First of, let me quickly introduce myself and provide some background information about my experience with the game. I started playing New World in the very first Alpha Phase around 2018, then played through Alpha 2, Preview, Alpha 3, Both Closed and Open Beta, and ultimately Launch. Overall I accumulated around 4k hours in the entire lifespan of the game so far and I’m again actively playing the game after taking a short break between November and December 2021.
I’m mainly a PvP player (that also enjoys expeditions and gathering / crafting) and spend a lot of time thinking about steps that the developers could take to elevate the game and improve the overall player experience. I hope that the following list sparks a conversation between the players, the community team (incl. @Luxendra , @Aenwyn , @Shadow_Fox , @TrevzorFTW) and the developers to make the game that all of us are passionate about a better one.
Disclaimer: The following list is just a starting Point, that I created in conjunction with dedicated players that i regularly interact with. I plan to add to it continuously based on community feedback and suggestions in this thread.
Keep in mind that some of the suggested changes might be somewhat controversial for some players, which is why I invite you to disagree with me in the comments with your explanation why you think change XYZ is not a good idea. If something stands out as a miss for the community, I’m open to completely remove an entry aswell.
The list is in no particular order outside of general categories and I’m also not gonna include any changes that have already been announced for the near future. However, I’m working on adding a priority tag (my opinion - feel free to disagree) to the most important points to create some hierarchy.
Adding a Detailed Character Stat Sheet (High Priority)
Gearing up and experimenting with different builds is a big part of New World’s identity. Over time more and more perks get introduced to the game that impact our characters in several ways. However, the current stat sheet that is provided when we open our inventory screen is massively outdated and does not provide enough of the basic and advanced stats to the player.
Here is an example of a detailed stat sheet:
Being able to Inspect other Players
With the upcoming group finder and the attached functionality of being able to inspect people’s gear, attribute spread and mastery talents when they’re signing up for expeditions, expanding this functionality to the regular social menu would be a great addition to the game.
Removing Weight of Quest Items
This would be a rather small Quality of Life improvement that just makes sense. Quest items, especially the ones later in the game, usually stay in your inventory for extended periods of time and take weight away from your inventory.
Display of Ingame Time incl. Day & Night Cycle (by ReddieEx)
With the introduction of many time-based mechanics and spawns in the Brimstone Update, it would be neat to add a display of the ingame time. This would help players to be able to identify the Day & Night Cycle aswell for specific spawns.
Adding an Emote Wheel
New World already has a wide selection of interesting emotes. Unfortunately the current UI makes using them incredibly clunky. A much more elegant solution that we know from other games is a simple emote wheel that allows you to favorite emotes and sort them for easy access.
Here is an example of an emote wheel:
Upgrade Faction Gear to 590 (by @Korm)
Faction Gear at the current state of the game unfortunately is completely irrelevant due to the low Gearscore. Upgrading it to 590 would keep the sets relevant longterm and would revitalize the faction shop in general. New Players could grind out a great starting set that is upgradeable later and Veteran Players would have something to spend their tokens on.
Remove or Increase Trophy Slots (Zboubi)
Another great Change that would remove some friction would be to increase or completely remove the restriction on trophy slots from houses as it is incredibly tedious to swap out trophies for each house when approaching different content. The limit of one per type per house would obviously stay.
Real Global Storage (High Priority)
With the recent update of “Global Storage”, which was really well received by the community, the developers have made the first step to remove one of the points that arguably created the highest amount of friction for players. However we should not stop here.
The next step is the complete shift to an actual global storage system that allows player to have a combined storage, which can be manually seperated in custom tabs that players can name, color and assign an icon to for better organization.
*Here is an example of storage tabs:
Targeted Healing Improvements (Ghaunr)
Targeted Healing just got introduced to the game, however there are certain things that need to be improved for it to be as useful as possible:
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Being able to assign keys with the usual modifiers: CTRL, SHIFT, ALT
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Being able to combine set keybinds for abilities with partymembers
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Being able to reshuffle the order of players so that the keybinds are consistent for the healer (f.e. Tank always in Slot 1)
Highlight Friendly and Enemy Abilities (ReddieEX)
New World has a lot of abilities that stay on the ground like Ice Storm, Beacon or Gravity Well. However in the current state abilities casted by both friendly and enemy players are colored the exact same way, which makes it impossible to tell which AoEs are safe to enter or useful and which aren’t. It would be a massive QoL improvement if we had some highlighting of abilities that have been casted by enemy players so that we can start to make better decisions on the battlefield.
