New World

One of the problems about an NDA is that it can keep players who are really enjoying the experience of a game fro evangelizing it. This has been the case with me and New World, that is until the current preview of the game. The NDA was lifted and I can finally share all the thoughts I had about my experiences… the challenge now however is I am not exactly sure where to begin. I will admit that based on the marketing of this game, it seemed like something I probably would not like. The early heavy PVP focus would have been a massive turn off. However at some point during the development cycle they made a hard pivot to more of a PVE experience, and attempting to buffer the world with more lore and story.

If you have played Greedfall, you understand the basic conceit of the game. Essentially there is a new island that has been discovered, and your expedition is attempting to colonize it. The thing is, the island is very much not new and you are very much not the first expedition. It appears that folks have been trying to colonize the island for untold centuries, but that there is some malevolent force on the island that possesses everyone that arrives. As a result the island is littered with the ruins of past settlements and the “withered” inhabitants that have been claimed by the spirit of the island, and will attack you on sight with track star zombie like vigor.

Combat

Your game play begins as your expedition is scuttled by some very angry rock tentacle looking things and you wash ashore in a ship graveyard. You stumble disheveled through a very scripted combat event, explaining the basics and from there you are pointed towards an objective to begin your experience in the new world. While we are here lets wind our way into combat. If I were to describe it, I would compare it to Elder Scrolls Online because you have a very similar set up. You have a dodge initially bound to the space bar, light attack is bound to a tap of the left mouse button, heavy attack is bound to a long press of the left mouse button and block is bound to holding down the right mouse button. Once you find ranged weapons, the block shifts to aiming your weapon with left firing.

The game has no classes and as a result you are mostly distinguished by your choice of armor type and weapon type much like Elder Scrolls Online. For weapons you have a choice between seven options. Equipping a straight sword gives you the ability to equip a shield for defense along with it. Hatchet is a very mobile weapon that eventually includes the ability to throw it. Warhammer is a big two hander that is slow and smashy. Fire Staff gives you access to elemental magical attacks, and Life Staff represents your healing options. Bow and Musket represent the dichotomy of fast and agile verses slow and hard hitting. Each weapon has its own progression system so you can in theory learn how to be proficient with all of them.

Using a weapon gains experience for that weapon, and then you can spend those points in a skill tree of sorts unlocking new abilities and buffing your general combat abilities. Each weapon offers two different trees designed to represent different play styles. For sword the first tree starts off with a spin attack and then offers you a bunch of abilities that are buffed if you are attacking from the back. The second tree focuses more on the shield and buffing your health and ability to soak damage. This is not explained at any point and when I first played the game I made a number of very poor decisions as to my build. This time around I am building significantly more tanky and am enjoying the sword and shield gameplay more as a result.

Questing and Lore

The quests in the game will send you out into the island to explore various areas, but in my experience are pretty simple mechanically. Essentially it seems like you have “kill the thing”, “get a specific drop”, and “loot the chest” type quests. Eventually you can partake of PVP quests that involve such gems as “deliver the thing”, but given that I am trying to forget that PVP exists in the game I have no clue how these actually function. The quests are uninspired, but mechanically are fine and largely just serve as giving you a purpose for being in the right level range area at the right time.

Another word of warning is that if you are going into New World expecting a deep story driven experience… this isn’t the game for you. If you are not a reader of quest text, you will have NO CLUE what is actually going on in the world. I mean that is fine because the story is largely superfluous and you can play the game perfectly successfully without it. This is one of those games where the story is told through exploration in the world and finding scattered documents in the abandoned settlements. piecing these together you get a feel for what happened to those who came before, and occasionally give you hints about where to find other features. This note for example hints about a nearby wolf den, that admittedly you can just stumble onto yourself.

Settlements

The game has made a lot of interesting choices, and I guess time will tell which were wise and which were foolish. The first of these is the fact that there are no NPC vendors in the entire game, or at least the the sort that allow you to unload your vendor trash for coin. The only way to sell items is on the Trading Post and this is entirely player driven. As a crafter I think this is pretty great, because I never again have to make the decision of if I should sell an item for gold or if I should break it down for crafting materials. If I get a drop that I don’t think would interest other players… I rapidly salvage the item in my inventory and move on with my life. The negative of this system however is depending on where you start certain resources might be exceptionally hard to get your hands on.

