I just tested out Outpost Rush.
World PVP which is supposed to be the most fun part is dead for me without old systems in place.
As to outpost…it’s the only fun thing to do but it’s just a battleground and it’s more or less a copy of other games so without the hard demanding pvp it’s…well, we just ran 5 rounds and it’s just spam of AOE xD
Great, we got that already in other games. Amazon, what’s the plan? for PVP I ask again
So we had the preview (what I am referring to as Alpha), then Beta 1, Beta 2.
There was definitely restricted areas in the preview. You could not venture into them. It’s been so long though I wasn’t sure if it was the preview or that first beta.
Preview was an open session for anyone who pre ordered at the time, it was not an alpha test. They had a closed alpha test from October to June which players had access to through invites, nothing was restricted in that alpha and everything we see today was tested and given feedback on.
absolute cancer!!
This game’s pvp is so ass. Please make stagger 2.0 and make your combat like dark souls again!!!
Will the devs answer this thread one day maybe ?
My input remains largely the same from the previous thread on this. It doesn’t matter about if stagger lock was real or a myth. What matters is that people engage with the game and they have a certain experience based on their ability to interact with the mechanics, if that experience is bad enough for a sufficient number of players then they will begin to quit the game due to frustration.
Arguments to do things like increase training and explanations of game mechanics is something I completely agree with. But I also think that the average player has a limit to what they can reasonably master.
The arguments for a severely higherly skill ceiling on combat boil down to it not being engaging enough to keep good players who can master it. But the counter argument is that there’s far, FAR more players at the average when it comes to skill than at the high end, and if you’re an MMO with a big budget who has to appeal to the masses in order to stay profitable, then you must necessarily appeal to the average player and the average player has average skill, and pushing the combat to a high skill ceiling is detrimental to the majority of the player base.
What happened to the vision is that it changed. Visions are stated ahead of time, but you have no way of knowing if your initial vision will lead to success in the long run. If you develop something based on a vision and it turns out that it’s not popular then you have to change your vision and that’s what happened here. If you think that framing this in terms of “X was your vision, you can’t possibly update that due to changing circumstances” then you’re unbelievably naive, that’s not how the world works.
NW_Mugsy replied:
“If I understand the discussions you want to have about Combat, you are talking about design and balance and not so much bug and things working as unintended.
Right now, we have so many critical bugs and things not working as intended that those issues tend to get the focus right now.
But this would be a great subject for a dedicated dev blog from the team.”
but im still not very hopeful lol
@NW_Mugsy I would really, really want to see the discussion about this taken by Devs.
Subject is so big it is more of a podcast or AMA not a post but nevertheless:
Big problem here is that combat isn’t engaging as you can see from this post, my posts, posts of many other people and we know we got game breaking bugs, but we really would like to know where are we going because if bugs will be fixed, and combat will be like this, the game doesn’t have anything engaging to offer at all. At least some information where are we heading and WHY that way.
In General, old combat systems were before I reached the game. Some of them are summarized here Alpha end game over 3 years ago was better than this - And as we can see they were greatly planned and game was circulating around them. Of course many things should be upgraded to make the PVP audience satisfied and bring new people, then we could focus on PVE and make it work in parallel.
Removing that, then stagger and stamina management and we got what we have now, not satisfying copy of other games people are returning to now to have all that NW offers, in better way.
Avoiding talking about combat, which at least was core of the game is avoiding the game itself.
Even if it is already in the thread. Just in case it isn’t. Fantastic excuse to bring this up.
It should be noted the current meta is to stack buffs in full heavy so you receive no damage whilst using melee options as they vastly out damage range plus have chase options. Mostly GA/H. However in wars people have worked out collision calculations can crash the server so they can abuse this to freely win attacks. Which is why you see so many hammers.
The stagger system was much healthier for pve and pvp
I would accept that if they stated it, even if I disagree. It’s their game after all and their money on the line. They changed their vision from a free-for-all PvP/survival game and were open and honest about it, and while that ruffled many feathers, it was overall a largely popular and welcomed change as you can see by their sales.
But they haven’t said anything about their vision of combat, and you don’t need to look at my thread to see that the steep stat-checks currently dominating PvP are largely unpopular and go directly against their stated vision. So now we wait to see if/how they intend to balance things. All of which, of course, is secondary to more pressing concerns. And while I’m not going to claim the combat changes are the cause of declining retention, I’m not going to pretend they aren’t a factor either.
I’m optimistic that maybe the big things will be sorted out by six months and we can start looking at more subjective “fun” issues. In the mean time I’ll just keep life-skilling. I’ve muted most of the channels in game because they’re so full of people complaining about combat/wars/territory/balance/etc.
We can’t even do that part of the game properly because end game progression is camping Orichalcum nodes, which on populated servers have 3-4+ people sitting on them per spawn.
I was really interested in this game a year ago, when what we were shown was a grounded and deliberate melee-orientated action combat MMO with satisfying physical reactions and fightinggame-lite decision making. A game that was very unique within the MMO genre. Since then it seems every single change has worked to take the game away from the interesting vision that was sold to us.