Customizable Crosshairs
The current Crosshairs that are used for Bow, Musket, Blunderbuss and Magic Weapons do not allow any customization, which is definitely a shame. Considering that ranged weapons heavily rely on basic attacks to land, it would be a huge Quality of Life update to present users of those weapons with choices between a couple presets, change the color, size and potentially the transparency.
Edit: Besides that, the game should offer the typical sensitivity and scoped sensitivity options that other 3rd person offer aswell.
Here are a couple examples for Crosshairs:
Make the AFK Timer less Strict
New Players probably already noticed that the game frequently kicks you out when you’ve just been afk for a couple minutes. This strict kicking system has been quickly introduced at the beginning of the game to shorten Queue times and make the game playable for more people. However with the current population of the game, where Queues are pretty much non-existant, it is definitely annoying at times to get kicked so quickly.
Obviously (and hopefully) we might get an influx of players in the future and the system might become more relevant again, which is why we definitely should’t fully remove it, but making the timer less strict should definitely be on the table.
Fun Fact: While writing this post up to this point, I got kicked out of the game 4 times.
Improving the Buff & Debuff Bar (Ghaunr)
The current display above the health & manabar is extremely limiting and makes it extremely hard to tell which and how many buffs & debuffs affect you at a time. The icons also make it really difficult to distinguish certain ones from one another. Currently a lot of buffs and debuffs straight up do not get displayed when it is really important to see them (f.e. Neishatun’s Fire Debuff). I really hope the developers can find a way to rework this for better clarity.
Here is an example for a buff bar with different icons and colors:
More Character Customization & Barbershops (by @Burnzey)
Although for me personally It’s not as important, I’ve seen frequent requests for more character customization options from the community since the game launched. More Presets, more Hairstyles, more Extras would definitely support players in creating a character that they can identify with. And even though this would normally belong in the “New Features” section, a barber shop of some sorts would also be a great addition to be able to customize your character in game after you created it.
Update Group Identification and Improve Pings
The Icons that are currently used for partymembers unfortunately don’t really allow players to clearly identify individual players that well. The different colors certainly help, but I think simplyfying the icons to something like a Circle, a Square, a Triangle, a Cross and a Star would definitely be a big improvement. The Colors could also get more saturated, so that they can be clearly distinguished from one another, especially to be able to spot teammates on the worldmap.
Pings could also use a slight update to make them more useful in a group setting. Let us ping with our corresponding color for better identification which partymember pinged. The current yellow markers are alright, but certainly hard to see at times when a lot is happening on the screen.
Camp Improvements & Camps in PvP
The crafting cost of camps is a remnant of the old iteration of New World as a survival game. Since the shift of the game to an MMO, the crafting cost no longer makes a lot of sense. Although there might be players that feel like it helps with immersion, I personally think it’s more of an annoyance to pick up 5 Wood and 1 Flint everytime I want to place a camp.
Edit: For Open World PvP, camps also seem to be a somewhat controversial topic as you’re able to respawn too frequently without a penalty. PvP often request camps to be destructible to counter that and make PvP fights more conclusive.
(Update: Fixed) Global Cooldown Everything (High Priority)
Since we already have Global Cooldowns, the rest of the activities like elite chests should also reset at that time. No more guessing, please.
Increase Amount of Trading Post Orders & History Improvements
I’m not sure why the amount of orders that any player can put up is limited to 100, but it would definitely a nice improvement if we could atleast double that number. New World has a big pool of items that can be sold and the limit makes it hard for some players to fully enjoy playing the market.
On that note, I also think we need more details for our history. I’m sure AGS has that data, but simply chose to not provide it. It would certainly be interesting to know when an item was sold, what settlement it got bought from etc.
