Hi there! Just wanted to leave my recent returning player experience here in the hopes that maybe some other player down the road can benefit from any considerations or changes that come from the feedback. If not, that’s okay too.
So we understand where I’m coming from, this review is written by a recently returning player that came back to a lvl ~58, and departing 600 all armor slots, 600 most weapons, and Sharded to 620-625 on a lot of individual pieces. I have done OPR and 3v3 (scored an 8-0!), have not done wars. I have done Laz, Gen, and Dynasty, but not Temp, Blackpowderm or mutations. I don’t know where that stripe of player falls on commonality, but I’m willing to wager “regularly occurs as a transitional stage”. Which brings me to my first bit of feedback -
The beginning of endgame grind in New World is one of the most overtly hostile, frustrating experiences in MMO history.
Story-less condensed version at the bottom.
[[[ You hit 60! Congrats! Endgame!
Well, no.
Oh, right, gear score. Right. Okay, no big deal. I did Champion Points in ESO, same kind of general idea. You’re endgame but not “endgame”. We can do this. Can I just buy 600 gear? Let’s try buying 600 gear.
…Ok no that didn’t work and now I’m broke, but maybe should’ve expected that. But this is okay. We’re 60, we’re in semirelevant 600 gear that we seem to get…most of? Some of? I found this hunting spot on Youtube that says it’s good for my GS, let’s go…get annihilated, apparently. Okay, that’s fine. Let’s try this other…nope. Portals? Absolutely not.
Well what can I do that’s “my level”? Oh! I know. I can try some of the Expeditions.
This Gen monster has oneshot me so hard I didn’t even get a downed state. Let’s try PvP? I can do Outpost Rush now, right?
Oh. Bows and Muskets can do 7k damage singularly and 11-12k in a burst. I have…10k health. I see. ]]]
and so on. The common thread behind all of these, however, is that at 60 - a moment of triumph! - I felt totally helpless and hopeless. It felt like I simply could not participate in the game, which is a problem when the only way to increase your GS and thus character power is to…participate in the game. So I participated, and felt constantly punished as I was relentlessly oneshot, twoshot, threeshot, permakilled, farmed, and at one point dropped by a Musket burst I couldn’t even see outside of my base portal in OPR. I understand that 620+ (625 realistically) with relevant perks is “the real game”, but English does not have the words to properly express how miserable actually attempting to bridge that gap was.
So I did what any self-unrespecting newly minted 60 does and I farmed WT, which is fantastic work, making my gameplay experience feel like a job I have to perform in order to play the game, which at no point since hitting 60 do I feel as if i have done yet. And the better news! Once WT is over and my chests are on cooldown, I still…don’t really have anything to do, because I still can’t really do anything. I remember here that I used to like logging on late and night and just kind of vibing as I mined Iron, so maybe…that? At least it’s money.
Except as I rose in the ranks, I realized later stages of materials only realistically have 2-2.5 viable farm spots, which are populated pretty close to 24/7. One literally has a player that is there for 10 hours a day. Sometimes you can squeak in some Orichalcum if you’re lucky, but Wireweave? Silk? Wyrdwood? Ironwood?
Good luck.
So I log on, I do my WT, and then I just kind of…exist. To attempt anything else (read: playing the game), is misery. Unfortunately I’m a video game masochist, so I do anyway, telling myself “This will get better, we just have to hit the finish line”.
And eventually, many WTs and Expedition death farms later, we do. We hit 600! We’re almost there. Now Expedition monsters only OTK us “occasionally”, and normally it takes about two hits to die. Progress! In PvE at least.
I’m progressing. I’m in on the learning curve. I’m starting to hit 39th in OPR instead of 41st. And now we’re 600 and…nothing really changes.
“The game starts at 620-625. 600 is not 620”.
Okay. fine.
Get some gear. get some shards. Relevant perks. Relevant stats. Stocked on potions. Got my stat food, my honing stone. Get Battle Bread early. Go participate, stand on points, hold the flamethrower button for literally invisible damage, and 25minutes of constant combat later we get…drumroll…a lousy green box of 590 gear and 500 PvP xp. (Which, sidenote, is frankly insulting. I understand wanting to reward high performers - so give them a better loot crate. I understand the 500 threshold - discourage AFK farming. But for someone to actively engage with the entire -blazingly masochistic- experience in OPR - of CC immune heavy hammer swings and constantly massive damage spikes from people you can’t even see with a HITSCAN WEAPON and just relentlessly being stunned and slammed and just bumped around??? so much you can’t even use a skill or potion, watching your basic attacks and spells cleanly hit people standing still for actually no damage - not low damage, damage simply doesn’t appear - and for all that you reward them with 500 PvP xp? 500? Most of these matches take 20-30m of their life and their reward for trying is Five. Hundred. xp?) - it’s belittling and insulting.
Coupled with the aggressive difficulty spike and I feel as if New World / AGS is for some reason putting me through some kind of bizarre hazing just to play the game. It is a surreal experience thus far, and easily the most frustrating MMO experience in like…20 years of personal MMO play.
Plus side, once I figured out that actually trying to actively contribute to my team’s victory with frontliners or healing or CC got me 500xp but mindlessly spamming ineffective AoEs as FS/IG got me my 3k threshold every time, at least I could make progress and a little bit of money there. I think at time of writing im somewhere in the 20s or 30s, trackwise. Sub50 for certain.
