New World

When you hit Brightwood and beyond, you're not fighting skeletons and wolves and pirates anymore. There are indeed a SHIT ton of VERY HARD and very UNIQUE enemies with deadly abilities/movesets and shit. Most people just won't get there because getting to 30ish doesn't happen in the first two days and a lot of people won't be able to stick it out that long, at least not in beta.

There's also all sorts of wild shit at 60 like Outpost Rush with mini forts and contested instanced PVE bosses and cannons and shit, but people haven't seen that yet and most won't for a few days until streamers get there.

They also are hotfixing community boards in ~1 hour to make the refresh timer on board missions longer. How long? I don't know. They used to be like 4.5 minutes and now they're like 3 minutes. I'm guessing they put it up to 15 minutes or something. Kind of sucks if you get a bad round, but the odds of you getting a decent quest and doing it within 15 minutes and coming back to check a fresh round is pretty good.

If you've played or watched this game and you/whoever you watch are under lvl 30 you don't really know yet. If you're loving it, there's just more to come to make it even more exciting. If you hate it, just wait until people are doing the high end content. I'm not saying EVERYONE will love it, but there's a bunch of stuff people haven't seen yet that should be pretty engaging.

rhinohelix said:

Because no one wants to pick one thing. It's not 1997 anymore. Darkside fucking sucked. I beta tested UO and most of that awesome experience took place in your head. It was great at the time (ish) but way simpler. Every game has done the big creature thing. It was impressive to see hill giants in 1999 in EQ; no one gives a shit anymore.

I understand both your love and nostalgia. We'll see if the game is DOA. I now get a lot of the complaints about it trying to do a lot of things and not succeeding spectacularly in any of them. I have really enjoyed crafting so far, and finding the stuff you need to craft: It was a bit of a shock to get to the gates of Cutlass Keys hamlet and find most of the things seemingly in short supply around First Light (Hemp, Turkeys for feathers, and Iron veins all a stones throw from the gate). It's doing a lot of things, with a seemingly shallow skill tree deeply affected by attributes, skill-based combat, electable PvP Territorial control, story missions; hopefully there is a guiding hand to bring it all together. It will have an audience, at least for a while. People are obviously hungry for something new; the question is how long will they give this a chance.

To me the bigger question will be does the dev team come out of the gate nerfing or are they more nuanced, and how much can they pull this all together in the last five weeks. I have seen some projects really come together, and some fall apart. Cynical me has seen many more fail but hope always springs eternal.

In regards to polish, GW2 was the last one for me that really hit it out of the park, though; Dynamic event chains 4 and 5 events deep that would lead to really amazing events it followed through, the renown hearts, that were added super late in the dev process to help flesh out the map and direct players' engagement, all of the different stories provided so much replay, you could level 3 or 4 characters and never see some of the same areas twice. Skills were weapon based, and also classed based, so as you changed off hand and main hand, even the same weapons would provide different skills (sword and mace vs mace and sword, for instance were different for a warrior).

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No point even talking to you bro. You're still subscribing to the basic tenant that we should give players what they "think" they want. How has the worked out for any game? People need a challenge. They need things to aspire to. Did I ever get 100 animal taming in UO? Fuck no, but seeing a dude with his dragon and nightmare sure looked appealing.

I'm not advocating for a direct copy, but if you aren't willing to put in the work to be a GM smith or whatever then you shouldn't be one. Tell me do you think throwing loot at players in WoW has placated the masses or made them burn out faster?

You can cling to hope all you want, but this game is DOA. I fucking guarantee it. Maybe they'll turn it around like FFXIV in a few years, but there is absolutely zero hook here. It may seem great to you that everyone can do everything, but the human condition does not thrive in that type of system. Human beings want challenge, they want uniqueness. This game offers none of that.

mkopec said:

Yeah EQ had that aspiration thing too. Seeing people with their fancy raid armors and shit when you were lv10 and barely out of the noob zone was a thing to see.

And this is the problem with every modern mmo. Catering to LCD. YOu cater to LCD your game is mediocrity.