(Update: Fixed) Reduce Scarcity of Resources
Ever wanted to level a profession and tried to farm large amounts of a specific material like Starmetal or Orichalcum Ore? Exactly, It can be a terrible experience on higher pop servers. Considering the absolutely absurd amount of materials necessary to level up crafting professions there are simply not enough node spawns on the map for certain resources to support the crafting needs of all players. People afk’ing on top of nodes is extremely common on some servers and it can be a really frustrating experience. I think some of the more rare materials could definitely get some more spawns out in the world.
Reworking the Skin UI
With the rapid addition of more and more skins to New World, the current UI to apply skins struggles to keep up with the increased quantity. Adding the fact that there are also no options for sorting, it becomes clear that this UI is in desperate need of a complete overhaul. The UI simply needs to be able to support a lot more skins, display bought sets together, let us create and save our own presets and have some options for filtering.
This is the current skin UI, which only displays 9 items at a time:
Change Arena Entrance System
The PvE Arena Entrance system should work just like the expedition entrance system so that only a single person is required at the entrance and the rest of the group simply gets ported in. The current system is massively outdated and should get adjusted so that it will work flawlessly with the groupfinder. Also maybe get rid of the Tuning Orbs for those, too?
(Update: Implemented) Trading Post Improvements
Even though I believe that the Trading Post UI in general needs a lot more love considering how central trading is to the game, some more short term solutions to massively improve the experience with the trading post would be to introduce 1.) a dropdown menu for attributes (Constitution, Strength etc.) so that we could easily filter through gear with desired attributes and 2.) a seachbar to filter the perks, so that we don’t have to manually scroll to find our desired perks. It would also be amazing to be able to see which sell orders belong to you when searching for items.
The general searchbar should also be more useful by allowing to search via keywords or strings. Typing in just the word “chest” should bring up all items that contain the “chest” in it’s name or properties instead of bringing up a list, where we have to select a specific item. I think this would definitely help with finding whatever you need!
Here is a quick Photoshop of the Attribute Filter:
Here is a quick Photoshop of the Searchbar for Perks:
Change Attribute Respec Cost (by @SkyMin)
Experimenting with different builds or even switching between different setups for PvE, PvP or Solocontent is a central part of New World’s identity. However there is still some friction attached to redistributing your attributes, costing 200g each time you do so. While it’s a lot better than the old cost of 500g, I think the game should do everything to encourage people to experiment instead of discouraging them through an attached cost.
I think changing the cost to 100-200 Azoth instead of 200g would be a great change to remove the friction from that part of the game, as azoth quickly became irrelevant after the recent changes to fasttraveling costs. This could also revitalize the market for azoth vials and make it atleast somewhat relevant again.
(Update: Fixed with Brimstone Patch) Weapon Expertise Display (High Priority)
Currently the only way of displaying the expertise for weapons is equipping a certain type of weapon and checking it in your inventory screen. A small, but impactful Quality of Life change would be to add the expertise levels to the overview on the mastery tab.
Here is a quick Photoshop of the Expertise Display:
Wishlisting Items on the Trading Post
It would be awesome if we could wishlist items on the trading post that we might be interested in buying and putting them in a certain list for easier comparison.
House Teleport Reset
If the teleport to our house is on cooldown we currently have to press it twice to reset the cooldown and then again to teleport to the house. Simplyfying this 2-step process by just paying the azoth cost when we teleport to our house would make this a little bit more convenient.
It would also be amazing to add buttons for our different houses to the ESC menu (like the Inn teleport), so that we don’t have to press it on the map anymore.
Dyeable Skins
I don’t know the technical limitations on this one, but in my opinion AGS would sell a lot more skins by simply allowing players to dye the different pieces so that they can be easily mixed and matched with gear from the game or other skins. I’m pretty sure it would also boost the sales of dyes from the store.
(Update: Fixed) Make Salvaging Gear more interesting & Mass Salvage
In New World, players aquire an insane amount of gear every single day that simply gets salvaged in most cases, which rewards some coin and some repair parts. At the moment, we have to salvage each piece individually, which can be extremely tedious at times, which is why I think a system to easily mark and mass salvage items would be a great addition to the game.
