Good Morning Friends! It is another day and another time I am posting my login screen to New World as a way of marking progress. I cannot fully put into words how much experience you gain in this game as compared to the way it was at release. I remember clearly that I essentially had to bounce from town to town grinding out objectives on the town boards in order to push my level bar forward. Now instead I am 53 having finished Monarch’s Bluff, Windsward, Everfall, and Brightwood… with over half the zones in the game still out there and loaded up with quests. My intent is to do them all in order to remove the markers from my map, and also soak up all of that “free” gold. The quests are worth a lot more of it than they were in the beginning as well. I’m currently sitting somewhere near close to 10,000 coins and still have so many more zones that I have yet to even visit.
My very short-term goal is to visit Restless Shore and Mourningdale, so that I can open up banks in those territories as well. At the moment I have been in questing mode, but while journeying across the map I am picking up every rare resource I can get my hands on. For the most part, I am just dumping these in the various storage sheds in the territories I have already opened. At some point, I am going to have a grand craft-a-thon to see how far I can push my skills up to using this stockpile. I posted this screenshot largely to show how full the various banks are. At one point last night I crafted up over 1100 Iron ingots for example to compress some of the space. As far as questing goes I am currently working my way through Cutlass Keys, which is chock full of uncontested materials since no one seems to go down there much.
In other news, Themiscyra is open for business once again if any of you were hoping to join us there. There seems to be a bug happening right now with company invites where they are taking a significant amount of time to resolve. They do eventually go through and I have been getting folks invited as I can. If you are looking for an invite to our nonsense throw Belglaive a friend invite as that is my character on the server. Transfers work as well because yesterday we had a few folks do just that. I really should have timed it better so that I could maybe catch someone transferring off of Valhalla and smuggle some gold over to me on Themiscyra. I sincerely doubt I will be returning to my Valhalla character because I am already pretty damned attached to this one.
We are once again Syndicate because purple is a good color, and I would rather be team science/magic than team religion or military. If you are hoping to join up with the company, you will need to make sure you choose Syndicate as your faction when you go through the series of quests in Everfall. That is one point of frustration with the new flow of quests, which is that it takes forever for you to choose your faction. Previously this happened around level 8 and I could speed clear my way through to the faction choice in about 15 minutes. Now, this takes place after you have cleared the first zone and are well into the second zone. I didn’t get my faction as a result until I was well into my 30s. This is a seemingly long time for folks to be hanging out in limbo waiting for a guild invite. In my opinion, guilds/clans are something that you should be able to do immediately in a game.
As far as progression goes, my proudest achievement of late is that I can now officially start harvesting Orichalcum. I even managed to get my first piece of void ore, and I believe I will need five more in order to eventually craft a full set of voidbent armor. This is one of my long-tailed achievements for this re-roll is to get back to my cool-looking armor set. My lumbering is lagging the most, and I probably need to devote some time to catch it up so I can begin doing my full route of orichalcum and ironwood spawns. I am also lagging a bit on harvesting, but I am not terribly far behind there as Cutlass Keys has been terribly lucrative when it comes to silkweed. Though it would be nice to start stockpiling those red weeds as well as I find them.
Another thing of note is that you should probably pop by the in-game shop soon. There are a couple of canopic jars for your house that you can claim, and a set of Roman Vexillarius armor that you can snag for free. There is also a really slick set of armor called Fallen Spirit that can be farmed through 4 hours of watching a participating twitch channel. You might watch the twitch drops space as well because there is another event that will be happening soonish with the drop of the fresh start servers. Essentially teams of streamers are going to be completing specific objectives, and each one unlocks a unique set of drops for their viewers. I will probably give more detail as it is released but it should be even more unique appearances that are available.
I’ve been frustrated with New World and the decision process of Amazon Game Studios… but I wouldn’t keep playing it if I did not also love it deeply. There is just something about this world that lands for me. It nails so many things which is what makes the glaring issues so maddening. Weaver’s Fen may be one of my favorite MMORPG zones ever, and it really exudes this foreboding nature. New World does dark and scary places so well, and when you get up to Shattered Mountain, it is maybe the closest game representation of something like Mordor I have experienced. The entire world feels dangerous and just roaming around out there sets me completely on edge. I am very happy that the experience curve and questing have been improved to maybe hook more players into sticking around a bit longer.
“The entire world feels dangerous and just roaming around out there sets me completely on edge.”
Heh! That’s almost the exact opposite of how it makes me feel. I’ve always found it an exceptionally cosy kind of place. Even the dingy zones like Weaver’s Fen seem quite charming. About the only one that’s really unpleasant is the aptly-named Reekwater. Brimstone Sands is so bright and cheery, even at night, and has such a refreshingly low mob density, it could be a holiday resort.