changes they have made since the release of the game like making the cost of fast travel largely inconsequential and opening access to storage in every town freely from any other town.
I’ve been poking my head back into the game periodically off and on since release, but it had largely fallen out of focus with my time spent in Path of Exile. I have to give credit to YouTuber Demone Kim for releasing a series of videos about the changes. In the video linked above, he does a naked run to Brimstone Sands and the capital city specifically. It looks straight out of Assassin’s Creed Origins/Odyssey and seems to be massive in scale. I spent most of last night playing around with the new weapon, the Greatsword which feels very much like Cloud’s Buster sword so far. You can spec into a tanky tree or a DPS tree, so it will be adding new tanking options to the game which is great. I feel similarly they probably now need to work on some more healing options because right now it feels like Lifestaff is the only truly viable endgame option.
We started talking about it last night among the AggroChat crew and might consider picking a server and starting over from scratch. The new player experience is different enough to warrant this. Yeah, it would suck to lose all of the progress I had made on my main character on Valhalla, but it seems like a lot of the leveling processes are way more forgiving. I was gaining harvest levels at lightning speed last night while picking up random things. Additionally, it felt like the loot was considerably more generous when it came to crafting reagents as well. At some point in the past, they flattened the reagents so that there is only one kind of sandpaper, flux, or thread… etc. So from the first minutes on the beach, you are getting materials that will serve you later in the game.
The more I think about it, the more I think I am going to start from scratch again. I don’t know the release date yet, but since it is up on the PTR currently I would assume it is “soon”.
Had the game released like this, it might have had more staying power for me. As it is, I never was really invested in it, and none of what you’re describing has enough pull other than a slight “oh that’d be interesting to see….. once……” behind it to me, which is certainly not enough to take the time to download it and try it again.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the changes, but I still just don’t see myself ever re-installing it.
Welp…I have been trying to figure out of the MMO genre has anything for me, so maybe I’ll give this another shot once these changes officially release. I didn’t DISLIKE New World, but for me, there wasn’t enough to really get super excited over, either. I do like new stuff, tho!