New World

The Fatal Flaw of New World

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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.

New World Revitalization

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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”.

Many Games and Little Focus

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Path of Exile – PC

Good Morning Friends! I find myself in a weird position right now where I am picking at the bones of several games but not terribly engaged with most of them. There was a time when I used to create these “regularly playing” posts, and in theory that is what today’s post is going to largely be. However, I just don’t really feel like reviving that format. If I was going to say I had a primary game at the moment it would be Path of Exile. I am very much in a bit of a honeymoon phase with that game… or as “honeymoon” as you can be with a game that is actively trying to make interactions with its systems difficult. I am not in my 60s on the Explosive Arrow Champion build and I have a few baby alts that are doing different things that I am poking around with as well. We have several folks from the AggroChat podcast playing right now and as a result, we have a “Greysky Armada” guild up and running. Not that I actually understand half of what there is to do with a guild… but we have a Guild Hideout and at least some Guild Stash storage.

Outriders Worldslayer – PC

Since Outriders Worldslayer just released, I am spending some time playing around in that game. I enjoy the mechanical systems but am a bit frustrated with how limited the expansion actually was. Essentially at its core, it adds one new activity to the game… the Trial of Tarya Gratar. If for whatever reason you don’t want to engage with the time commitment of that event, then you are stuck doing the same familiar grinds that have been in place since the release of the game. However, with the game being way more generous about dropping legendaries, I am actually trying to build a proper gear set focused around the Seismic Commander set. At the moment I am wearing mostly the “purple legendaries” gear until I can get a decent roll on all slots of the actual gear set.

Guild Wars 2 – PC

I am still logging in pretty regularly to Guild Wars 2, but I am not really doing much of anything. At a minimum, I farm resources in the three guild halls that I can farm each day, and gather what home instance nodes I have. Most days I try and figure out a quick path to getting 3 dailies done and get my 2 gold. However lately I have not even been doing that. Essentially I need to pick a goal and then focus on that because while I have a wealth of things that I could be doing… I am pretty directionless in actually doing any of them. I could focus on my Skyscale or knocking out the karka hunting achievement which would give me some way of disposing of excess ascended materials. The problem is that I fail miserably at actually sitting down and focusing on any of them.

New World – PC

I am in a similar “maintenance mode” with New World, where I am logging in most days and harvesting enough materials to get 3 of the Hidden Stashes which turn into diamond gypsum, and one of the proficiency caches that gives me emerald gypsum. I then take these out to Shattered Mountain where my inn is bound, craft some gear for expertise boosts and then log out for the day. Doing this has allowed me to take all of my armor slots, sword, shield, and warhammer to 600 expertise. Right now I am working on pushing up greataxe and hatchet. At some point when the major patch drops that take away dungeon keys I will probably start running some of these again through the new group finder tool. The devs made a joke about calling them tuning orbs and expeditions… but I am sorry… that is obtuse and weird. They are dungeons and they are keys and “ya done fucked up” by not naming them the industry standards.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I am even in a worse state with Final Fantasy XIV right now. Basically, I am logging in every 4 days… either to go house shopping among the ever-dwindling number of housing plots… or to collect my money from the lottery system because I lost yet again. None of these interactions make me happy. I am very sad about the state of housing in Final Fantasy XIV. The lottery while it helped in some ways by keeping me from having to set up an auto clicker in order to succeed… but I also feel pretty hopeless still about my prospects of acquiring a house. Now that there are additional catch-up mechanics, I really should dive back into the systems and catch a character up. However, there is a mental barrier between me and this game at the moment. If I win a house I will once again have the desire to spend time in this world, but so long as I am homeless I am lacking that traction.

Diablo III – PC

My return to Diablo III was a whirlwind romance. While it was not my fastest season in the world, now that I have finished up with those achievements and gotten the rewards… I have very little desire to keep playing. I had started a Hardcore Seasonal character, simply because I had never actually played in that game mode. I have to admit what knocked the wind out of my sails was when I realized it worked vastly different than I was expecting. I assumed that when I took a death, the hardcore seasonal would turn into a softcore seasonal. I mean this is how it works in Path of Exile and my brief jaunt into Hardcore Minecraft… but my assumptions were wrong. Instead, your character is just gone, and I cannot stomach the idea of wasting time on a character that poofs. This combined with the fact that I just got into Path of Exile has more or less stopped this project dead in its tracks.

Diablo Immortal – PC/Android

Lastly, we have Diablo Immortal. This one is mostly just a footnote because I have uninstalled this game from all of my devices and not looked back after my “fruitless grinding” post. There were a lot of things I liked about this game and the way some of the systems interacted. I specifically loved the way that legendary items worked, and how you could extract the “legendaryness” and apply it to other items. It appears that Diablo 4 is going to do something similar to this, so it makes me very excited for what that game might end up feeling like in the end. However, the monetization of Immortal is going to give me a great pause for what the future of Blizzard games looks like. I have to admit though I had some fun while it lasted, and if they at some point in the future come to their damned senses and make this a more reasonable option… I might return. Considering most of the reputable sources have stopped covering the game aside from the occasional dunk on it… I will be interested to see what the revenue stream looks like on this going forward. I am also curious to see what lasting impact this will have on the Diablo player base… since this essentially nuked the goodwill from orbit.

Exonerating the Dungeon Finder

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With the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, there has been quite a bit of talk in the Twitterverse and greater blogging community about this expansion. I have no plans to go back and try out the classic experiment because across the board I think it has failed. World of Warcraft Classic was quite a bit of fun… until we all remembered the work commitment that game required for doing anything serious at the endgame. I think I personally petered out somewhere in the mid-50s and I ultimately lasted longer than a good number of my friends. Those who remained however represented some of the more toxic players, and I’ve heard stories from folks who played like Namaslays about the sexual harassment represented in that community.

