I was participating in a discussion about PvP and decided to share a personal experience of mine to illustrate my point.
Later on, while thinking about it, I read what I had written and it struck me that this would be the perfect illustration of why meaning, purpose, is SO important, and why good content isn’t simply about features.
This is something that is very often overlooked by everyone, players and devs alike, and I really strongly believe that is crucial, essential. Copy paste bellow this line. (I’ll highlight the most relevant part if you want to skip the story).
I played New World for 1 year already, but it was a different game, this was during the first part of Alpha.
It was a harsh game, very punishing, but I loved it. I loved the challenge, and the rewards came from the gameplay itself rather than from a box that you open when you complete a quest.
For example, there was no flagging for pvp, everyone could be attacked all the time and if someone killed you, you dropped everything you carried (not what you were wearing).
That was hard, it was very punishing, but at the same time, one of my greatest memories was being attacked by a small group of players, running away as fast as I could, but one of them catching up.
Some mobs had attacked him and he had lost some HP, so I attacked him and managed to kill him, and he droped a lot of loot, a lot of very very valuable loot, which I grabbed, and ran away quick. But now, the players didn’t only want to kill me to kill me, they wanted their loot back, and they chased me across half the continent, calling in reinforcements from other settlements to try and catch me.
It was the most thrilling experience I had ever had in any game.
In the end, just like in the movies lol, I reached a precipice (fall damage was bigger back then) and managed to jump on a small rock in the middle, then jump down, I lost almost all my HP, and I ran and ran. Looking back, a couple of the players had followed me and died from the jump lol, some decided not to jump, and others were going down carefully.
I escaped, and hid in a remote part of the area, and waited, then, I ran to my settlement, by taking the long way round, it must have taken 30 minutes just to get there, and I droped all that loot in the storage.
It was EPIC, it was really an adventure, the kind that can’t ever happen in New World as it is.
But you see, in that game, I was happy to spend 20 minutes waiting in a bush, prone, doing nothing, just waiting. I was happy to spend 30 minutes taking the long way home to avoid the players who were searching for me. Waiting and doing nothing isn’t fun, running for 30 isn’t fun either, but it WAS fun, because I it had meaning, it had purpose, that’s what made it fun.