At the time of posting I have put 117 hours into the New World Preview and have both loved it and hated it. I have played the game mostly solo or in a 2-man group and run a few breach trains. I have run a substantial amount of pvp quests as well as every story quest on the map except for the Cutlass and First Light region as well as any quests that I might have been locked out of levelwise. I also have a relatively small amount of MMO experience when it comes to ‘theme parks’ however I have enjoyed and put time into MMOs such as OSRS and Darkfall.
Let me talk about what this game both does and does not do well. COMBAT | The game has in my opinion a great foundation for combat with some major flaws, the game’s combat feels like it was built for 1 on 1 dueling more than anything and in almost all cases is quite fun to fight an appropriately leveled enemy mob. I’ll explain later the issues with combat in the more in-depth part of the overview.
This game does have some decent quests however they are end-game and not memorable, in fact I have almost no idea what I have actually done in the game in terms of story except for collecting supplies from farms, graveyards, villages, docks etc. There are a few exceptions such as the early main story mission where you eventually meet Thorpe at the quest corruption monolith. There was also some other mission about following a Ranger through the Great Cleave which was something different at least. Besides this I have absolutely no idea what the story is or what I have done.
Crafting is a mixed bag in this game, personally I think for both quests and crafting the New World devs should take a good look at Runescape for inspiration. New World should have many more tiers of gear to craft as well as quests that reward you with crafting XP for different crafting types. Players should be able to grind just their crafting level if they want. Different Types of crafting should also relate to certain types of gathering.
The pvp in this game is quite fun with a few exceptions in the combat system. Pvp quests however suck, they need to be seriously looked at because as of right now they are the same quest over and over and most of the time there aren’t other people to fight with the exception of Everfall which sometimes had other flagged players at Arcturus. Wars are very fun but give no meaningful rewards for helping out another guild of the same faction.
This game’s pve is all over the place, some places are designed for groups of 5 and others for solo players. This is fine however when I explore a new place there is no indicator if I’m walking into a place meant for groups or solos. One of the better examples of this is in the Shattered Mountain region where there are tons of copy-paste forts some have a doable amount of enemies and some forts have triple the amount with really messed up aggro radii that if you hit one archer on the wall it pulls the whole first half of the fort. This game is well suited for tons of different content in the future.
The gear system is also all over the place, the idea of weapon caches and armor caches can be fun but also can feel like a huge disappointment. Gear perks are also so lackluster and just boring, durability is something that shouldn’t exist and with the current repair system rolling durability on a piece of armor is boring and next to useless. I would scrap the durability system and just force people to respawn at their nearest respawn location instead of destroying player’s items for attempting hard solo content. If you want to keep a system like this in place look at Diablo 3’s gear system and make non-combat traits secondary traits instead of primary, pulling an epic sword just to see traits like durability and luck is just boring and not dopamine inducing. Gear score is a strange way of displaying just the base stats of the weapon, it should include the traits into the score in some way imo. Gathering and crafting gear should also not be rewards for combat, move crafting and gathering gear to be rewards from crafting and gathering quests.
My goal of the in-depth review is to try and provide suggestions to make the game’s systems more fun and less frustrating without reworking the existing framework.
1.1. Staggering is a very commonly brought up mechanic and for good reason, at this point in time staggering is NOT FUN. The reward for hitting an enemy should not be combo hitting the enemy another 10 times.
SOLUTION: Both Players and NPCs should only be able to be staggered once every few seconds, this should help get rid of the stagger spam from fast attacking melee weapons and making the combat a bit more interesting. This also buffs slower attacking weapons by allowing a larger percentage of those weapon’s attack to cause staggers. (Hammers might stagger every attack or every other attack while hatchets stagger every 4-5 attacks)
1.2. TWS or Three Weapon System, I like the idea of this system a lot but it lacks a little bit of depth right now. I believe that shared cooldowns stop spell spam and allow different weapon builds less one-dimensional however there needs to be more options.