The good news is, I found a very kind group of people that did their best to help me throughout this process - which is super jarring when I basically get /b/ from 4chan + the angriest subreddits in my global feed every time I log in (I think the first two messages I saw in global immediately upon log in were “AMOURANTH” and “LETS GO BRANDON” which…super cool. At least i can turn it off.) But my companymates tried their best. And I tried my best to learn.
Okay, spears get to oneshot me with CC the entire time, and bows and muskets get to twoshot me, so Thrust resist seems good. So…sure. Stat up on armor on the Black Mage FS/IG build, medium chest light all else, and just slot thrust resist in every slot. This might help?
4k bowshot. 3.7k musket taps. I’m in 620 resilient with a couple stacks of Physical Aversion, and 7 antithrust gems, and…I’m still getting 30%+'d by weapons I can’t see, and just left clicked to death by spears and rapiers while the melee bumps trigger their almost visceral hate responsible the entire time.
Sidenote, shoutout to the sound and graphics devs - I’m not sure if you intended it, but the combination bump/stagger and SFX of being hit by attacks are truly masterclass. I hate them with every fiber of my being. They are extremely impressive in how much they make me want to not be hit by things. Thats excellent shadow-teaching.
It mostly continues on like this. I can kind of regularly do gen and laz now, though the minute you have to respawn far you’re toasted if your group doesn’t come back for you. I can at least hit my 3k threshold in OPR and sometimes score kills with some lucky empowered fireballs (whenever the Muskets and Bows and Greathammers and Great Axes and Spears let me play but also the target isn’t a Life Staff or Rapier user). We’ve hit the point where to go further is a deep dive grind and I just…there’s nothing worth grinding for here, for me, as a new/returning player. At 58 nothing I could do mattered, and at 60 nothing I could do mattered, and at 600 nothing I could really do mattered, and now I’m 620 and very little to nothing of what I can do matters so…why am I here. Why does it feel like I have to work so hard to get the game into a state where I feel like I’m actually playing it? Why does New World feel like it wants me to go away this entire time?
And thats…mostly my experience. Also worth noting - the UI errors and some basic level design stuff should absolutely be fixed this late into the game’s life. One time I wondered if I could get any of my friends to play this with me again to make things more tolerable, and then my mouse cursor disappeared on an OPR death/respawn screen for the third time that day after a man I am 100% aimbots cracked me for the sixth time in a row, and realized “Absolutely not. No one will tolerate this. Why are you tolerating this?”. So then I finished that OPR, went to destress with PvE, got into a Gen, and promptly fell down and got stuck in an inescapable pit for reads notes walking the most clear path forward.
// Condensed Notes //
Grind from 60-625 is one of the most miserable video game experience I have ever had, because the game seemingly is based around the 625 cap in totality, rendering the character effectively helpless at most on-level tasks for some time. The best way forward is literally following 50 people around in a circle and hoping you don’t die too much. The entire experience is surreal and punishing.
OPR and 3v3 is similarly surreal and punishing. At what point did we think “constantly being 1-2shot by literally everything all the time” was a good experience? Why do we keep inflicting this experience on New World players?
Hitscan weapon capable of dealing 4k through almost 50% mitigation is…unreal.
Seeming inability to solve players snapping 90* headshots fast enough their character doesn’t even move, or in one case hitting a headshot behind them while spinning, is unreal. The good news is, there’s not actually that many of them - I think maybe 2 people out of 100 or so regulars on CoS are botting. But still. 2% is a pretty high margin when they are regulars.
Constantly inability to feel like my character functions between endless CC chains and the stagger/bump is viscerally unfun.
My buffs and perks not transferring on swap is normally unfun.
Participating to the best of my ability for a 25-30 minute duration only for the game to reward me with spitting in my face (500 pvp xp) is unfun.
Your dungeons not spawning monsters on time leading to party wipes because of the stagger vs mechanic (looking at you, groundskeeper adds) is unfun. Getting stuck by walking forward along the most clear path is unfun. (Seriously it’s the bridge drop in genesis, just move the tree branch or something. At least one player gets stuck in the baby-cage every run. Why is it still here?)
The monsters power seemingly having very little to do with their level tag, and much on-level content being ridiculously out of class for single newer players is weird and unfun.
And while we’re here, the exorbitant amount of time, energy, and gold required to level most crafting skills and then the NEXT exorbitant amount of time, energy, and/or gold required to actually craft relevant things (via craft suits and trophies) is wildly unfun. Getting to 200 feels a lot like getting to 60 - the game slaps you in the face for daring to think you got to play/do something yet.
Ultimately: why does it seem like New World simply hates me for not being endgame already? Because that’s the feeling, is that it does. If that’s not the feeling you want your newly endgame players to have, you need to reconsider a great many things. if it is, cool. Hardcore is a niche genre but a real one.
Fix your UI. The numerous bugs that render the game literally inoperable, and require spamming random buttons, waiting entire minutes, or totally resetting the game is far too high for a game of this magnitude. This is stuff that should’ve gotten cleared in beta.
Anyway, that’s my POV. I really did try, because I think ultimately there is kind of something here, but…I mean to be honest, if I wanted to do a ton of work for something that seems to hate me, I could go back to working retail. I don’t need it from my video games. Maybe check this out in another year, maybe not, but I hope at least some of this can be helpful, and I hope at least one other new/returning player might one day have less of a hellish experience because of it.
Take it easy, New World. Happy sniping.
