New World, Day Six Bullet Points

Bullet points because I don’t feel like writing an essay.

• I’ve reached level 18. The old man by the river who sounds like Danny Glover, who appears to be the first and only recurring NPC with any kind of personality or backstory in the game, is trying to get me to become a Soulwarden and make an Azoth Staff.
• The “new game smell” of New World has already worn off for me. If I had another game to play, I’d drop this one in a hot second. I logged out Friday night knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to log back in again, because I was just weary of playing it. I could have played all day Saturday but I only played a couple hours.
• I still don’t experience much queueing on Hanan Pacha. If I login any time before about 6 PM, there’s no queue or just a few minutes of queue. By 8-9 PM, however, the queue can take a half hour or so.
• Hanan Pacha was marked as “full,” so no new players. I can confirm it’s pretty crowded (by my standards, at least, who generally prefers not to see a single other soul in MMORPGs) it’s almost impossible to find a place where there isn’t somebody wandering around.
• I keep reading everyone talking about “how much stuff there is to do!” And I keep looking at this game thinking that every activity basically boils down to one of these things:
  • Gathering things
  • Killing things
  • Running back and forth
• New World reminds me of Outward in some strange way. The running part, at least. All the running. Running, running, running, all the time. This is a game for people with lots and lots of spare time and no pressing appointments. People who like WoW Classic pre-level 40.
• Every town looks exactly the same.

• There are lots of artifacts and monoliths out in the environment that have no purpose whatsoever except to stand in front of and take a screenshot. There are never any NPCs standing by the road who need help at that location, no NPCs to explain what the things are or why they’re there, no plaques or signs explaining what they are, nothing. Just non-interactive scenery everywhere.
• There are boxes and buckets and wagon wheels beside every road for inexplicable reasons.
• Just like ESO’s launch, I doubt many people will still be playing New World in a month.
• Combat in New World feels super laggy and janky with random hit boxes and inexplicable rules. I like precision and repeatability in combat, there’s none of that here. It’s even worse than ESO’s combat, if you can believe that. Everything is so, so obviously balanced around PvP that nothing makes much sense for PvE. None of the weapons are particularly good or effective. I’ve settled on the brute force giant axe/life staff combo because high risk/high reward weaponry seems most sensible in this laggy environment where dodging and blocking isn’t responsive enough most of the time, and you can heal up faster for less down time with the life staff.

• I need to revise my previous assessment of the combat being easy. The overland questing difficulty is somewhat akin to WildStar’s, in that it’s a long, tedious process to make your way through to quest objectives. The mob density is high, and the mob respawn rate is high, so if you’re by yourself, you have to be really careful and work your way through things slowly. You can’t run away, because you’ll run right back into all the mobs respawning behind you. It’s a bit like WoW Classic in that regard, too. I predict some years from now we’ll all be nostalgic for how the game used to be hard because they’ll probably be nerfing all of this in future updates.
• Just now I had to give up on “Adiana’s Fountain,” a quest where you have to destroy Clotting Carapaces located smack in the middle of a camp full of bad guys and tentacles that shoot at you. I’m level 18, the quest is level 17, and the mobs are level 15. Most of the people I saw running around there were in their 20s. There’s just too many mobs that spawn too fast, and I apparently don’t have enough damage output to get in there by myself yet. So I’ll have to go back later I guess.
• I tried signing up for a war and that system makes no sense. I thought it would just plop everyone in a map at the appropriate time and there’d be a big zerg versus zerg battle, like every other game in the world, but you have to sign up for a “spot” and get put into a raid group and maybe you’ll be on standby if you don’t get picked and all kinds of weird company-based elitism that didn’t make any sense. Seemed like being back in school hoping you don’t get picked last for the sports team. I unsigned up.

• I don’t know where the makers of this game are located in the world, but at one time this game was supposed to resemble North America, but the 3D modelers apparently aren’t aware of what deer look like in North America. They walk through my back yard all the time and they don’t look like that.
• New World seems to favor play sessions of indeterminate length, so it forces its time schedule upon you. You don’t really know how long it’s going to take to go out to a place and back. Big problem for people who, you know, have lives.
• I still don’t see any reason to think New World doesn’t exist solely to be a live test platform to find and fix the problems in Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine offering.
• Despite all its jankiness, for some reason I keep logging in, mainly because it’s new, and everyone’s talking about it. It’s not terrible, but it’s got many years of updates ahead of it before it reaches a AAA MMORPG status.