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Right, and if you logged in and got a cloak of flames and everything else under the sun would you have played as long? Would you of given two fucks about dying if there wasn't experience loss and a corpse run?

As you said people think they want this carefully curated experience, but really they don't....

mkopec said:

But on the other side of things im not fucking 20 something anymore and I dont want a game that sucks me in such a way that I no longer even want to engage with my family (yeah EQ did that to me) this game will be fine for a play through to 60 casual like, maybe partake in some PvP action for a while. And then you can drop this shit and never look back or even come back later when they add more shit. This is all im hoping to get out of it. And im sure it will deliver from what I have seen. 100-150 hrs for $40? Not bad.

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Which is why I think they have a super solid foundation for a UO style game here. Remove the leveling system. Cap skills at 100, and let people pick 5-7 skills to max. You would have smiths with mining and maybe swordsmanship or magery. You'd have animal tamers with magery. You'd have tailors with fencing and skinning.

It's hard to explain if you never played Ultima Online, but there was no super item of uberness. You could go out and enjoy the game and improve your characters skill a little, collect some loot, etc., and then be done. The prestige came from becoming a grandmaster in the more difficult skills like Magic Resist, Animal Taming, Blacksmithing, Poisoning, Tinkering, etc.

I mean the difference between a 95 skill player and a 100 skill player was exponentially more play time and a special title, but beyond that they could do the same stuff for the most part. It's just a shame that instead we're getting this watered down game where nobody really cares what your smithing is because everyone can make everything.

There is already prestige a bit. My homie went and grinded tracking&skinning to 25 early game when us plebs were trying to hunt rabbits like idiots. Our healer is basically our tracker/brewer/cook. Feels more runecape than UO imo. Where's the wilderness zone ffs

Aaaaaaaaand Town Board projects nerfed from 5min refresh to 30min.

Time to find the next not-shit way to gain xp.

I really cannot comment on this game as a whole. I have yet to play its entirety. I will say that the idea of one player having the capability to easily reach maximum potential in all crafting abilities seems to negate any need for me to ever rely on other players. It is the "everyone gets an award" kind of system. It is also kind of boring.

Compare a system to real life. Can a person do every skill set that exists in real life? A person could in theory learn most things in life. The real question is could a person master every skill in real life? The answer to that is a very easy no. Very few people even master one skill to such a level that they reach recognition by others outside the field. A person pretty much has to have an inherent natural tendency towards the skill to be a Master. The major factor involved with Mastering a skill in real life is time. A person born natural to the skill needs less of it but if they try a different skill, they become like everyone else. They need time of practice.

Here is the other side of the coin for time. If you stop practicing a skill, you will lose some of what you learned. If a person chooses to no longer use the time to practice a skill but rather learn a new skill, they lose some of the qualities that made them a master. A person will always retain the ability to work the skill but not to remain a master of it. The adage of riding a bike comes to mind. You have to practice again to remember what it was that made you a Master.

How do you translate this into a game?

Well it certainly does not involve the potential for a player to master everything easily.

It negates the need for transaction if I can just make the product myself. Also the game itself tells a player to play the system and try to build up a skill. This furthers an even less need to rely on others for a product. In this game, like real life, time is the only factor limiting a player. I have not gotten a skill up to 200 yet, but I get the feeling it is not something that would take a player hundreds of game time hours to do with just one skill.

In real life I do not have multiple copies of me.

If you limit a player's skill mastery, you also limit the number of toons a person can have per server. Otherwise a person just uses crafting ALTS. Maybe Amazon realized that was not the way to go.

That then just leaves time.

How long does it take a player to skill up to a 200 level? Are the resources required to get from 150-200 Ultra rare? In the end, if a player wants, they can Master every skill. The questions becomes how much game time and dedication will it take to reach that point. Hopefully they have realized that getting to a 200 skill should be a great achievement and not something easily attained. If it is easy to get to, then the game losses the fundamental definition of Master.

Mahes said:

How long does it take a player to skill up to a 200 level?

