New World is an interesting MMO for many reasons. The first reason is that it is the first big outing by Amazon's game studios a department I'm not sure why they've bothered to invest in, but they have and they've actually got a game out of it so already they are in better shape than most of the studios that Microsoft owns. The second reason is that this game was built to be the "hardcore" pvp mmo that apparently people in the mmo-space have been asking for. I don't know who these people are because I've been in the mmo-space for decades and nobody has ever told me they wanted a more hardcore pvp mmo. Nevertheless we have New World now and it is an mmo of some description.
If you've played any mmo in the last ten years, then you pretty much know the basic set up for how New World works. It's a hotbar mmo which assigns your attacks and skills to the number keys and grants you abilities as you level up. However unlike most other fantasy RPG's, there are no classes. Instead you level up individual weapons by using them and the more you use a given weapon the better you get at the weapon. So you can gradually become your own class by focusing on specific weapons to get good at. Leveing the weapons grants abilities for that weapon and leveling each weapon is a grind. Enemies aggro you and you stab them or shot them until they die. Pretty standard combatty stuff, although the other big feature of combat in New World is a dodge button. The dodge is a basic Dark Souls dodge, granting you a brief window of immunity to move through an attack. Though unlike Dark Souls you cannot dodge fast enough to avoid everything, because of the way the server ticks if you are attacked by multiple things at once, you are likely to be hit by at least one attack through your dodge even if you avoid a few other attacks. Or you can become completely immune to all damage forever if you play in windowed mode.....more on that later.
So combat is standard and so is questing....well...questing is standard if you were playing Everquest in 2002, because questing is fucking garbage. Each quest seems designed to do nothing but make you run your ass far away, then run your ass all the way back, only to get a follow up quest which sends you even further away. It's horrible, run for ten minutes to click a rock, run ten minutes back because fuck you. Which to be fair, is what old hardcore mmo's used to do back in the day so maybe this is interntional? I don't know. I do know it's not fun anymore and they should stop it.
Then there is crafting and crafting is the big thing for New World both in terms of player wealth but also for player combat. You see unlike more recent mmo's or just vastly better ones like Final Fantasy 14, in New World everyone on the server sees the same crafting nodes and if a player gets to it before you do....oh well. You have to wait for it to respawn, or you can kill the player and take the node for yourself. And crafting is the biggest progression for characters in NEw World, well rather I should say gathering is the biggest thing. Mining, skining, lubberjacking, etc, the more you do these tasks the more you level those skills up which allow you to harvest the better and better materials.
When I say every player sees the same crafting nodes by the way, I mean EVERY POSSIBLE node. For example, how do you skin animals? Well obviously you find them and kill them, once dead you can skin them. But every other player around you can skin them too and if someone skins your kill before you can, you lose that skin. So a lot of early players would just follow people around and steal their skins before the player exited combat because there is a little delay before they can start skining, making it super easy to get your shit stolen.
"Well simply kill that player then." I hear you say. Well yes you could do that, but then someone else steals the kill from both of you and neither of you get anything. So the meta became to not bother and simply go find some more resources somewhere else.
Additionally the crafting is broken. I mean it does work the way it is intended to work but it's one of those systems that requires the basic material to make the next level material to make the material after that and then the material after that to then make the high level item. What this means is that the most valuable gathering resources in the game are the lowest level ones, because you always need shitloads of them. This breaks the economy, because it means that low level players can simply become the richest players very early on if they figure this out and thus breaking the game for them essentially forever. By becoming so rich at low level, it makes the high levels meaningless because you can already just afford whatever you want whenever you want it.
Then there are the bugs. And I could go over the bugs but I'm not going to. I'm going to let a lovely British voice show you the bugs.
And there are more.
The basic consensus of this game seems to be, it needed a LOT more time before releasing. Beta was rushed and all the problems that people warned the developers about made it into the live game for exploiting.
If you've played any mmo in the last ten years, then you pretty much know the basic set up for how New World works. It's a hotbar mmo which assigns your attacks and skills to the number keys and grants you abilities as you level up. However unlike most other fantasy RPG's, there are no classes. Instead you level up individual weapons by using them and the more you use a given weapon the better you get at the weapon. So you can gradually become your own class by focusing on specific weapons to get good at. Leveing the weapons grants abilities for that weapon and leveling each weapon is a grind. Enemies aggro you and you stab them or shot them until they die. Pretty standard combatty stuff, although the other big feature of combat in New World is a dodge button. The dodge is a basic Dark Souls dodge, granting you a brief window of immunity to move through an attack. Though unlike Dark Souls you cannot dodge fast enough to avoid everything, because of the way the server ticks if you are attacked by multiple things at once, you are likely to be hit by at least one attack through your dodge even if you avoid a few other attacks. Or you can become completely immune to all damage forever if you play in windowed mode.....more on that later.
So combat is standard and so is questing....well...questing is standard if you were playing Everquest in 2002, because questing is fucking garbage. Each quest seems designed to do nothing but make you run your ass far away, then run your ass all the way back, only to get a follow up quest which sends you even further away. It's horrible, run for ten minutes to click a rock, run ten minutes back because fuck you. Which to be fair, is what old hardcore mmo's used to do back in the day so maybe this is interntional? I don't know. I do know it's not fun anymore and they should stop it.
Then there is crafting and crafting is the big thing for New World both in terms of player wealth but also for player combat. You see unlike more recent mmo's or just vastly better ones like Final Fantasy 14, in New World everyone on the server sees the same crafting nodes and if a player gets to it before you do....oh well. You have to wait for it to respawn, or you can kill the player and take the node for yourself. And crafting is the biggest progression for characters in NEw World, well rather I should say gathering is the biggest thing. Mining, skining, lubberjacking, etc, the more you do these tasks the more you level those skills up which allow you to harvest the better and better materials.
When I say every player sees the same crafting nodes by the way, I mean EVERY POSSIBLE node. For example, how do you skin animals? Well obviously you find them and kill them, once dead you can skin them. But every other player around you can skin them too and if someone skins your kill before you can, you lose that skin. So a lot of early players would just follow people around and steal their skins before the player exited combat because there is a little delay before they can start skining, making it super easy to get your shit stolen.
"Well simply kill that player then." I hear you say. Well yes you could do that, but then someone else steals the kill from both of you and neither of you get anything. So the meta became to not bother and simply go find some more resources somewhere else.
Additionally the crafting is broken. I mean it does work the way it is intended to work but it's one of those systems that requires the basic material to make the next level material to make the material after that and then the material after that to then make the high level item. What this means is that the most valuable gathering resources in the game are the lowest level ones, because you always need shitloads of them. This breaks the economy, because it means that low level players can simply become the richest players very early on if they figure this out and thus breaking the game for them essentially forever. By becoming so rich at low level, it makes the high levels meaningless because you can already just afford whatever you want whenever you want it.
Then there are the bugs. And I could go over the bugs but I'm not going to. I'm going to let a lovely British voice show you the bugs.
And there are more.
The basic consensus of this game seems to be, it needed a LOT more time before releasing. Beta was rushed and all the problems that people warned the developers about made it into the live game for exploiting.
