New World - Still haven't found what they're looking for (beta opinion)

Iselin

Don't get me wrong, I like this game and I will definitely be playing it when it releases but that's purely my personal opinion after weighing what I find good about the game and what I don't - the positives and especially its potential, far outweigh the negatives for me... YMMV.

But it's also hard to ignore the feeling I get when delving into some of the finer details that right along with the last minute technical polish, bug smashing, exploit quashing and balancing, they are still feeling their way around some very basic design decisions that may more appropriately belong to the pre-alpha design stages.

Some examples.

Yes, the game needed some on demand, repeatable PvE and PvP group content to supplement the large and somewhat rare events (50 v. 50 PvP Wars and 50 player vs. mob invasion PvE) they already had and they spent a large portion of the last year implementing that. There are now several high quality dungeons or in NW terms "expeditions" starting at level 25 (should be earlier than 25 but whatever) but they really don't want you to do those as "on demand" as you'd think since they are gated behind a token that needs to be crafted (not a simple recipe either) in order to do the dungeon. That feels to me like ambivalence recognizing the game needed those but reluctance to do it in a way that makes them truly repeatable and on demand.

Kind of the same way with PvP battlegrounds. Yes they now have one that didn't exist last year but you must be level 60 to queue for it.

Then there is the visuals. The game is absolutely gorgeous and well rendered with very realistic looking environments, structures, fauna and flora... and then you can buy multi colored lions and rabbits as house decorations that look as out of place in the world as rocket powered skateboards would. And they're not just visible to the cash shop customer with no taste who buy them - they have a system where the top decorator for any given house instance has their house and decorations visible by default to any passerby. So you have these great environments and structures everywhere and then your senses are assaulted by rainbow lions and giant cyan rabbits whenever you're in a town.

And then there's healing and the lack of credit you get for healing for any purpose: XP gain, life staff leveling or WAR contribution scoreboards. The only time that healing counts is when you're in a group and heal someone in your group and even then the "credit" you get for it is small compared to credit you would get if you do damage. From a purely selfish perspective, if you're running around, see someone about to die to 4 mobs on them you'd get no credit for throwing them a heal and saving their ass, but if you instead let them die and kill the 4 mobs yourself you get experience for both yourself and your weapon. In 50 v. 50 wars? Forget about it. You'll get credit for healing your 4 group mates but not anyone else and once again the credit is very small compared to what you would get from getting a kill. I thought the need to give healing appropriate credit in PvP events or PvE healing had been firmly established in MMOs 20 years ago... maybe I'm wrong

There are also questing issues that I won't repeat here since they were already discussed in Joseph's article so I'll just mention a couple of things: that it currently feels like the conversion from full loot PvP sandbox to PvE MMO is not complete and that the random starting beach (1 of 4,) random town board and faction quests and lack of quest sharing is a serious impediment to PvE questing with friends in a group if that's how you want to play.

So what do I like about it?

I already mentioned the visuals and art style that are absolutely top notch and if anything, the soundscape is even better. Ambient as well as fighting and harvesting sounds are outstanding and the positional audio (if you have the headphones or speakers for it) is very accurate with appropriate fade by distance.

The combat frankly took me some getting used to but after just 2 weeks of beta, playing mostly casually, I'm not missing nearly as many ranged attacks as I was for the first few days. I also got much better at slowing it down some and timing defensive moves like blocks and dodges in these two weeks... I guess I just needed to git gud.

The harvesting and crafting are excellent and enjoyable with a lot of variety and depth and just enough. but not too much, RNG to make getting a critical crafting result enjoyable and not extremely rare.

In all honesty I'm not even sure there is still enough to keep the average player engaged for more than a couple or 3 months at the moment. I expect that will continue to change and improve over time but I don't feel a need to wait for that to happen. I'll play at release and if I get bored in 3 months so be it and I'll still feel like I got my money's worth.

Slapshot1188

I agree with pretty much everything you said, except this part:

"The only time that healing counts is when you're in a group and heal someone in your group and even then the "credit" you get for it is small compared to credit you would get if you do damage"

When I am in my group I don't even have to heal or hit anything.  I get credit for what my group kills.  At least as far as XP and faction gain go.  Am I missing something ?

Asm0deus

I agree Iselin's write up, it's pretty spot on. 

I would add the jumping is quite annoying...it doesn't feel right as you simply cant jump high enough and the fall damage needs a little tweaking IMO. 

