MMORPG

The Rebranding of New World

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On the 15th of October, New World is launching the latest version of itself as Aeternum. There has been a heap of confusing marketing surrounding this event, and quite honestly a bit of weasel wording when it comes to what is actually about to transpire. Essentially Aeternum is the attempt to launch New World on consoles with a clean slate, in order to wipe a bit of the bad taste of the dwindling PC player numbers out of the collective mouths of an audience that may have not actually played the game. Treating this as though it were a new and fresh gameplay experience, is what feels like a last-ditch effort to make this game succeed. The hard truth however is that PC players have not received any substantive updates since the launch of Angry Earth in October 2023.

The truth is that New World has struggled since its just slightly under 1 million concurrent player launch, and has never quite found a large enough player base to keep the game successful. It is very obvious that Amazon does not really consider this to have been a success, because while they often laud the achievements of Lost Ark… you never quite hear the same rhetoric surrounding their other MMO New World. Steam Charts paints the picture clearly of never quite getting a critical mass of players interested for the long haul. I feel like the console launch is essentially the last lifeline that the game has before Amazon ultimately shutters it. For that reason, I legitimately hope that this awkward rebranding is what the game needed in order to sell the notion of it to a new group of players.

I’ve loved this game deeply since its release three years ago. Over the course of that time I have dedicated 92 blog posts to the game, including this one… and probably would have had more except due to the fact that I spent a lot of time playing the game when it was under NDA. Unfortunately, New World is also a game with deep systemic problems due to the awkward way that this game was built. It is a game that needs about 1200-2000 players on a single server in order to make the game feel alive but was crafted in a manner that limits the total population of a server. It was designed more in the manner of a Rust private server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. We struggled at the release of the game to get everyone on the same server at the same time, and ultimately that is the core requirement of an MMORPG… the ability to play with your friends. This fresh coat of paint and renaming does nothing to solve this fundamental issue that exists at the core of the game.

At launch, there were one hundred and seventy-seven servers available, and it was simply not enough capacity to contain the millions of players attempting to play the game. Within days they spun up a number of servers at least doubling the total number, and quite honestly… I cannot remember how many servers that number eventually ballooned to. As the influx of players waned quickly, you were left with a ton of servers with little to no population and no way of those players migrating elsewhere. The game has been plagued with a long history of server migrations as we have now shrunk to twelve servers serving the global population. This gives players no real identity for what server they play on. I’ve not played in almost a year at this point and I could not tell you off the top of my head what server I was playing on. This makes it extremely hard to link up with friends wanting to play the game, which again is the most important requirement of an MMORPG.

I last played the game around the launch of Angry Earth and quite honestly… the game was in a pretty good state then. It was fun and the new story was pretty solid. The “new” zone was also pretty great, but I say new in quotation marks… because it wasn’t a new zone at all. It was taking the existing zone of First Light and changing everything about it to create a new endgame zone for the Angry Earth campaign. Similarly, the launch of Aeternum in 11 days is destroying the previous zone of Cutlass Keys to turn it into a new endgame zone that is half-dominated by full PVP. Instead of adding content to the game they are removing content by way of repurposing it. I didn’t care that much about First Light, but I loved Cutlass Keys and it was a destination that I went to regularly because I enjoyed the material farming loops there. the New World team has not actually “added” content to the game in the form of new open-world real estate since October 2022 when they introduced the Brimstone Sands region.

All of that said, I guess it should not shock me with what they are trying to do with Aeternum, but renaming something that has existed for four years at this point considering pre-release gameplay time, and treating it as though it were a brand new gameplay experience. They have attempted to put a shiny coat of paint on things several times with limited results. I get that this might be a team that is strapped for resources and might not have the time to devote to building entirely new zones out of whole cloth, but do have time to rearrange a bunch of chess pieces on the board in the form of a zone redesign. However, as a long-term player, it feels like I am losing content much in the same way I did with Destiny each time they vaulted a zone… instead of gaining content.

I have baggage, and I know that. I still have bitterness surrounding the patch where they effectively killed all of the player-created elite farm trains out in the world that were amazing. Bitterness aside though I really do want this game to succeed, if for no reason other than that they might get the resources required to fix some of the deeper fundamental flaws that the game has. The game keeps chasing the PVP player base, but time and time again the MMORPG market has proven that this is not a big enough community to ever support a game in its totality. PVE gamers are deeply social gamers by nature, and all of the flaws surrounding server limits and connectivity have always been a giant impediment for that style of player.

I feel like the healthiest thing for New World would be a change in server methodology to something akin to Guild Wars 2 where servers do not matter other than for WVW combat, and now there is a semi-regular process of matching up different guilds into groups to balance that. I could see something like that where companies are matched based on activity level and assigned to a relatively leveled playing field so that they are vying for control of the map against a similar group of players. Then remove all of the negative things that impact PVE players from other factions owning territory. This would lean into the fun PVE nature of the game while also serving the desires of the more bloodthirsty competitive minority in MMO players.

