The Fatal Flaw of New World

by

Good Morning Friends. There are times as a blogger when it pains me a bit to write the words that I write. There are times when I write negatively about things that I deeply love. This morning’s blog post is going to be one of those times because I deeply care about New World. I’ve loved this game since the moment I set foot in the game’s second major phase of external alpha testing. There is just something about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay that I enjoy greatly. I’ve also been deeply disappointed in this game at times, namely the first several patches and the developers not seeming to “grok” what was wrong with the game. However, things have improved greatly and as a result, you are getting bombarded with the good news of New World right now.

At the moment YouTube is filled with videos like this one talking about how now is the perfect time to rejoin New World and how best to get started again. There are think pieces talking about the concept of a “fresh start” server and rallying a large number of players to poke their head back into the title and explore it. I am not saying these things are wrong. Once the Brimstone Sands update releases, New World is going to be in the best state it has ever been in period. It would be a great time to come back and check out the game, but at the tail end of this post, I am going to talk about my fears. However, for the moment let’s just revel in the things that are going right. I’ve written about significant improvements in the game before, but here is a bullet point list in no particular order of some of the major changes since we played at launch.

  • Lowered travel costs to a cap of 20 Azoth and removed the inventory weight component.
  • Significantly more fast travel points spread throughout the world making traversal much easier.
  • Unifying all of the storage sheds so that you can access them free from any town.
  • Removing the keystone system from dungeons, letting players run them for free.
  • Flattened the crafting reagents so that there is only one tier for each profession and it can be gained from level 1 all the way up to the endgame.
  • Added Out of Combat regeneration so you no longer have to spam food to regain health.
  • An expertise system was introduced to give a visible number of the previous invisible “watermark” system for per slot gear score.
  • The gypsum system was introduced to give you several ways to get a predictable expertise bump every single day by crafting items of a specific type.
  • Structured PVP modes of Outpost Rush and 3v3 Arenas were added and then given the ability to queue for them from anywhere in the world rather than having to keep going back to a faction vendor.
  • A PVP rewards track was added to give a predictable method for gaining rewards from participating in any Player Vs Player activity or just leveling out in the world while flagged. We still desperately need some version of this for PVE however.
  • Reworked all of the main story quests so that you can complete them solo and that dungeons are no longer roadblocks to progress and are instead optional.
  • More than doubled the number of high-end harvest nodes in the world so that those end game materials are much easier to come by.
  • Introduced aptitude chests that you start receiving after 200 in a profession which rewards rare materials that were otherwise only gained through very lucky harvests.
  • Ammunition is no longer required to use a projectile weapon and instead gives your weapon a buff meaning it is still desirable but can be skipped while open-world grinding.
  • Housing taxes have been capped so that a Tier 4 house is roughly 150g per week and a Tier 1 house is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40g per week.
  • Coin drops are significantly more plentiful and you regularly get them from killing mobs and opening chests. You also reliably get them from salvaging gear.
  • Mutated Expeditions have been added to the game which give you WoW Mythic+ style affixes that modify the difficulty of the dungeon while scaling up the rewards.
  • With the launch of the Brimstone Sands patch there will have been three new weapons added to the game:
    • Void Gauntlet
    • Blunderbuss
    • Greatsword
  • Leveling has been sped up significantly both for combat and for professions, and they have standardized the XP curve for crafting so that 20,000 level 1 item is no longer the correct way to level.
  • Respec costs have been significantly lowered so it is no longer onerous to change your character build around, and this I believe is leading to a “loadout” type system that will allow you to swap things more quickly.
  • With the Brimstone Sands release, the entire new player experience has been reworked with an improved layout of the starter areas and actually letting the player engage with some of the later story themes immediately.
  • Similarly, with Brimstone Sands there have been significant improvements to the layout and design of the starter towns.

There legitimately is a ton of things to be excited about when it comes to returning to New World. However, there are some aspects of the game that still concern me. New World had a phenomenal rise and a slow and steady fall. While the game has addressed a large number of the issues that came from the launch of the game, there is one fundamental problem that has yet to be addressed. It is my belief that New World failed, because it did not attract the social PVE-only MMORPG players in droves, and it is these players that make up the majority of the player base that made World of Warcraft succeed and have now caused Final Fantasy XIV to take that throne.

There is one common desire that stands above pretty much any other for that player base, and that is the ability to play with their friends. They form large guilds and move in packs, and even if playing solo… still want to be on the same server as the people they actually know playing the game. Most of us have been gathering a friend network since the moment we set foot in our first MMORPG, and have gathered more friends each time we move games. I know when we started our Elder Scrolls Online guild, it had over 150 players at launch. If you counted the acquaintances of those folks that may not want to be in a guild but want to at least be on the same server… you end up with an extended social network that can number in the thousands.

New World as a game was designed for 1500 players on a specific server and is scaled to be more like a Rust server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. While they have bumped the server caps up to 2500, this is still a core flaw in the design of the game that seemingly cannot be fixed. At launch, they spawned literal hundreds of servers, attempting to soak up the player population and let them play the game, and have since been constantly collapsing server populations trying to fight the impression that the game “felt dead”. If a large influx of players returns to the game… we are about to go through the same problems that we did at launch because their server model is not flexible enough to reliably guarantee the one simple process that the social gamer wants… to be able to reliably play on the same server that their friends are on.