I also believe that salvaging gear could be made more interesting and rewarding, but thats up for debate.
Here is an example of a Mass Salvaging System:
Removal of Luck
I don’t know where to start on this one. Luck has been a stat in New World for a really long time at this point and it honestly has always been one of the most confusing and frustrating parts of this game. Especially recently it has been by far the most controversial topic on the forums, on reddit and on the steam forums.
It has been so present, that the developers attempted twice, once in video and once in written form, to explain luck and people still don’t fully understand it. A big portion of the community doesn’t even believe luck works, which should be an immediate red flag for the developers that the system might have a negative impact on the game.
The worst part of the entire luck system is that it’s a stat that competes with meaningful combat stats, which means that players have to trade off a fun stat that makes them stronger for something that doesn’t really feel all that impactful. Basically players feel pressured by the game to exchange their combat effectiveness in a group to be able to get better drops. This also invalidates pretty much every piece of gear that does not have luck on it for people that believe luck works.
I really can’t stress enough how unfun the system is and no matter how hard the development team tries to explain the system to the community, it will always have a negative impact on the game as a whole. I strongly encourage AGS to be brave and just remove the luck system as a whole so that people can finally start to wear gear that makes them feel strong and that makes New World more enjoyable to them.
Transmog System
Oh Boy. This is probably one of the hottest topics in the community and I’m sure the developers are aware at this point how much this feature is wanted. New World’s art team has done an absolutely outstanding job with a lot of the armor sets, but unfortunately you barely every see most of them as they’re not practical to use. It’s honestly a shame. Adding a transmog system would open up a ton of options for players to express themselves and also open up a lot more gameplay options when farming cosmetics is a thing.
Now I understand that there are some things that need to be considered with the introduction of the system. Obviously New World is currently exclusively monetized through cosmetics and a fully fleshed out transmog system would certainly devalue a lot of the shop cosmetics, which ultimately would result in less monetary gains for Amazon.
I don’t know the perfect solution for this, but I think either AGS needs to find different avenues to monetize the game (f.e. a Battle Pass type system, Name Changes, Apperance Changes etc.) or monetize the transmog system itself, which in my opinion would the better option.
A great mockup by @VeNoMz :
Loadouts & Inventory Management (High Priority)
Considering how time consuming inventory management in New World is in the current iteration of the game, it’s not far fetched to think that loadouts might be the most anticipated feature for pretty much every single player ever.
We desperately need loadouts to create custom sets that we can swap between easily. We need to be able to mark items and sort them in more custom ways. And we need better filtering options to easily find items in our storages. There have been a ton of great suggestions on the forums before on how to improve inventory management, so I’m not gonna go into greater detail here. I’m just going to assume everybody is with me here.
Here is an example of a Loadout UI:
Here is a Mockup for Inventory Management (by @Nourri):
Wager Duels
People in New World love a good duel. Give them the option to add some spice to the duel by adding in a wager system that allows people to request a duel and set a coin amount that you can duel for. The winner gets it all!
(Update: Instruments added) Introduce More Tools
Tools are currently closely tied to professions. Over the last couple months there have been several good suggestions how to expand the tool system in the game. Things like Torches / Lanterns, Binoculars, Shovels and even Instruments all have a lot of potential to be interesting additions to the game.
Add a Calender
Adding a calender would be a great way for players to plan ahead for events, upcoming mutations, new seasons etc. and a great way for developers to communicate those things outside of the game’s frontpage.
Here is an example of a Calender:
(Update: Announced) Introduce Mounts
Uh, this is a super controversial one. While being against mounts myself, I know that a huge portion of the community is heavily invested in the idea of mounts in New World. So far the official response has been that they’re coming, but only if the mapsize is able to support them.
A lot of PvP players are concerned about mounts being a detriment to the already lackluster Open World PvP and I share that sentiment myself. However I believe there is definitely a way in which mounts could be implemented that would not hurt the open world experience.
Mounts in general are a really important collectible aswell for players that have played other MMOs in the past and they would certainly add a layer to the immersion of the game. This would also open up new avenues for mounts in the cash-shop. I guess we’ll see what happens with this one.