For years I have idolized the Wrath of the Lich King expansion as the last truly good time in World of Warcraft, and similarly, I have placed the transition squarely on the shoulders of the Dungeon Finder tool. It was late in the Wrath patch cycle that we were first introduced to this tool, and rapidly folks stopped forming groups on their own and instead relied on random chances to throw them together with other players. As someone who used to cultivate a wide network of social channels and friends lists so I could rapidly pull together groups from a huge pool of hundreds of “known good” players, this was an earthquake that shattered the infrastructure that I had built. However, as I look back on this era, I am pretty certain that I have been wrong about the Dungeon Finder all of these years.

I think the larger truth is that “online social interaction in a video game” no longer held the novelty that it once did. I very much remember my early days in Everquest were spent being amazed that I could be online with that many other players at once. We went into these games carrying with us the lineage of MUDs and IRC chat rooms… that were by nature deeply social enterprises. So the fact that we could play a game and do it while chatting with friends, was a groundbreaking scenario. World of Warcraft was probably the first MMORPG I played that was legitimately by its own merits a “Good Game”. What I mean by that is a game that was capable of enthralling someone who had no interest in “Online Worlds” and only really cared about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay. I think those of us who came to these games for the social interaction that they provided… eventually “aged out” of it. It isn’t so much that we lack the desire, it is just that real-world responsibilities eventually replaced the ability to maintain in-game responsibilities.

Since then I have played a lot of different MMORPGs at a good number of different levels of seriousness. It is really Final Fantasy XIV that proved to me that the dungeon finder tool could be a seriously good thing. The key difference here is that Yoshi P and crew wanted to create a structure that rewarded the player for good play or at least good behavior. The subtle pressure of wanting to win a commendation has been enough to curb most of the worst behavior for years. That is not to say that a good deal of toxicity has not crept into this game as well, but most of that can be seen at the highest levels of play and not necessarily in the “duty roulette”. It did plant the idea in my head though that with the correct social structure and systems that reward fair play, you might be able to rehabilitate even the worst of environments.

I’ve also played a good number of games since then that have had no grouping functionality built into them at all. While I can go through the social labor of trying to find groups, it is so much harder for me to be willing to put myself out there when I am grouping with strangers. There has been a long series of games lately where I have been the last one playing or one of the last few playing. This means I am spending almost all of my time soloing, and do not have a ready-made pocket healer to go with my tanky nature. If I could somehow transplant the Final Fantasy XIV Duty Finder and its social structure into New World for example… I would do so in a heartbeat. I know with the removal of dungeon keys, they are putting in some manner of group finding tool, but I believe it is a manual process and not an auto-matching system. Regardless having even that minimal infrastructure is an improvement over spamming trade chat.

Guild Wars 2 has a lot of grouping options for certain segments of the game, but thus far has done little to help me ease into other areas. For example, if we are talking about Open World or WVW content, I can simply click on the commander tag on the map and join the group (pending the group is open, which most are). If it is some daily objective like bounties in a specific region, there are also often manual group finder groups active for folks trying to accomplish that. Similarly, big reoccurring meta events have group finder groups allowing you to drop into RIBA in Silverwastes at will. However, up until this point they have not been a terribly viable way of finding a Dungeon, Strike, or Raid group because those communities tend not to use them. Arena Net knows this and is trying to implement some changes to make them more random player friendly… but still it is not “push button get group” easy.

I think the thing that the Dungeon Finder tool did do, was limit the importance of a server community and the social structures that are entangled with that notion. At the time… I mourned this greatly, but modern me is generally in favor of just completely abolishing the concept of a server and opening up grouping freely across the entire game. One of the greatest faults that I can find in both Diablo Immortal and New World is the deeply limiting server infrastructure that almost guarantees that over time server merges will be consistently required. At the end of the day, the ethic that I care the most about in an Online Game is the ability to play with my friends, regardless of what region they might be playing in. Sure it might be a pain in the butt to organize a play session, but having any sort of basic social infrastructure greatly improves my experience in the long run. Given that it is deeply difficult to keep players engaged for more than a few months at a time, the ability to hop around between different pools of active friends is key to the long-term success of a game.

Essentially for the last decade and some change, I have branded the Dungeon Finder as the great killer of games when in truth that was a flawed perception. I’ve realized that Wrath of the Lich King is a specific moment in time for me that could never be replicated. While some of that experience was wrapped up in the social infrastructure that I had built, probably more of it was associated with the deep depression that I was in at the time. I was clinging to World of Warcraft and the friends I had made in it as a lifeline to keep me from fading away. It is weird to me that I hold the game in such nostalgia when I was playing it through quite possibly the darkest period in my life. I can’t go back to the way I felt at that time, and I honestly would never want to knowing how close I came to ending it all. Instead of realizing it was me that was changing, I placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the biggest innovation to be brought into the game that I loved.

The hard truth is, I would love to see the Dungeon Finder or something similar to it in more games. Even with the toxic community of players that it brings along with it… having access to run dungeons and harder content is far better than having to expend the emotional energy to make it happen without one. My more modern mindset is that all of the barriers that keep people from doing content, easily with friends should be leveled. Constructs like the Trust system in Final Fantasy XIV are great, but could be even better if they were more flexible and allowed you to build a group of what you had available, and then use NPCs to fill out the rest of the party. There were so many times I wish we had systems like SWTOR where you could run content with two people and two companions. No game has really nailed these systems, but I now have to fully admit that we are far better off with them than without them.