SOLUTION: Add either 1 or 2 more ‘Cooldown Slots’ as well as adding maybe 10-15 more weapon types to the game. Fire Staff, Life Staff, Void Staff, Frost Staff, Shock Staff, Two-Hand Sword, Greataxe, Mace, Morningstar, Longbow, Shortbow, Crossbow etc. Some of these weapons could have spells in their tree to make them more fantasy like maybe morningstar's give paladin-like abilities.
1.3. Weapons talent trees are boring in this iteration of the game and are not very intuitive. The current iteration also makes you want to respec for every different situation which I find to be very unfun, I would much rather we didn’t have to respec and could simply just shuffle around the spells on their CD bar.
SOLUTION: I think it would be healthier for each weapon to have many more abilities and they should be a linear level progression, lvl1 sword has whirlwind, lvl3 gets shield bash, the passives could be reworked into a separate tree that you get a point every time you get a mastery level or possibly once you reach max level in your weapon you can start unlocking passive buffs. I would say a good starting point is for each weapon to have 15-20 skills. This also would mean that players should be allowed to have the same weapon equipped up to three times so that you could play as a full sword and shield ‘class’ or as a mixture of 3 different weapons. Right now your cooldown slots are forced to be shared with 3 different weapons so I can’t play a class which has access to all 3 sword and shield skills. This would also allow you to have a set of cooldown slots for dueling and another for Area-of-Effect damage without changing weapons. Maybe only having 2 weapons equipped but having 5 - 6 abilities is worth thinking about?
2.1. Quests in this game all provide the same boring reward for doing tedious boring tasks. Quests are not memorable and do not provide anything interesting to the game, they are only a way to level and get quest gear.
SOLUTION: The only quests that should ever feel like repeats of one another are randomly generated quests such as PVP or town quests. Runescape is a good example of having quests that make sense, have character, and are hardly if ever repetitive. There should also be quest NPCs placed out in the world hidden away in dungeons or caves so that you might find them and do unique quests. The game right now puts all the quest NPCs in the same place in each region which makes the game one of running out to objectives and returning over and over and over again. This game also needs to write a compelling story for itself with interesting characters.
2.2. Quests are very imbalanced in the games current iteration, many quests are too easy or too hard.
SOLUTION: Story quests should be balanced around solo play since many MMO players want to be able to hop on and play the game without needing to form a group to get through your personal missions. Group quests could be added but they should warn the player and be their own set of quests. The worst offenders of imbalanced quests at this point in time are the ones in Shattered Mountain where you need to loot a full fort full of 20-30+ enemies that all aggro off of eachother.
3.1. Crafting progression feels extremely uneven, It takes many times more effort to craft tier 4 than it does to craft tier 3 almost jarringly slow. Tier 4 weapons require 4 tier 4 requirements to craft anything, tier 4 forge, starmetal, layered leather, and wyrdwood planks.
SOLUTION: Each type of crafting should be based off one or two skills maxed. It should only require woodcutting and woodworking to create bows or mining and metalworking to create melee weapons and metal armor. This will create more crafting diversity, in the current system if you want to craft something you will become the master of crafting every material. Crafting / gathering should also be harder to level or scale differently to give crafters a better sense of progression, it might also be a possibility to let players specialize in certain types of crafting to stop players from being able to craft everything by themselves and incentivize trading. Should gems be mined from gem rocks or kept as rare mining drops?
3.2. Speaking of trading, the trading post seems like an afterthought and for whatever reason the trading posts seem quite barren.
SOLUTION: In order to keep with the idea of resources being localized and resources being more expensive the harder they are for you to get I think it is worth looking into cross server local trading. IE all Everfall trading posts are linked across servers so oil in Everfall is still more expensive than in Weaver’s Fen but there are more options and competition in each local trading post.
