Hey guys. I’ve been playing New World for a while and I’ve got a few hours in the game and I wanted to share my point of view.
Firstly, I’m mostly a PvE player that only dabbles in PvP at endgame. So take my opinions for what they’re worth from that perspective. I was lucky enough to have played most if not all of the testing phases of New World and I’ve gotten to understand the game through its myriad of versions fairly well. I feel that the game has some blind spots that really make it hard for me to enjoy it as a PvE experience.
1: Combat: It’s enjoyable as you level up and find your preferred weapon and style of play. But the mobs are very easy to kill and are pretty “dumb” from an AI point of view. Solo-play is fun and engaging but quickly becomes monotonous if you just stay with one weapon set. I found that if I change things up and use various weapons throughout the leveling process the game becomes less repetitive.
1a: Combat in Groups: I don’t like this aspect of NW. Initially you might think that the combat requires a “holy trinity” mindset, but as you level up and gear up you come to realize that the combat is basically a big zerg. (
Yes there are boss “mechanics” but after learning these, you end up just face-rolling your keyboard 90% of the time.)
2: UI/UX: The UI is garbage unless you’re running an ultrawide monitor (
but it has gotten progressively better over iterations). I feel that it’s a terrible use of screen space. Yes, I will admit that it’s light years ahead of most, if not all other MMOs out there. But there are several issues I have with it and hope Amazon will address. (
Keep in mind, that this will likely get better after the game launches)
Having no option to re-scale or move any of the unit frames or UI elements is a HUGE turn off for me. I have always enjoyed making my UI fit my style and gameplay behaviors, and not having this sucks.
Also, there should be an optional minimap that can be enabled/disabled. Not having this feature as default is pretty dumb IMHO. (and fuck off with your, you can just press M). When you have a questing system with targets and P.O.I’s, you should be able to have a minimap for your own QoL. While I love the UI, it’s ‘minimalist’ style and it’s ‘reactive’ nature, Amazon needs to put the UI layout into the hands of the player.
3: Crafting: I like it the way it is. (
though there are some resources/recipes that are a weird bottleneck)
4: Gathering: Enjoyable but there are some bottlenecks that need to be addressed. (
for example, Logging and Mining seem to be a bit more ‘grindy’ than other gathering skills)
5: Questing: It is what it is. Until massive improvements in NPC AI start coming to games, I just accept that questing is a needed although silly time sink. The questing in this game does nothing to progress the main story line. (
I only have some vague concept of the overarching story in this game, and I’ve been playing since the start)
6: Leveling: Barring the Community board experience rewards being WAY too high, I think the leveling curve is solid where it is now.
7: Companies: There really should have been an easier way for company members to share loot/drops (
company storage/chest etc). Hopefully this will be in the release. (T
here used to be shared storage in the alphas from the past when they allowed company base building.)
8: Factions: It remains to be seen how Amazon is going to keep things ‘balanced’ for the players who just happen to join a faction that has minimal numbers. I foresee this being one of the most annoying aspects of the endgame.
9: Economy: I think this is where players are going to “break the game”. I say this loosely because I love the fact that if you want to become a dominant economist, you can monopolize the high end loot/materials if you choose to do so. I think this idea will likely cause many servers to become “economically dead”. (
I’m on the fence about a total player built economy, but part of me really loves the idea of having item monopolies.)
10: Dungeons/Expeditions: They’re fun but still suffer from the zerg/spam mentality. Holy trinity doesn’t seem particularly reliable at any level. Maybe they need to work on threat a bit more.
11: Loot/Rewards: I don’t even know where to start with this one. I don’t like the itemization throughout the entire leveling process. Quest rewards are hit or miss (
mostly miss). And for the love of god I don’t know why we can’t just choose our own reward/loot type. At the bare minimum, let us choose the weapon type for quest/expedition rewards.
12: PvP: I put this last because honestly I don't do PvP all that much. What time I’ve spent doing it (
wars/open world etc) was predominantly just a massive zerg and spam-fest. Solo PvP and duels are quite fun, but group PvP is pretty mind-numbing to me.
Overall I will definitely be playing this at launch, but like others have mentioned, I will probably struggle to remain playing this game a month after level cap. Here’s hoping they patch some content in fairly quickly.
TLDR - New World is worth playing in the short term, but it may have trouble locking in the long term players if they don’t address some of the PvE shortcomings.
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