Just for a little background, I’m level 54 player with a little over 200hours playtime of New World now (including 2xbetas and launch) and whilst the base of the gameplay is solid, its clear the design of what the game wants to be is blurred. The early experience is great, but it’s pains quickly surface around the level 30+ mark. As time has gone on the community is beginning to notice similar issues that plague the game and whilst I recognise that fixing these will take time, I figured I’d share my feedback in order that we might see a clearer vision for the future of New World:
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PVE content being stale in mob variety and in tasks undertaken. Questing areas are sometimes too widespread and uneven or are annoying to navigate (Weavers Fen isn’t fun for the most part, aside from the bears in the south west). The areas in which they’re more interesting are few, Brightwood and the Angry Earth mobs are one example of where this feels good, but there’s just too little variety overall. Quests obviously need to change to be more interesting and engaging. There’s so many landmark areas that mean very little, they need more individuality either via subtle storytelling or unique drops/mobs. Scorpius and the Azoth Tree are two fantastic examples of areas that are done well, but could be so much more with changes.
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Crafting and gathering whilst fun is fast becoming a problem, especially where the economy is concerned. Lower tier resources are too much of a necessity and because everybody can do gathering the demand is thin, but the supply is sky high. The game’s resources need more use beyond their craft needs which could include company improvements, more personalised town projects and reintroducing some building aspect out into the world. Resources could do with a minimum gold value tied to them or NPC vendors to sell to otherwise everything will be worth 0.01 eventually. I also believe that the game needs to force people to choose specific trade skills, either at cap or as a complete overhaul. It would better enable people to specialise and to be more renowned for the gear they craft. Another possibility is introducing reagent type abilities that would enforce a continuous need for them and provide some more interesting dynamics to your characters abilities either in combat or crafting, as well as maintaining a persistent market.
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UI and performance needs a lot of work. Performance particularly in wars and the UI needs changes across the board, but the trade post UI is particularly bad (need better filters and search functions). Feels like there is a memory leak in the game and eventually everything ends up breaking, requiring a restart to reset as fps tanks over time and the UI bugs seep through.
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Gear oversaturation. Honestly I firmly believe the game should do away with gear drops almost altogether and focus on the community as the primary provider of gear. Instances and landmarks should have rarer resources that can drop and be used for the crafting of gear or as a means to craft better or more unique gear than your peers. Gear currently has little to no value most of the time or will be of value for a very limited timeframe. You should be able to gain more than just repair parts and gold from salvaging, it should be possible to trade as resources or broken down into the armour types craft parts. Removing a lot of the gear, also brings a further focus on the player driven economy to grind and craft for its players.
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Whilst I’ve only participated in a single war and invasion (and found them a fluctuating experience), the way they are implemented along with the faction system is also due a rework. There’s currently no incentive to play factions that are on the losing side of a server, in fact it is totally against everything you do to not join the faction controlling the map. Cliques will be a problem for wars moving forward if they’re not already, potentially locking a large portion of the player base out of the ability to participate in an event they’d like to and with no meaningful alternatives. I would suggest a change to the map system that would have wars/invasions occur all over, but only the top 3 zones are contested by companies (but they can pick who participates including entire companies). The rest of the map is contested by territory standing and by endorsing world PVP, but the settlement wars are purely faction related. Once a war breaks out, people get to participate over a 24 hour period contributing wins, points and resources over a period of time that allows EVERYBODY to contribute to the war effort. Faction missions could then be changed to be more of a variation of town projects and they could provide more substantial or unique rewards that would entice more people to flag and contribute. Think of the faction wars as zone specific battlegrounds, in which everybody can participate, with buffs provided by the gatherers and crafters whom have contributed to the cause.
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PVP flagging gives little to no reward and PVP questing needs to have varying objectives and rewards in order to stay interesting and worthwhile (access to limited special resources for the winning faction?). Weapon switching and general responsiveness is way too slow (reduce recovery of everything and make animation cancelling a standard feature). It takes nearly 3 seconds just to begin self casting a heal on myself because of the massive delay in activating the ability to pressing ctrl and beginning the cast, it feels bad. Hitboxes are all over the place from muskets having a dead zone at point blank and the rapier missing every other hit for seemingly no reason. Overall the combat needs ironing out. I would go further and add more variations to combat such as kicks, parries/perfect dodges, introducing new perks/gems that enable more play styles (more disease, dots and healing reduction), adding another skill to the 3 per weapon limitation.
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Instance content so far has been fun, if a bit janky. Harder difficulties could be a good thing and generally having more of them. Player collision in PVE perhaps even overall could be toned down or implemented better. More mechanics and complicated fights would also be good. Like with most of this, it again needs more enemy variation and storytelling that isn’t reading from a pamphlet.
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Add swimming of course. Seems like a feature that just got put further and further down the list as release loomed. The possibility of adding underwater areas and raids is exciting.
Fin.