3.3 Crafting in New World has obviously had a lot of thought put into it but it also lacks variety.
SOLUTION: Craftable Uniques and upgrading uniques. I’ll explain more in the PVE section of this review but there should be certain PVE enemies that drop craftable resources, for example you might fight a named NPC X who drops X’s bone shards which can be used to create different weapons or armor that have that unique properties stylized around X’s theme. Then these items might also be upgradable to keep them relevant in some way.
3.4. Gathering can get boring just hitting the same plain trees all the way up to level 200. There is nothing interesting leveling gathering and no sense of progression and then after you farm 200 levels you only need to farm 50 more to hit the end-game.
SOLUTION: Gathering and crafting need to be looked at, there are a lot of mines and lumberyard and farms in the world base some quests around these locations and break up the monotony of just hitting trees for levels. Maybe once you hit level 200 woodcutting you unlock a quest to cut some wood from a sacred Angry Earth tree hidden away from the world to unlock new special crafting materials for enchantments!
4.1. PVE has both been very fun and very infuriating, it seems like some mobs have not been playtested and are just not fun to play against, one of the worst examples I can think of are the vehemence and hewscar patrollers. These shield and hatchet wielding enemies always have their block up or are performing an uninterruptible attack which stagger combos with itself a little too quickly not allowing for a block. They also seem to have no cooldown on there uninterruptible and will sometimes chain up to 3 combos. Their hatchet attack hitboxes are also horrendous sometimes hitting players with their model being 2 meters away.
SOLUTION: It seems like some mobs have been half-baked, their attacks and stuff were added but not playtested against to see if a well-timed dodge will actually dodge their attacks. Ideally mobs in a game like this will have correct answers to avoid damage in most situations. Also attacking one ranger on the top of a fort wall should not pull the entire fort. 4.2. Endgame PVE from what I can tell is currently not very difficult. The Arenas should have a certain role in the game, when people reached the spriggan arena the assumption was it was an endgame raid that would likely not be beaten on the first try. In its current state arenas are used to farm XP which is fine but a little bit of a letdown.
SOLUTION: I say ‘solution’ but this is really more of a discussion since I feel there are a lot of routes the developers could go down to create fun and long-lasting content. I will simply discuss the different types of endgame content and what to watch out for when implementing different types. Let’s start off with the most abusable and sticky types of content, WORLD BOSSES. The issue with world bosses is that in an open word setting they can be zerged and bogged down. I believe you have 2-3 solutions to world bosses, to deal with zerging world bosses should be in their own arena type rooms that are designed to make it hard to fight them with too many people, Malevolence somewhat follows this approach but ideally you should design a room to fit X amount of people and then have the world boss balanced around fighting X amount of people with a lot of boss mechanics and resistance. World bosses should (and they might already?) have unique drops, I think if world bosses are meant to be farmed they should drop boss-specific crafting materials to allow high level crafters to craft legendary boss armor. World bosses seem to fall into 2 categories which would be unkillable powerhouses that should take an organized group to have a chance of killing or a still very strong boss that has rare drops and is farmed to make very late-game gear. If world bosses are meant to be farmed then there should be instanced extremely hard raids with leaderboards that essentially require both high skill and powerful gear to defeat. I think one of the best ways to add difficulty to the pve game is to have these bosses have mechanics that kill players without allowing them to be revived. INSTANCED BOSSES these bosses are almost always good for a game and allow for a more structured form of play within a crazy open world game. These bosses could be placed at the end of world dungeons like the myrkgard arena or be their own boss at the end of an instanced dungeon. I think a system like this can either have extremely powerful hard to beat bosses that feel like a real accomplishment to beat or ‘speed run’ dungeons where people try to clear less impressive dungeons in the fastest time possible almost like diablo greater rifts.