Your view of the world largely focuses on a settlement. At first this will be the the settlement near where you start the game. For me it was Monarch’s Bluffs and in a previous play through it was a settlement called First Light. It seems as though each region of the map has one major settlement and one fort, and the faction and company that holds the fort also holds the city. There is likely a rich PVP based system that exists to determine this, but once again I am completing ignoring that. For me who holds a settlement seems to not really matter at all.

Each region of the game has a faction associated with it and this levels up as you do things that would gain you favor. This can be completing quests or just doing things like killing random baddies that you might encounter along the way. When you level up you a presented with a series of choices that provide quality of life changes to that region for you. For example in this case I have the choice between lowering my trading tax fee a the trading post, increasing the speed at which I gather resources or gaining more faction tokens each time I complete a mission for my chosen faction. These choices end up giving you a reason to support a specific area, and when you get level 25 with a faction you can purchase housing.

Another one of those interesting decisions that I spoke of is the fact that what we would think of as a banking system, is tied to a specific settlement. You are granted access to a storage shed and additional storage space is another one of the options you can occasionally choose when you gain levels with a given region. Your items stored will only be available while you are in a given region and once you cross over into another settlement, you will be starting back at square one both in access to space and for item availability. This makes me think that the game is designed in such a way as to drive loyalty to a given region by the players.

Player Factions

At a specific point in the quest line, you will be asked to choose a faction. Once again I am going to throw back to Greedfall, because you could essentially name the three factions the Coin Guard, Alchemists and the Church if you wanted to. The green team are more aligned to military might and adventuring, the purple team is stealth and forbidden knowledge and the yellow team is the might of divine right. For me it seemed like Green team was the ideal fit… largely because I like fighty things and the color green is my favorite… also skulls are cool. The only negative about these factions is your company… aka the guild equivalent, will be limited to only members of a specific faction. So you will have to convince all of your friends to be cool with the same lore tropes. Really for me, I am fine with pretty much everything but team Yellow, because I have no desire to align to the church.

If you don’t care about PVP however, the choices are largely interchangeable with the primary difference being the armor sets that are available to you through the faction currency. Regardless of who holds a territory, there will be a representative of each faction in each settlement it seems. Other than the main quest chain, there will be a constant repeating stream of faction quests and town quests available. These send you out into the world and the first row is completely PVE focused with the second row all requiring you to flag up in order to partake. I’ve only ever done the first row of quests because again, I am pretending that PVP does not exist in the game.

Town quests come from the Project Board, and this gets into one of the really interesting aspects of the game. The players are effectively improving the settlement as they play the game, and at any point a player can plunk down 100 gold and declare a project to upgrade something. For example in the above picture there is a project to upgrade the Forge to Tier 3 increasing the sort of items that you can craft with it. The other project is to upgrade the Gates to Tier 2, which I believe are involved with the PVP siege game play allowing for the town to be more easily defended. In both cases there are three quests at a time offered, and each of these reward 10 points towards a given project with 3000 total points needed to complete the project. Each player that takes town quests is all working towards the same shared benefits.

Crafting Systems

The game has an exceptionally rich crafting system, that once again I would liken to the experience of playing Elder Scrolls Online. The key difference being there is seemingly nothing holding you back from just leveling everything as they each are progressed independently of each other. These are divided up into three general categories: Gathering raw resources, Refining those resources into materials and then Crafting something from materials. Since I am playing a heavy armored tanky character, I have spent most of my time focused on weaponsmithing and armoring which cover melee weapons and metal armor. From what I can tell, nothing exists in the game that cannot be crafted and the majority of your loot are resources that can then be crafted with.

Gathering is a bit interesting in that there are not just fields worth of nodes out there in the world. Most everything that you can see can be gathered in some way. The trees that are in the above screenshot can be chopped down, the plants can be gathered… and the Iron Vein that I stumbled across can be mined. Rock is extremely plentiful for example, but ore is a little harder to find with specific resources appearing in specific biomes and areas. For example if you find a ruined settlement that was a mine or a quarry… chances are you are going to find ore. If you find a settlement that was a farm, you are going to find things like herbs and various vegetables that you can harvest. Things are just scarce enough that I find myself constantly scanning the horizon for any resource that might come in handy.

