After playing for cca 800 hours, I’ve finally felt my inner scales tip away from wanting to play New World. I’ve stuck around for all this time because I had a lot of fun playing in wars and OPR, my company was really good and our faction dominated the server. Also, I simply love the setting of this game, the lore is amazing and uncovering its deeper layers was special, the pvp mixed in with territory control is a great concept, visually the game is one of the best looking MMOs, sound effects are immersive and iconic, just being in Aeternum is an experience that draws you in.
But after 800 hours, I’m afraid I’m clocking out for the time being. After spending my whole Saturday in New World, I realized I haven’t really progressed in any significant way towards anything. Which got me thinking… I did the elite run, closed a few portals, wasted time trying to find people for 2 arenas nobody does anymore (needed to progress my remaining questlines), wasted 2.5 hours sorting out my storages, had some dinner then came back and attempted to farm a bit of Siren’s Reef a few times but experienced bugs and glitches - and I really don’t have anything meaningful to show for it. Is this experience really worth my time? Worth my Saturdays…
I did the old Alt+F4, and just before I switched over to watch some new episodes of my favourite shows on Prime Video (wink wink), I realized it’s time to uninstall. I knew, like everyone, for the longest time this game has it’s flaws but I was able to put up with them until now. But I guess, finally, “the thrill is gone”.
Knowing I’ll probably want to come back at some point, I made a list of “fixes” that would justify me coming back and investing a lot of time in this game again. So, I decided to share them here.
This list is from a perspective of a healer & it’s just like my opinion, man.
Things that need to be fixed before I choose to install New World again:
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Weapon swapping. Weapon swap needs to be FLUID. If you can queue light attacks (like nothing else matters in this world) then you can queue a weapon swap.
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Fix the bug showing you the wrong weapon as equipped.
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It has to be easier to see party members during war - for healers especially. I need to see the distance to my party member and a better way to tell if I can apply that heal spell/skill on them in that visual chaos.
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Give me the option to select which healing spell will use target locking. For example, Light’s Embrace yes, Sacred Ground no, Beacon optional in my preference.
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Fix Beacon disappearing through the ground, flying off into the sky randomly etc.
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Fix the bug showing all party members having full health when in fact they don’t.
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Movement bug in pvp needs to be fixed (perma haste, or stuck).
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Make weapon/armour perks ALL working as intended.
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Make weapon passives ALL work as intended.
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Make ALL gems work as intended. Amber especially.
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Fix desync and rubber banding.
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Weapon balance needs to be better. No clear “meta”, especially not due to bugs.
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Make being a healer at least somewhat rewarding in PVE, getting ZERO bags or drops ever is a great oversight and punishes support players, prolonging their expertise & gear grind by an insane amount.
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Make gear drops somehow valuable, cause 99.9% of them are absolutely useless. Maybe make them drop 1/3 of an umbral shard when salvaged or something. What’s the point of all that gear that you salvage for repair parts when you don’t need repair parts?
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Luck gear actually needs to work as described. Gathering, chest opening luck, drop luck ALL OF IT has to work with no hidden nonsense. The trophies you have + the bonuses you have on your gear + bonus foods should all add up with no caveats. At the moment, people do elite runs naked cause they get more legendaries that way. How does that make any sense?
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Gear sets need to be more organized and more accessible. It’s an absolute cluttering mess right now. The amount of different gearsets you need is very high, make organizing them easier somehow (dye their icons a certain colour, or add sub-icons, or introduce gear templates that we can save…). At the moment, I have to have an excel sheet for my gearsets, because I wouldn’t know otherwise if my new drop is an improvement over the one I have in one of my storages currently. How many gearsets do people have to have? (gathering, refining, crafting, luck, corruption, angry earth, lost, beast, pvp, different gearsets for different melee, heal, range builds etc…)
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All in all, the game needs to respect my time. The grind is stretched out, and the newest changes will make me grind even more, trying to level up my gear to 625. I gave up on levelling all crafting professions to 200 as it’s pointless with no top tier trophies. Guess how many top tier trophy mats I have dropped after 800h of playing as a healer. Zero. BIS gear drops? Zero.
Less important improvements:
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Make OPR more rewarding in terms of item drops. I know it gives gold and azoth already, but getting only 3 greens 90% of the time is defeating the purpose of even getting any gear.
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Fix map because it doesn’t show corruptions sometimes, and will always displays inaccurate war/invasion info. Wasted a lot of azoth traveling to places trying to sign up for a war/invasion that wasn’t real.
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Make role specific signups for wars and invasions. Give people in charge of creating the squads some info on who signed up/what they can play. This should’ve been there from the start, especially since it’s a classless MMO.
Just leaving my honest opinion here. I hope this game makes it somehow and comes back. Until then, thanks for all the fish.