4.3. DUNGEONS like all world content it has the issue of being zerged the current elite dungeons in the game fill their current role but should probably have more interesting rewards for completing the dungeon. The problem with these dungeons is they really only appeal to parties of multiple, this is fine but it leaves less content for groups of <5. SOLUTION: Dungeons should be prevalent everywhere in the world for all types of levels. These dungeons should also contain 2 or 3 designs, Solo dungeons 3man dungeons and 5man dungeons. Dungeons should be only accessible by traveling in the world to the dungeon entrance with places to set up camps outside. I know the philosophy behind New World is to make the world feel like a world and as such there should be no ‘dungeon finder’ or anything of the sort. Players should be able to go out and do solo dungeons or find small groups to join and attempt 3man or 5man dungeons appropriate for their level. These dungeons could also tie into quests and having interesting characters as bosses or maybe found within the dungeons. I think the core combat gameplay really suits 1 on 1 sword fighting or small adventuring parties which is antithetical to world dungeons. This doesn’t mean I think world content is bad; it should just be balanced around their most abusable aspects. High level world bosses and dungeons placed in the more newbie zones would also encourage high level players and therefore higher valued products to circulate in these zones settlements. Dungeons should also have detailed damage statistics at the end of the dungeon so players can look at their performance and adapt however they would like.
4.4. Ranged PVE, this has been a very controversial topic within the game and that is ranged attacks being blocked by allied players. This is extremely frustrating for someone who wants to play a ranged class focused around doing damage and being absolutely griefed by their allies.
SOLUTION: You have 2 ways of changing this since in its current iteration it is just pure unfun and limits the amount of viable weapons in the game. You either need to make enemies much taller than players so range can shoot over them, OR you will need to only enable collision in PVP events be it wars or other PVP. I like the idea of having players block each other's shots in a PVP setting so that you can’t just put up a shield wall and have your allies shoot through it to hit the enemy but it is absolutely awful when trying to fight hordes of smaller enemies or even just enemies approximately the size of players.
4.5. Fighting against ranged enemies. Ranged enemies in the current iteration are the absolutely most infuriating thing to play against after being attacked just a few times they will run super far away typically forcing you to pull other mobs or be hit by them. SOLUTION: ranged mobs should be allowed to have mobility and be somewhat evasive but only when it makes sense, if you want archers to get help from their allies melee mobs then just place them in a spot where it makes sense, they should be able to run away but they really shouldn’t run farther away than like 10 meters before manning up and attacking again. Enemies like the impalers are fairly decent in their current state but they could be tuned down a bit, maybe have their run away mechanic on somewhat of a cooldown and counterbalance it by giving mobs that the devs feel die too fast more HP. I would rather the enemy be tankier and easier to hit than evasive and infuriating to chase down and kill. Frustrating pve will drive players away from the game. In some cases these evasive mobs will reset themselves which is just a terrible and surely a not intended interaction.
4.6. Non boss mobs should never have invincibility frames, I think the worst offender I have seen so far for this are the corrupted entities / demons. There are many times where they will freely move and not take damage.
SOLUTION: It is fine to allow mobs to have free movement with their special attacks and dodges but they should never cheat the player out of a hit. If you feel like a mob should take less damage in any way, just increase their health pool and let players have the satisfaction of landing hits.
4.7. Staggering makes pve fairly boring. It is usable when playing 1 on 1 pve but if you have 1 friend it becomes a very boring stagger fest where you can just permalock mobs to their death. I found the most interesting combat to be when my friend would use ranged so we wouldn’t stunlock things to death.
SOLUTION: You could probably apply the same anti-stagger for pvp to pve or figure something else out there are plenty of options!
5.1. Staggering, as of right now staggering is not a fun mechanic to play against since it happens after almost every hit. Stagger is a mechanic to punish a player for messing up, after a player is staggered and hit again they shouldn’t be punished again since they weren’t supposed to have any counterplay in the first place.
SOLUTION: There are many solutions to this issue but the real issue is to fix the issue while still allowing combat to feel very tangible. I personally would test only allowing a player to be staggered once every 2-3 seconds. This should allow players to be staggered, take damage then be able to reset their stance.