I think half of the revamped Cutlass Keys zone being devoted to full-open PVP is going to be a mistake in the long run, but I feel like it is probably a carrot being thrown to the players who have stuck around and are more PVP-focused. I imagine a few months from now, it is going to be a dead space with the same few people dueling each other. That said… I have no clue how you sell this game to PVE players in a way that does not exist currently. The thing that killed the game for me, was the fact that I was competing for harvesting resources constantly with a bunch of bots who were running a loop constantly. I feel like the game would be better served with longer node respawns, but having them flagged to your account so that if you go out into the woods looking for resources you are not actively competing with other players for them.

I’ve not had the game installed for a few months, and I last played in May. Even then I only played for a little bit to poke my head and see how things were going. I’ve not played a ton since the release of Angry Earth last year. I’ve seen nothing about this Aeternum rebranding that is really speaking to me. For the PC players… there really isn’t a lot of change. I think there is some new story, a new dungeon, and half of a revamped zone to explore. Aeternum is not for us, it is an attempt at luring a brand new audience of previously untouched console-first gamers. I think this is probably a make-or-break moment for New World. If on the 15th it fails to find a brand new audience, it is probably the eventual death of the franchise.

I think what I would have personally liked to see instead of this, is a shift in the model of the game as a whole. Instead of being a persistent forever game… focus on being a seasonal game like many of the ARPG Diablo-likes are. In that scenario, the crippling server constraints are not that big of a deal, because you are playing the game for a three to four-month shot at a time. They would need to amp everything up… experience, resources, gold… but honestly some of the most fun I ever had playing New World was rerolling fresh on a new server when they launched the story updates and fresh start servers in 2022. I could see having a heck of a lot of fun rolling fresh characters and going through all of the content again at an accelerated pace with a group of players doing the same thing. I think it could have worked, pending they came up with some gimmick for each season in the way that Path of Exile does its leagues.

As it stands, I will have a lot of happy memories from the time I played New World. I hope they find a new audience and get the resources to make this game the game it could have been. I hope they come up with a hook to earn back PC players who have felt abandoned by the staff. I legitimately hope this dangerous gambit works, because the alternative is that the game goes away. The stakes feel extremely high… but given everything else coming out this month, I can’t bring myself to join the folks who will be playing on the 15th. I wish them luck, but will be doing so more than likely from the sidelines.

Are you going to be checking out New World Aeternum? Did I completely miss the mark in my assessment of the game? Drop me a line below.

Accidental Free Company

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So it is no longer morning… but also feels really weird not to start a post with “Morning Folks”. I am still on the mend and struggling a bit, and Covid brain fog claimed me this morning and kept me from making a post. Instead, I thought I would do a bit of storytime because I find this funny. Shortly after the release of Dawntrail, my friend Ace and I started baby characters on the Kraken Dynamis Server. The new Path of Exile League came out which caused me to want to take a break, but at some point, I am sure we will return and pick up where we left off at the end of Heavensward. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and weirdly… it was weirdly enjoyable to actually be playing on a server where everyone was newbies either by new accounts or by fresh transfers.

Moments after logging into my character for the very first time on that server, I got an invite to sign a Free Company Charter. I thought sure… I have been that person trying to get my guild started before and would help out with this process. I half assumed that the moment it got started, I would get kicked out… but that was not what happened. Instead, I was promoted to an officer and later drug Ace into the madness just for funsies. We did not really have any plans to make a Free Company for our shenanigans, but having a few genuine new players around was rather charming. Based on our interactions… it was VERY clear we were the wizened elders of this group, but it was still fun to hang out while we were pushing the content through its paces.

We got busy doing other things, some of them on our mains… others in other games. The thing is, I kept logging in periodically when I thought about it to do the daily MGP grind just to get a reasonable base of currency built up on that character. While I was not actively playing, I was actively checking in on how things were going. There were a lot of fresh recruits that eventually left the Free Company leaving us down to just me and Ace who were logging in regularly, and then a trio including the originator of the FC that had not logged in within two months. I didn’t think much about this because Free Companies come and go in membership. Even our primary Greysky Armada goes through large blocks of time when Sol is pretty much the only person reliably logging in.

Late last week I logged in and saw a message that I had been promoted to the leader of the Free Company. So I guess I have now inherited Darkwraith… a super edgy named FC to keep up and running. I made a few tweaks… firstly I renamed the primary role to Leader, because “Master” squicks me out something fierce. I went with a Leader > Officer > Veteran > Memeber > Recruit naming scheme for the ranks because it felt less awkward and also sort of clearly delineated what each role was for. The only other thing that I am contemplating is shifting the Allegiance from Order of the Twin Adder to Maelstrom… because who the fuck ever wants to be part of team piss yellow? Mostly I plan on keeping the lights on and even inviting anyone else who wants to play on Dynamis. This is still 100% an alt project that I am never going to give my full attention to, but it is weird how this FC that I didn’t even intend on joining fell into my lap.