More Open World Encounters & World Bosses (eigustin)
The Open World in New World is beautiful and the art team did a great job designing it. Unfortunately it can feel pretty stale and lifeless at times as there are no dynamic events in the game. Recently the developers added roadsign encounters and rafflebones, but I think we could definitely go one step further with adding actual world bosses.
The Turkulon Event was a great first step in that direction and it would be an awesome addition to the game to have big, massive Bosses roaming the World that could have some interesting rulesets attached to them and drop exclusive loot.
Training Area (by @Vesstan)
We are all aware that we have access to training dummies in the attacker camps next to each of the forts. However it would be awesome to have an actual testing area, where we can reset cooldowns and have different options for dummies (like light, medium or heavy armor; enemy types etc.). This would greatly help with testing builds and also with testing and confirming bugs & exploits.
Mastery Loadouts
Even though the cost of respeccing mastery points is a non-factor, I’d still like to see some kind of loadout system for mastery pages aswell. With more and more weapons coming into the game, it would be awesome to save different specs and swap between them for different content. The cost can obviously stay the way it is currently.
About Minigames, Static NPCs and Settlement Feeling
I recently came across more and more threads on different platforms where people critized New World’s settlements, especially how they don’t feel alive with just a few static NPCs and no fun side activities or minigames that allow players to interact. This seems to be even more extreme on the lower population servers. Settlements are just really practical at the moment, they’re basically just crafting and trading hubs. Additionally all settlements also provide the exact same utility provided they have all the crafting station upgrades.
While not being a pressing issue, I definitely think the development team could add little things here and there to revitalize the settlements a little bit. Card Games and Other Minigames come to mind. Being able to play instruments together. Random Events like a parade of NPCs.
Me standing in a “dead” Everfall before Merges happened:
About Company Housing, Company Trophies, Company Storage & Company Quests
With how shallow the current company system is, here are a couple suggestions that would massively increase player engagement with that system. First of, I think everybody had the same thought atleast once after experiencing the housing system.
What if we had a bigger plot of land that we could fully customize with our company including minigames and a shared storage? What if we could craft specific company trophies that can only be placed inside the company plot that would give some buffs to all company members? Would if there was an NPC that specifically hands out Quests that you can do with your company members to advance your company ranks for rewards?
Right now all of those questions are big What Ifs. But I think this would be an absolutely amazing addition and create more community interaction through gameplay elements.
Here is an example of a guild house interior:
Armor Mastery Trees
I got to admit, this one is just a wild idea from me, but it sounds too cool to not include it in the list. Further down I’m going to talk about armor balancing, which I think desperately needs some adjustments in the upcoming months.
I personally think the bonusses of 10% damage and 10% stun duration etc. for the different weights are incredibly boring and everybody plays the same armor the same way, which made me think. What if we had neutral armor mastery trees for light, medium and heavy that you could level just like weapons, which would allow players to customize their playstyle further?
(Update: Announced) Raids
While not being a big PvE player myself (Even though I run a couple of expeditions here and there), I definitely hear people asking for this all the time. Expeditions were pretty successful so far in creating a repeatable activity for PvE players and I think they should definitely continue adding more in the future.
However the next step would be to create harder, more largescale activities for bigger groups that are comparable with raids from other MMOs. That doesn’t mean there is a pattern that needs to be copied, but players are familiar with this type of content already and it would definitely be an exciting addition to the game at some point in the future.
Introduce New Professions
Crafting has always been a staple in MMOs and New World actually did a pretty decent job with providing a good amount of variety from the start. However I think going forward it’s definitely something that the developers can build on and introduce more professions.
F.e. Farming: Since the crops are already out there in the game, I think farming could be a really nice addition as a profession and also tie in with the housing system. Simply create seeds that you can plant on your housing plot, water them and create fertilizer at the arcana or cooking station that helps you to boost their growth.
If the developers want this take this one step further, they could create special, buyable houses that are out in the world that have much bigger plots and would allow people to really immerse themselves into the role of a farmer.