5.2. Pvp quests are extremely boring and I’m sure more variety will be added later but as of right now there are 5 different quests being loot zone 1, loot zone 2, loot zone 3, delivery, and patrol zones 1 2 3.
SOLUTION: I don’t know the best solution to this current problem, it might be to rework factions, remove factions, I’m not really sure but as of right now it’s one of the best and most uninteresting ways to earn xp mainly due to lack of forced pvp that actually occurs on these quests. Maybe add bonuses to the XP when you kill another player to incentivize players to attack each other and double their XP gain rather than just wait until they leave so you can get your 12k XP in mourningdale.
5.3. PVP Reward, rewards for pvp can be tricky and hard to balance since it is a system built upon players and it can also be one of the most abused systems in the game.
SOLUTION: I don’t have a perfect solution for this issue either but I do know that in order for a player driven system to work there should be equal give and take to an encounter. One solution could be to have a sort of pvp ranking system where you gain reputation for killing other players. Then depending on ranking when one player kills another player they lose a portion of gold based on the difference between their reputation. For example if a rep 3 player kills another rep 3 player the dead player loses 100 gold and the winner receives that gold. If a rep 5 player kills a newbie / rep 1 player the newbie only loses 10 gold and the rep 5 player receives that 10 gold. Rep could also be visible so a high rep player would know not to kill a newbie. There should also be greater rewards for war. Maybe when you declare war you can bet a certain amount of items on each and the side that bets more value worth of items and gold gets some sort of advantage in the war since they are risking more. Then whoever wins the war receives the loser’s bet.
5.4. This is one of the lesser issues in the game but I don’t think pvp scaling should be as harsh as it is but the better geared and higher leveled player should have an advantage over a low level low geared player. Right now in pvp levels and gear essentially don’t matter everyone might as well be fighting naked with sticks.
SOLUTION: The devs should look into how much sense this system makes within the game. It seems silly right now that some godlike geared player at high level has little or no advantage over underleveled players.
5.5. There is a lack of PVP in New World for some of the reasons listed above. PVP is in it’s own way it’s own community as many have probably experienced either in your global chats or on these forums. Basically there should be hubs for PVP’ers to gather around.
SOLUTION: Arenas, and yes I know arenas are mentioned by everyone but imagine this, in each server there exists only a few arenas that players can sit and watch other players fight in these arenas are somewhat rare and maybe only 2 or 3 exist in the many settlements across Aeternum. Arenas allow for ranked and unranked 1v1, 3v3, and 5v5 combat and each of these unique settlements has their own local pvp player ranking. These would be chill spots for the community to gather and watch well renowned players of the server duke it out for fame.
6.1. The gear system needs a good hard look at it, the jumps in gear power is somewhat underwhelming. It seems pretty ridiculous to me that a group of low levels can zerg through open world zones.
SOLUTION: In my opinion the power jump from level 35 to 50 should happen about every 5 levels. I want to feel like there is always more content to do and I think the best way to do that is to essentially level / gear ‘lock’ out of zones by making those zones be too hard for them to do. In the games current state level 40s can zerg and take on myrkgard be it messy and hard but after you do that type of content at level 40 then it feels like there is much less of a reason to level up because you can ‘experience’ the endgame content. 6.2. Void damage, and fire damage, and lightning damage oh my! This has to be one of the more disappointing parts of the gear system. In a lot of cases getting elemental damage on your weapon is a downgrade! WHY! The converted damage doesn’t benefit from your primary stat and in general is bland and boring, you get void damage to fight the corrupted just to find out they have high resistance to void damage.
SOLUTION: Change these magical enchantments to be effects that don’t detract from the weapon’s power. Fire could apply a stacking burn, frost could apply a slow, void could burn mana, etc. maybe these aren’t the best idea for effects but you get the idea. Right now the magical weapons look cooler than the plain weapons but tend to underperform in most situations sadly.
6.3. Boring traits. Durability and luck, just because lucky is useful doesn’t mean it should take up a combat slot. Durability is just useless since you can just press TAB then R Left-Click and E to repair a broken item.