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I think the skills go to 300?
If you just focus on it?, Not long at all I was level 20, (in 3days?) with 100+ in mining, 60+ in the other gathering skills. before I uninstalled the game. (instancing was the nail in the coffin, which all future content will be) The problem with new world is that is will be botted to all hell and back, it's just to easy to bot. nodes are on a static respawn, any idiot a macro can afk a node.

Utnayan said:

I guess I don't understand this since it takes so fucking long to travel anywhere. What was being abused?

I spent 87 minutes of the 120 I played running to and from. This was with a campfire - while running covenant missions around the second area and not having the ability to even teleport back to the fucking Inn more than once every 60 minutes.

This game so far makes traveling on Hoth in SWTOR look like traveling through the EC/South Ro tunnel in EQ.

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At a 5minute refresh you could pick and choose the missions you accepted. You could stack multiple Kill X enemy (Rabbits, Wolves, Goats, Lynxes, etc) and get multiple done at once. Or bypass kill quests entirely and just wait for the easy to complete armorsmith/weaponsmith/cooking quests that give even more XP and require only basic materials.

At a 30min refresh you can still technically do this but it takes significantly more time and if you are playing the game more actively you probably don't want to wait that long to continue progressing.

Overall I'm not surprised at the change and almost welcome it because just farming Tier 2 resources over and over for crafting quests was pretty sleeper but man the level xp you get for just killing NPCs needs to be increased.

This was very similar to the Faction Mission quest cheese from last years preview where players (myself included) were stacking multiple delivery quests to all go to the same settlement and turning in 15-20 quests at once gaining multiple levels. It seems like delivery missions were scrapped entirely or at least I haven't seen any out of Windsward yet.

I feel like New World is still suffering from an identity crisis. WAR and Rift suffered from this as well. I worry that ultimately New World will suffer a similar fate it's just the MMO community has greater opportunity to be exposed to games earlier and more platforms to be more vocal.

New World has already went from Open-World, PvP Centered to instanced, "Sorry, here's your PvE content" type of game. Is that for the better? I have no idea, I played more than 6-8 months ago probably. However, I am concerned the game will continue to evolve to a shell of its former self. Again, that might be good but I was more excited with their earlier vision than what I'm seeing today.

Believe me, I hope I'm pleasantly surprised but WAR and Rift had incredible potential but I feel, in my opinion, they bent to the will of the people that did not have the best interest of the game long term. I just wish I could tell if this is the same path New World is taking or were they just overly ambitious and couldn't execute or is this all for the better?

xmod2 said:

No offense, but if the game is designed around cracking open a monster zero ultra, solo grinding and dabbling in a little pvp before heading out to a PTA meeting or whatever, then the game will be DOA. Anyone who plays faster than you will get bored and quit after they non-life consume the content (because there are still 20 something no lifers out there) and there won't be anyone to PVP with. Designing the game for the no-lifer 20 something still leaves plenty of content and space for 40 year olds to play casually. This will always be a problem with pvp focused games. You need a critical mass of players to provide content, but you need enough content to keep them online so pvp can happen.

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The no-lifers need to be a status symbol for the plebes. But game should still be fun for the plebes as well... which is where WoW has failed.

Utnayan said:

I guess I don't understand this since it takes so fucking long to travel anywhere. What was being abused?

I spent 87 minutes of the 120 I played running to and from. This was with a campfire - while running covenant missions around the second area and not having the ability to even teleport back to the fucking Inn more than once every 60 minutes.

This game so far makes traveling on Hoth in SWTOR look like traveling through the EC/South Ro tunnel in EQ.

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Streamers were abusing crafting quests by taking only those, abandoning the ones that werent crafting quests and waiting for refresh to get new crafting quests. Then theyd run around outside their town for a couple minutes chopping trees down and spend the rest of the 5 minute CD waiting for their simps to trade them crafting mats so theyd be 20 levels higher than anyone levelling normally

So, I went to login last night to play some more. I click on my character, and it says that the server is down for maintenance. I thought about making another character. Then I remembered how many hours I had already put in to harvesting to get my mining up, and was like fuck that. Logged out and loaded up EQ.