Seems a non issue but for some reason games with no jumping or a pitiful version like in NW it makes the movement just feel far more sluggish.

Iselin

Slapshot1188 said:

I agree with pretty much everything you said, except this part:

"The only time that healing counts is when you're in a group and heal someone in your group and even then the "credit" you get for it is small compared to credit you would get if you do damage"

When I am in my group I don't even have to heal or hit anything.  I get credit for what my group kills.  At least as far as XP and faction gain go.  Am I missing something ?

No you're not missing anything. Being in a group gives you credit for just being there. You can go AFK and still get the same amount of XP as if you busted your ass healing

I'm talking more about no credit for healing the other 45 players in a WAR or "drive by" healing of someone in need or competitive credit for healing when 20 others are camping the same named boss.

That's not just old school no credit for healing, it's prehistoric school stuff. I remember that being a problem in DAoC 20 years ago at release but they fixed that after a few months. WOW also made the same mistake in their BGs back in the day and also corrected it eventually.

I'm sure they'll get it right here too but I'm just surprised a team makes the same mistake these many years later.

Slapshot1188

Gotchya

olepi

I agree, the game as is has some problems, but the potential is great. The world is a pleasure to be in. I figure the game will be a success, and it will change quite a bit in the next year or two.

It does feel like a game that isn't fully thought-out, probably because they changed the main vision for it in the last year. I see that as a positive though, the community said their direction wasn't good enough, and the devs listened and changed direction.

So it isn't fully baked yet, but it smells good and I want a bite now

Iselin

Asm0deus said:

I would add the jumping is quite annoying...it doesn't feel right as you simply cant jump high enough and the fall damage needs a little tweaking IMO. 

I agree. It's a bit weird. It's also a recent addition.

Last year there was no voluntary jumping just the auto traverse, which is an option now, when you ran into something that was traversable.

I tried playing with that option on but got annoyed when I couldn't interact with a well to get water and kept climbing on top of it instead lol.

YashaX

Iselin said:

Then there is the visuals. The game is absolutely gorgeous and well rendered with very realistic looking environments, structures, fauna and flora... and then you can buy multi colored lions and rabbits as house decorations that look as out of place in the world as rocket powered skateboards would. And they're not just visible to the cash shop customer with no taste who buy them - they have a system where the top decorator for any given house instance has their house and decorations visible by default to any passerby. So you have these great environments and structures everywhere and then your senses are assaulted by rainbow lions and giant cyan rabbits whenever you're in a town.

This is actually quite worrying to me because as you point out one of the great things about the game is its world and aesthetic. Those fluro house decorations and the recent weird offbeat advertising suggest they have hired someone with a wacky and imo totally out of place artistic sensibility for their design team. That doesn't bode well for the future direction of the game.

Tiller

I did find some of the enemy NPC design is pretty cool. Nothing like getting chased by legless corpses that creepily claw after you on their arms while screaming bloody murder.

Iselin

YashaX said:

Iselin said:

Then there is the visuals. The game is absolutely gorgeous and well rendered with very realistic looking environments, structures, fauna and flora... and then you can buy multi colored lions and rabbits as house decorations that look as out of place in the world as rocket powered skateboards would. And they're not just visible to the cash shop customer with no taste who buy them - they have a system where the top decorator for any given house instance has their house and decorations visible by default to any passerby. So you have these great environments and structures everywhere and then your senses are assaulted by rainbow lions and giant cyan rabbits whenever you're in a town.

This is actually quite worrying to me because as you point out one of the great things about the game is its world and aesthetic. Those fluro house decorations and the recent weird offbeat advertising suggest they have hired someone with a wacky and imo totally out of place artistic sensibility for their design team. That doesn't bode well for the future direction of the game.

I did post in their forums to give feedback on different things.

My suggestion to get rid of the color of the lions and rabbits met with positive response there and upvotes although I did have someone pushing back and asking if his magenta hair bothers me - it does actually but I didn't bother to respond

Same with my suggestion about lower level and more repeatable (i..e get rid of the need to use the token) dungeons as well as more and lower level BGs.

My suggestion about better credit for healing didn't amount to much I suspect because there's a lot of PvPer hate currently for the so-called "paladin build" of a life staff + great axe that deals a lot of damage and is virtually un-killable (it isn't when they run out of mana and/or you apply a disease debuff to them) due to the self heals so no one wants to hear any suggestions about improving anything about life staff users lol.