I am not going to lie… there is at least a large chunk of me that wants to rename this to something involving “Robosquids” given that Free Company renaming is a thing you can do easily. I am pretty sure the original owner of the Free Company is “gonezo”, given that he largely popped over to the server to get housing… and has also long since had that demolished. So at this point, the Free Company is essentially what we make of it. If you have alts on Kraken hit me up, because apparently, I lead a Free Company now. I have another group of friends who randomly ended up on the server so I might snag them to at least get the guild leveling at a decent pace.

World Boss and Meta Add-On

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Good Morning Friends. Zone Meta Events are the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 amazing. For the uninitiated, a “Meta” in Guild Wars 2 language is a zone-wide event that takes place on a reoccurring timer. Some of these are straightforward single-shot world bosses, and others are complicated if/then/else chains that start with minor escort events and end up in giant 80+ player raid fights. The popularity of specific zones is often determined by how popular the metas associated with them are. That said… pretty much EVERY zone has at least some player population wanting to complete the meta at any given moment. For example, this is Queensdale this morning at 6:30 am… with folks waiting on the spawn of Shadow Behemoth. We wrecked the World Boss in what felt like record time… all during non-primetime hours.

I’ve personally always struggled with keeping track of what was going on at any given time. For example, you can type “/wiki et” in the game and it will pop open the event tracker page… which does a reasonable attempt at laying this data out but also… causes my eyeballs to fuzz out and my mind to go blank. It seemed a bit mad to try and figure out what I was going to do in a given evening, with the amount of playtime that I had in front of me. This meant that most of the time… I participated in the meta events that I happened to accidentally stumble into rather than approaching any of them with a sense of purpose. I had tried a few plugins for BlishHUD in the hopes of helping me keep track of this nonsense, but honestly, it always felt a bit too cumbersome, and as a result… I defaulted to just roaming aimlessly or following the World Boss train when I could hop on board knowing for example that Tequatl always spawns at server reset.

Over the weekend, I stumbled onto a better solution. I was setting up ArcDPS again, and I went through the process of setting up the Addon Loader Nexus as it supposedly handles some of the problems with ArcDPS on the release of major patches. Nexus works very similarly to BlishHUD and offers the ability to hot load addons into the game while it is running and similarly comes with a library of addons you can install quickly from within the UI. One of these is called World Bosses by Sognus and for me at least it has been a game changer. Essentially it puts little clocks for lack of a better term over the top of the world map zones that contain popular metas, and at any given time you can see what phase that meta is in and what phase is coming next. For example, I blew up a chunk of my screen in the above image showing that Dragon Stand was just about to start a fresh meta train, which would of course be the ideal time to join that map.

What is even better about this is that after playing with this for a bit, it becomes trivial to see the natural synergy between different meta events and how you can easily hop from one to the next one without much forethought. For example, in the above image, the Aetherblade Assault is just about to start in Seitung Province, and then when it is wrapping up… The New Kaineng City Blackout should be starting… and then as it is wrapping up you can pop over and pick up the Echovald Forest Gang War event. Similarly this weekend I rode from Dragon Stand to Chalk Gerent to Octovine without missing a beat, just rolling from one event to the next and racking up the sweet sweet loot. I used to think that either people joined specific Commanders exclusively, or just had some vague sense of precognition about these things… but with this addon, it becomes super easy to follow the meta train.

If you are curious I would check out this general video about Nexus, as it can install a lot more add-ons other than the World Boss one that I am specifically talking about. I am also a huge fan of BlishHUD for marker packs that help with world completion, jumping puzzles, and getting various achievement collections completed like all of the nonsense associated with the SkyScales. Thankfully the two addon loaders play nicely together, and each of them seems to do something slightly different than the other one. There are a few add-ons that can be found on both of them… for example, Regions of Tyria a dumb addon that I enjoy greatly that announces the name of every area when you enter it, exists on both platforms. Add-ons and Guild Wars 2 are a massive rabbit hole, but the World Bosses tool seems well worth diving into because it gives me a level of confidence at being able to join in various Metas that I have not had before now.

Zone Metas are legitimately the best part of Guild Wars 2, and being able to participate in them more predictably is pretty freaking amazing. Sure I might not be in the mood every night to gather together with eighty strangers and mash buttons to take down a big bad, but when I am… this just works so much better. It makes me realize how important add-ons have been to my enjoyment of various MMORPG tropes throughout the years. Generally speaking, they just take information that already exists and present it in a more digestible format that my ADHD-addled brain can consume. While I have completely eschewed them in Final Fantasy XIV, I do get why players use them because I have always found having an interface that I can more directly control key to my enjoyment in games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.

Anyways! I hope this is helpful to someone out there. If you ever want to do Meta nonsense, hit me up in game.

A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.

I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.

I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.

Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.

What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.

Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.

Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.