A defining part of the original vision was that player characters were very limited. In generic tab target MMOs player characters can run and jump and mash magical AoEs and instantly heal each other to full with little recovery or restriction on what they are doing, but last year’s New World was far removed from that. The vision we were shown was a grounded game where players were rooted and stuck in animations, where any action you take could be punished and so every input was a weighty decision.
This is not how the game feels any more, because one by one any mechanic in the game which could feel punishing or require you to think twice before smashing buttons is either being removed or made irrelevant. Hitstun was removed because players wanted to be able to Do Stuff all of the time without thinking about it first. Healing and self sustain become more and more ridiculous in every patch because avoiding damage is considered an inconvenience and we’d rather be able to carry on swinging without a care. Stronger player characters with stronger healing and fewer restrictions now pull 5+ enemies at a time to AoE them down because they CAN, and because it’s efficient to do so, and when the experience of trying to speedrun a blob of enemies via brute force ends up not being fantastic, do people ask if it’s a good idea for their character to be able to AoE grind 10 mobs at once? No, they complain that while tanking 10 mobs with their face and trying to swing into them they get interrupted repeatedly. So now we have permanent Grit on Hatchet, big weapon heavies and 300STR builds. We have that because players wanted to kill things faster with less effort, and developers made the mistake of answering their request.
It’s this character power creep which is destroying everything which made the original game interesting. It feels as if generic WoW-clone MMO designers have been brought in to create generic WoW-clone MMO content with no respect for the original vision, and the result is that every patch brings us closer to 40 people sat in a blob mashing abilities while they trade damage against healing in a numbers fight that only tests your gear.
What I want is what was shown as a “Preview”. The game I played and enjoyed last year.
I’m not Halcyon, but I tool life-skilling to mean “not playing New World”, but I could be wrong. Maybe I am Halcyon. No wait, that’s not right, maybe I meant wrong about the meaning of the quote.
Oddly enough, I’m having the opposite problem, I’m having no issue gathering anything aside from green/aged wood and that’s only because it takes so damned long. Almost every west coast server is so empty that I can wander around and find unclaimed nodes all over the place. Granted I’m only 59, so I’m not looking in the end game elite areas.
The biggest problem I see with all the people complaining about balance/nerfs/buffs/etc is that some fundamental things are so broken that balancing is meaningless.
The resilient perk being the big one here, everyone has such high damage mitigation that they effectively have 3x their listed hit points (which means that heals are three times as effective)
Unfortunately even stagger (and stamina sprinting, shared cooldowns, etc) won’t help that. Until the perks actually do what they’re supposed to do, no amount of tweaking will fix the game and we can’t move on the biggest issues (like this thread)
I definitely liked combat better before they removed stagger.
Back when there was a sprint button, movement and combat felt really good.
It feels really clunky now and I just don’t understand why they’ve changed this.
Stamina management is all wonky now too.
In my opinion, bring back the sprint button, make it so you auto-sprint on roads and out of combat. Keep the slow-on-hit, bring back stagger.
Yea, it is just a bummer. I have been wanting an MMO with Dark Souls style combat and I thought this was going to be it. I have had fun playing the game but the more I learn about the alpha/beta period the more I realize this game could have been the MMO I was looking for but it will never be so (barring some massive changes)
Like most things it’s going to be a PR nightmare to address something like this. The sad reality is that most people treat games as art and less like businesses, which causes their expectations to be wildly out of line with reality. The moment you mention money and profits and return on investment, people start getting upset that there’s sacrifice of the vision for other things, especially if it’s related to money. It also kinda means you have to own up to not knowing what you’re doing to some degree, which isn’t a great look.
You also risk the same problem happening again, setting a new vision and then having to veer from that for other, as yet unforseen, reasons. Whenever you state a vision or goal like this you also set expectations and when people have their expectations violated they tend to get very upset. You can tell someone that a new feature will be ready in 2 weeks and if it takes 3 weeks they’ll be upset it’s late. If you tell the same people it’ll be 4 weeks but it takes 3, then they’ll be happy. Same delivery time in both cases but wildly different outcomes.
Imagine how little complaints there would be about lifestaff tanks if you could staggerthem to death if they stubbornly tried to remain in their healing circles…
@Halcyon I just read the Dev blog regarding PVP improvements and “vision”…thing is that there is not much vision in there and of course, no information about anything regarding old systems that there were before so…we will get new things to general boring soup. How is that going to make pvp more engaging and skill based? I don’t know
Well, now all the open-world PvPers got what they wanted, a bonus luck when flagged.
Not going to actually help open world-PvP, but at least they’ll get their bribe. Now they can stop whining about not having any incentives and instead complain the incentive wasn’t big enough because open world PvP still is lack luster (regardless of the combat system)
I’m not really expecting the topic to be broached anytime soon, they’ve got so many fundamental problems with getting the current game to work properly.
Once the exploits and bugs are worked out, then hopefully the real discussions will begin.
EDIT: Since they’ve disabled quoting for this post.
“It is a top priority for the team to get war to a stable, performant state where the skill and coordination of the best team determines the outcome.”
This really begs the question: Have they ever seen a fucking New World war take place?