I know this with absolute certainty because right now the server that I play on is experiencing a peak population as players are returning to check out the game. That server is both locked to new player creation and player transfers, and those poor souls who did not already get characters moved to that server will likely never be able to. We’ve yet to even receive the critical mass of returners because the Brimstone Sands patch has not been released. I can guarantee with certainty that we will once again see server queues in the multiple thousands on launch day and in the days proceeding it. MMORPG players come in waves and the “day one” folks will be enough to saturate the available capacity, let alone the “day two”, “day three”, and the “first-weekend” folks.

The improvements that have been made to New World are extremely impressive, and I want more than anything to give this game a full chance to be the success I hoped it would be. However, until they have a more flexible server model… I am questioning if it will ever succeed. Playing with your friends and reliably rolling on the same server they are on… is the fundamental requirement for a social game and this game still cannot promise that. I personally would love to start over from scratch and the AggroChat folks have talked about maybe doing this thing, but I cannot with any certainty guarantee that the server I would pick to start on… could support everyone else that will be coming over the subsequent few days of character creation. Most people do not have the freedom to log in within the first thirty minutes of a patch launch, and as such would be once again locked out in the cold.

I want so much for New World to be the game I know it can be… but fundamentally in order to get there, they are going to have to change the server model to something more akin to the “virtual” servers that Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online use. Most players are never going to engage in the PVP territory conquest of this game, and as such most players won’t care who holds a specific territory. I would love to see some sort of opt-out for the PVP aspects of the game that throws you into a flexible virtual server, that simply allows you to play with your friends. Since guild names and character names are unique across ALL servers… the core framework already exists to let players group freely with each other. There however must be some technical limitation to the core design of the game that is holding it back.

This is the fatal flaw of New World, the inability to promise the most basic of desires… to reliably play with your friends.

5 thoughts on “The Fatal Flaw of New World”

  1. I started playing WoW 8 months after my wife did. We started in a guild, moved to another and another, made friends, faction changed, some friends did too, made new friends, but a consistent issue is where goals in the game conflict with the people you’re playing with as some want more and ho off to find it elsewhere, to those that feel the game is too much of an investment of their life and just walk away. Of all those we’ve played with for close to 14 years, we don’t really have anyone left. Sure we will join in on a conversation in guild if one happens. I think that either people are just not talkative anymore or they’ve created private channels to talk. An MMO can feel kind of lonely even in a guild of 900 if no one is talking. It may just be the newer generations too. I’m certainly an old timer in age, and years playing, but I don’t know if I could start over making all new friends knowing that cat some point they will go off to pursue different challenges.

  3. I think there’s something of the “If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” to this. The social issues you describe are clearly crucial to your enjoyment of any multiplayer game but they’re almost entirely irrelevant to me. I don’t come to any multiplayer games with any expectation or desire to play them with anyone else at all, much less with people I already know. I just lay the games and if I meet people while I’m playing and play with them, that’s a bonus.

    I have no way of knowing whether that attitude or the one you’re describing is the majority view but I would say that for years now I’ve been reading endless concerns about how mmo game design emphasizes solo play and how mmos are becoming nothing more than solo games we play alongside other people. It seems game designers have been focusing on removing most meaningful social ties from mmos in favor of systems that mimic social structures without requiring any personal interaction. That’s been the trend for over a decade.

    If New World has a problem in this regard, it’s been an archaic reliance on actual personal contact between players – the lack of an instant dungeon finder that builds th etem for you without anyone having to speak to anyoen else, for example. Those kinds of functions are the ones I hear people bitterly complaining about the lack of in any game foolish enough not to provide them.

    The very small server population cap is an issue, it’s true. That also feels archaic. Whether the number of people likely to be so disturbed by it they choose not to play at all is commercially significant, though, I have no way of knowing. My feeling is that, provided they don’t have to sit in a queue for long, most potential players won’t care all that much who they end up on a server with because mst of them probably have no immediate plans to speak to anyone, anyway.

    The real question, though, is whether Amazon want to stick with it for the long haul. As Wilhelm was posting yesterday, quite a few mmos are passing the 20 year mark now. New World is barely a year old. It has a long , long time to get all of this right provided Amazon has the patience to let it happen organically.

    • There’s a conceit with MMOs that the other people playing them MATTER. In EverQuest, who the top guilds were and who were in them was vitally important, as they could be content gatekeepers in many ways. WoW had the same thing — the game had guilds and players that everyone knew. EvE Online, same thing. Remove all that and what keeps someone playing when they’ve seen what they want to see? Stickiness.

      For me, if I know nobody I know is playing a MMO I am playing, I’ll probably stop playing, which is why I stopped playing MMOs. Was lonely logging into FFXIV or EQ (these days) by myself. I stayed longer than I should have in EQ and EQ2 for friends I knew. I have never tried Lost Ark or New World for that same reason and the whole genre is pretty much dead to me, and I used to live and breathe MMOs.

      So yeah, make New World into something where you only group with people you will never see again, see where that gets them.

  4. Is there still that issue with crafting where you need one faction to dominate and level up the crafting stations or else you are out of luck?

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