Tiller

I received this free due to pre-order when it was free, but at this point I'm just playing until Lost Ark I guess. On a side note, I dread walking place to place in this game, needs mounts bad.

Iselin

Tiller said:

 I dread walking place to place in this game, needs mounts bad.

It's not so bad once you have enough azoth to fast travel. unlock the different towns and fast travel shrines and buy a house.

The cheap house comes with a 4hr cool down to fast travel there but it only costs like 50 azoth to remove the cool down and use it again and just like the inn, you can travel to it from anywhere.

Once you're in a town you can fast travel to any other town or any shrine so the running distance to where you really want to go get shorter.

It's slow going initially but it gets better at ~ level 20+

Cryomatrix

i stopped playing at lvl 11. But that is because it is enough for me to play the game and why keep playing when they will just wipe. 

So i'll play on launch. I like the crafting a lot. I do think the jump animation is horrid, like worst jump animation in any game i've ever played. 

But yeah, i kind of liked it, then again, i was playing with a friend which i never usually do. 

nurso

What's all this talk about unrealised potential? We're not talking about an indie MMORPG with chronic financial problems, but Amazon's own game studio!

cheyane

Not getting healing credit properly as opposed to damage is why people avoid playing healers. Why does almost every game do this. They have to fix this since I enjoy playing healers. 

Thanks for the write up it was good to read other people's points of view too.

Scot

In combination with those generic fantasy armours they were showing off, the multicoloured home items do raise a question about their intention to stay true to the strong themes they have set out in the background of the world.

All MMORPG's have this issue, if I was already in game I would already be complaining. The originality of the games background concept combined with very good graphics creates a strong thematic look to the world, they need to realise how damaging it would be to throw that away.

Kyleran

nurso said:

What's all this talk about unrealised potential? We're not talking about an indie MMORPG with chronic financial problems, but Amazon's own game studio!

Probably wanted to release the game without having to go with Star Citizen length development times. (And costs)

Not uncommon to launch a MMP version and build from there, MMORPGS have been doing it for ages.

Amazon is a for profit business so they have to confirm the game can make money before sinking more into it to confirm that it's worth doing so and  sounds like it's just about there.

Still not quite baked enough to my liking, but I'm normally not an early adopter so I'll wait a while and let it mature some more before taking the plunge.

nurso

Kyleran said:

Probably wanted to release the game without having to go with Star Citizen length development times. (And costs)

Not uncommon to launch a MMP version and build from there, MMORPGS have been doing it for ages.

Amazon is a for profit business so they have to confirm the game can make money before sinking more into it to confirm that it's worth doing so and  sounds like it's just about there.

Then why did they bother to develop an MMORPG? If they wanted to spend less money and have a shorter development time, another genre would have been a better fit. And if NW turns out to be a mere market study, that would be quite an insult to the gaming community.

Slapshot1188

Jean-Luc_Picard said:

Iselin said:

Tiller said:

 I dread walking place to place in this game, needs mounts bad.

It's not so bad once you have enough azoth to fast travel. unlock the different towns and fast travel shrines and buy a house.

The cheap house comes with a 4hr cool down to fast travel there but it only costs like 50 azoth to remove the cool down and use it again and just like the inn, you can travel to it from anywhere.

Once you're in a town you can fast travel to any other town or any shrine so the running distance to where you really want to go get shorter.

It's slow going initially but it gets better at ~ level 20+

While I'd also like to see mounts added in a future expansion, but please only horses, no rainbow tigers of doom, actually the travel speed in NW works just like in all other MMORPGs, you get faster once you progress in the game. Azoth becomes very easy to get, I personally never ran out of it. Once you can solo the lower level corruption events (25+), it's even easier, but I didn't need that to almost always be at the Azoth cap once I passed level 15ish.

There is actually Lore scattered around that speaks to why there are no mounts.  They have been banned due to an "incident"...

Slapshot1188

Scot said:

In combination with those generic fantasy armours they were showing off, the multicoloured home items do raise a question about their intention to stay true to the strong themes they have set out in the background of the world.

All MMORPG's have this issue, if I was already in game I would already be complaining. The originality of the games background concept combined with very good graphics creates a strong thematic look to the world, they need to realise how damaging it would be to throw that away.