When it comes to crafting the items itself… there are a bunch of levers to pull and knobs to turn. When crafting an item there are base requirements and then a few things you can do to increase your chance of getting something interesting. You can add additional primary resource in order to influence the chance of getting a gem socket, or at a resource called Azoth in order to increase a perk appearing on the item. Occasionally you will find something out in the world that allows you to place a specific perk as well. I think the idea being, that in the end game you will be able to directly influence the type of item you are producing if you have sufficient skill and sufficient resources.

The crafting machines are located in your settlement, and are scattered throughout the town with them largely appearing in one of two areas. Everything you can craft has both material requirements and machine requirements. For example moving up a tier in food requires you to have access to a tier 2 kitchen, but moving up to the third tier would require access to a tier 3 kitchen and so forth. This feeds that desire for a town to evolve and for the players to run those town project quests because it ultimately benefits everyone, or at least everyone that is interested in getting items crafted.

Your Campsite

New World is a game without fast travel or mounts, and the various activities will involve you traversing vast distances. Inevitably you are going to die, which makes life a little tricky. Any player can run up to me and resurrect me as I am bleeding out, however I watched three players in the general vicinity do nothing, meaning I had to eventually respawn more or less pushing me back to the settlement. Depending on where I happened to be, this might mean a rather lengthy run to get back to where I was questing. Thankfully the game has what I consider to be my favorite system to handle this.

At nearly any moment, with some minor restrictions as to placement… you can hit Y and build a camp site. This requires 5 pieces of wood and 1 piece of flint, which are exceptionally common throughout the island and has the effect of resetting your respawn point. In addition to that you can use any players camp to craft some very basic materials like simple food and crude gathering tools. You can also use a camp to rest, which allows you to regenerate health at a vastly increased pace. For me at least this means that I am never not carrying wood and flint and when I find myself questing out in the middle of nowhere I always plunk down a camp site just to serve as a life line in case I happen to die. This allows me to get back into the action quickly and respawn significantly closer to the objective.

The Rough Spots

I’ve gone on for some time about the features, and during that I covered a ton of the positives of the game. Now I guess as I close things up I should probably talk about some of the negatives. The first and most immediately apparent is that New World does not have a good character creation system. The models for characters look on par with memories of Fallout 3, and have sadly far fewer options. They are what I would expect for a pvp kill box game where you don’t really care about roleplay, and not what I would expect from a MMORPG. I hope given the delay they can maybe work on this system a bit because it is very much not amazing.

Combat has some weirdness to it as well, namely when it comes to hit registration. If you and the thing you are attacking are on different elevations… even the most slight of differences… you can end up just swinging at the air which is extremely frustrating when you hit a special attack. Special attacks are extremely powerful… but also have insanely long cooldowns meaning you are going to have them up about every other fight if you are rolling through encounters. There is some weirdness with switching weapons as you can get animation locked limiting the usefulness of say having a ranged weapon that you open combat with and then switching to a melee weapon for close combat. It works, it is just way more kludgy than I would have liked.

One of my key complaints from earlier testing was that the radius for what counted as killing something within a certain area was very very short. This appears to have improved significantly but it still can be really hard to find a certain number of wolves for example around a certain den. The spawn rate seems to be either feast or famine, where you can be standing around waiting forever for something to spawn in… or the spawns are happening so fast that you get overwhelmed. I am hoping they continue to tweak this, as it was better for this test than it had be in previous iterations.

Final Thoughts

As I said at the beginning of this massive post, New World was not a game I expected to like. However after having played it for a significant number of hours and through multiple tests I am really looking forward to it launching. They are making some big gambles by constraining the player to largely interact with a specific settlement, but it might also create a game with multiple rich player environments rather than a single vibrant city. I am on board with the crafting system, and I legitimately find combat to be enjoyable. Really for me however this is a game about exploring a very beautiful world, and I like just roaming around looking for resources.

I am fully on board with this game and plan on playing when it eventually launches. So now I ask you my readers, have you had a chance to play the game? If so what were your thoughts? Drop me a line below because I am very interesting in hearing about your experiences now that I can finally talk about it.