SOLUTION: Give weapons and armor secondary and primary traits similar to Diablo. Make traits that improve your abilities more accessible like the ‘for every enemy hit by whirling blade reduce the cooldown of whirling blade by 4% up to 40%’ That is a GOOD trait. It makes it so I can try to craft weapons to fit my playstyle if I wanted to be a sword user. The more weapon unique and playstyle traits the better.
6.4. Gathering gear, this is something that needs to change and I really mean it. Gathering gear is not something I should EVER receive if I am not doing something related to that gear. The gear you get in game should either be crafted or related to whatever you are doing within the game.
SOLUTION: Lock gathering gear behind gathering and crafting questlines, players who are not focusing on gathering and crafting should not receive extremely powerful gathering and crafting gear. Lock gathering gear behind trade skill levels and questlines. This will give crafting and gatherers a lot more reward for specializing since in the current iteration of the game it makes more sense to power level to high level gathering gear and then start gathering and crafting.
6.5. Rare gear sets? Do they exist? Kinda? You can receive plague doctor items from the breach chests are there other unique or rare item sets because I haven’t seen them.
SOLUTION: I like the idea of locking certain gear sets behind certain content, in fact it’s a great idea! This allows gear to not only protect you but show off your accomplishments of your character, plague doctor? You’ve grinded and destroyed a lot of breaches. Corrupted Spriggan armor? You’ve put a lot of work into learning the spriggan arena fight and getting the Spriggan’s rare drops. More of this in the game is good! Maybe you will implement dungeons that give you crafting components that can be used to make legendary armor. There are a lot of options here!
6.6. Durability, this is one of the most lame parts about the current gear system, a green item with durability might as well be a common it doesn’t provide anything cool about the item.
SOLUTION: Right now durability is used to balance out killing your player and respawning to teleport. You have two solutions to this problem, 1. If a player dies then send them to their nearest respawn point, don’t let them choose. Or 2. Allow players to travel to their tents as a fast travel point. Both of these systems will get rid of the need for the boring durability system.
7.1. The stat system when leveling is okay but isn’t very interesting. Basically I can level damage, damage, damage, cooldown, or hp. SOLUTION: You have a few options here. Personally I would add a passive skill tree for players to level through every time they level up as well as making strength/dex/int give more bonuses than just damage. Right now in the game levels don’t feel like they mean much except for unlocking gear tiers. Maybe to make higher level content harder for super underleveled characters there should be some damage mitigation/modifier to make a level 60 impossible for a level 45 or maybe 50 to kill.
SUMMARY In short combat is fun but has some very frustrating flaws that will drive players away from the game. Crafting needs to be separated from the rest of the game so players who just want to craft and do unique crafting quests and missions can do so and strive to be the best crafter on the server. Quests need much more variety and story, quests should also not always cause the player to return back to the settlement. PVP needs to really be looked at and figure out what it’s place in the game is and what rewards players should receive for participating. PVE needs more solo and party endgame competitive progression and challenge dungeons / arenas / whatever that allow players to strive for a goal that may take months to accomplish but can also be experienced in low level variety. Gear needs to be separated in terms of availability and purpose, make gathering gear obtained through gathering / crafting / and gathering quests, make more ‘uniques’ craftable by getting crafting materials from bosses or dungeons. You might also think about adding some sort of encyclopedia similar to runescapes so people know what types of items are out there to be earned.
CONCLUSION I really love this game and the idea of the potential of this game, obviously I do or else I wouldn’t have spent all this time writing up this review and playing the game. This review might come across as demanding which I don’t really mean for it to. I just want to see this game be amazing since it is a very unique combination of many different game elements. I wanted my feedback to stay somewhat in-line with the already developed philosophies of New World and hope that the implementation of these mechanics and content will be doable. The team has a lot of work ahead of them and I hope the devs find this feedback helpful. I wish the New World team the best and hope that come launch time this title will kick serious ass.