Keep in mind, we were given Store credit for free.  For all I know these house pets were just assets from a cancelled Amazon game and they tossed them in just to populate the Store.  At least that is what I hope... 

Kyleran

nurso said:

Kyleran said:

Probably wanted to release the game without having to go with Star Citizen length development times. (And costs)

Not uncommon to launch a MMP version and build from there, MMORPGS have been doing it for ages.

Amazon is a for profit business so they have to confirm the game can make money before sinking more into it to confirm that it's worth doing so and  sounds like it's just about there.

Then why did they bother to develop an MMORPG? If they wanted to spend less money and have a shorter development time, another genre would have been a better fit. And if NW turns out to be a mere market study, that would be quite an insult to the gaming community.

I dunno, next time I have lunch with Jeff I'll ask him about that.

Wizardry

I think the game and you guys got it all wrong on the design and healing.

Using the healing example it should be it's own skill and not bound to some global xp idea.

Players should be utilizing skills LOT'S of them and the game should NOT be so catered to gear.I have always detested gear scores and removing the player factor for gear.Gear does not defeat enemies but for some reason this stupid idea was pushed by so many games...cough Blizzard...cough.

FFXI got this right but of course there is AWLAYS room to improve on ideas.SO FXI had healing skills,enhancing skills"buffs"and many other skills for each class archetype.So the more you heal there is a chance of raising your skills and the developer can choose the threasholds to gaining skills.So for example you can't just stand there and spam heal friend to raise your skill,it has to actually be while engaged either pvp or pve and perhaps only when healing a player with at most 50% hp.
Player xp should not exist but instead show a combined level of all pertinent skills to enable the wearing of certain gear or using certain weapons or perhaps even the tier or  type of ability/spell.

So for example to be able to use an AOE heal you must have first attained a healing skill of 100 and every 50 levels of healing rises the AOE healing by 1 and every 50 AOE levels raises the AOE radius.

I am not saying yo uhave to follow my example word for word i am just pointing out a developer SHOULD >>THINK a bit and not just copy SIMPLE aged ideas that often don't make any sense at all.

olepi

Cryomatrix said:

i stopped playing at lvl 11. But that is because it is enough for me to play the game and why keep playing when they will just wipe. 

So i'll play on launch. I like the crafting a lot. I do think the jump animation is horrid, like worst jump animation in any game i've ever played. 

But yeah, i kind of liked it, then again, i was playing with a friend which i never usually do. 

I stopped playing around lvl 11 too, but not because I wanted to. I kept getting the black screen, and once a character got it, it was broken forever. Even logging out and back in didn't help, the character still had a black screen.

So I made a lot of characters and got them to lvl 10 or so before the bug would hit.  I tried out a bunch of different weapons, builds, etc.

I don't mind actually, since I wanted to save the real game for when it launches. I usually wait 6 months to a year after an MMORPG releases before I play it anyway.

Scot

Slapshot1188 said:

Jean-Luc_Picard said:

Iselin said:

Tiller said:

 I dread walking place to place in this game, needs mounts bad.

It's not so bad once you have enough azoth to fast travel. unlock the different towns and fast travel shrines and buy a house.

The cheap house comes with a 4hr cool down to fast travel there but it only costs like 50 azoth to remove the cool down and use it again and just like the inn, you can travel to it from anywhere.

Once you're in a town you can fast travel to any other town or any shrine so the running distance to where you really want to go get shorter.

It's slow going initially but it gets better at ~ level 20+

While I'd also like to see mounts added in a future expansion, but please only horses, no rainbow tigers of doom, actually the travel speed in NW works just like in all other MMORPGs, you get faster once you progress in the game. Azoth becomes very easy to get, I personally never ran out of it. Once you can solo the lower level corruption events (25+), it's even easier, but I didn't need that to almost always be at the Azoth cap once I passed level 15ish.

There is actually Lore scattered around that speaks to why there are no mounts.  They have been banned due to an "incident"...

Unfortunately when has lore ever stood in the way of a good cash shop item? I did hear there are so many "teleports" that mounts are not needed, no idea if that's true. As a mount fan I would hope the mounts come in and the teleporters get binned.

Theocritus

I was sure Kyleran would have a U2 link in this thread........

Iselin

Theocritus said:

I was sure Kyleran would have a U2 link in this thread........

Here you go. One of my favorites of their songs and also one of my favorite U2 videos: