The best game developer advice I've ever heard

Devs please this. Please go through and change mobs in older territories, existing dungeons, add animations, add lore to them, include them in quests, spend an entire month on lore and mobs. This would make such a large change in my humble opinion <3

@Shadow_Fox @Luxendra @Centeotl

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seriously please post it notes alone isnt enough,

they are great for clarification or small hints at things but the old adage show dont tell still rings true for this visual media.

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So true! I really like the designs of many of the overworld dropped sets. The Ancients are one. Pretty much any tier, cloth or leather. But like everything else, getting any of that with the actual stats you want…RNG hell.

This is why I join so many other players and ask for a transmog system that will us take the look of a crap piece of gear with nice appearance and put that appearance on a good piece of gear with a crappy appearance.

After playing NW I don’t know if I can switch back to traditional RPG with classes to be honest.

And I want to try Ashes of Creation so bad.

cant even get the forest warden set. i seriously SERIOUSLY hope that the hinted at bad guy angry earth chick zone has that at t5 590+

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was thinking more eldritch horror but a human sized stalker could also work.

a size diffrence can also invoke a sense of dread if done right. and colossal world bosses are cool if also done right.

I was amore alluding to the fact that Margit the Fell ripped new players new assholes left and right as a significantly challenging gatekeeper boss.

Imagine if people actually felt intimidated to fight something in New World. Like, the closest I get to the that feeling is joining a Tempest PUG and rolling up on Neishatun. It’s like “Ok, time to see if my teammates are actually trash or not.”

I’m not worried about the boss so much as I am worried about my teammates. I want to feel challenged by the boss, not the number of chromosomes my teammates have.

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ah that’s from elden ring. didnt play that yet.

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Mark Rosewater is a legend. Not many people stay in the game industry and remain true to their game as much as he has. What a legend. No matter how dedicated you are to the game, he is definitely one you can always learn from.

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Really good post, funniest thing for me out of this is I have absolutely no idea what the lore/story in this game is.

I 100% agree with the OP’s take.

Specific to #10: One very important thing I learned as a developer (not games) was to get out of the way of the user as much as possible. Create an environment that is sensible and straightforward, and let them do whatever it is they need to do: in the case of a game, the user needs to PLAY.

Making the players jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops isn’t play. Nothing about grinding expertise or crafting RNG is fun.

On the other hand, housing is. Furnishing a home is a combination of leveling crafting and finding/buying recipes, and then the system mostly gets out of the way of the player and lets them explore what their house can look like. AGS did a good job with the basic structure of housing, in a way they didn’t with systems like armorsmithing.

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Speaking of which, crafting was supposed to have stupidly strong weapons & armor locked behind rare drop recipes.

Except, you know. We have the RNG Gamba system.

Used to be cool getting those schematics. Now they’re just for novelty of having a crafting bench filled out for crap named craftables.

During the leveling process your random crafts can chance at creating a named weapon. No such thing in end-game crafting. FeelsBadMan.

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I mostly agree with you on furnishing, but even there they stuck their hands in to limit players in a way that doesn’t allow agency. Only being able to put up certain numbers of certain types of items is a limit that just doesn’t make any sense.

I had my girlfriend help me decorate my Ebonscale Reach house because I thought it would be a fun activity for us (it was) even though she doesn’t play the game. I bought or made all of the things I wanted, then we went through the rest of my inventory and started getting really into it. But then we ran into the limit on the number of lighting elements that you can have in your house. WTF? And then there’s the limit on the total number of items in your house, as well. And only being able to put up 5 trophies at a time. Not sure if there are other limits on furnishing your home, but they just don’t make sense to me.

I can kind of understand the trophy thing being an azoth sink before they nerfed azoth travel costs, but now it’s just annoying. Should be able to put them all up, or even just have them in the local storage, and activate them from the character screen. Otherwise, it’s just another time sink where you’re not playing the game.

The limits are probably based on technical performance, but I agree they stink. Since there are cards to upgrade the number of items, I think the item limit has some extra play they could loosen up.

I don’t even really decorate and you run into lighting limits super fast.

I think that was the idea, but they didn’t consider that those items weren’t really end game items. They were great for like the first month of the game, if you leveled your crafting up to 200 super quick. I remember occasionally getting the WH or GA artifacts and drooling over being able to craft a guaranteed legendary STR weapon. But the minute I made it to Genesis and Lazarus dungeon level, the drops from there blew everything else out of the water. And making the items BoP just made them even less useful, because so few people could actually make them.

Well, they allow players to have cc, mobility, high damage and utility with every weapon as long as they play in light armor. They nailed it here…

Again, as long as you use light armor, EVERY BUILD has cc, utility, high damage and mobility

Tanks are for peasants that don’t use i-frames

So, I wouldn’t say it’s limited

To be honest, I’ve seen better ideas on the forum than they released in the past 6 months

Great post and I especially agree with the above.

I think New World has good bones and just needs to work on a few tweaks and better marketing. Personal customisation through transmog and unique skill builds are important.

Game developers often make the mistake of dumbing things down to try and attract new players (and we all know how well that went for Star Wars Galaxies), when what you really need are ways for diverse levels to play together. This can be achieved through highlighting rewards available only in lower level content (New World does this slightly with things like Sacred perk craft mod only being available in a lower expedition) or by allowing low level players to be carried in higher content (the second way is worse because the new player doesn’t learn how to play).

In the very popular transmog thread, there is an idea that relates to collecting skins from various level items in the game. This would give higher level players something to do while helping their low level friends. Collecting in general can keep players addicted.

Another option is to scale some content, so for e.g. if a mixed team goes into Amrine, everyone’s output is scaled to the content (no lvl 60 smashing through it) but rewards are also scaled to the level of the players, so the lvl 60 gets drops at their Expertise level. This way each player gets to contribute to the progress and is rewarded appropriately, so friends can play together without getting bored.

The other thing New World needs to work on is some solid research on who their audience is, what motivates them, and how to design collaboratively to meet their needs.

Developers, this post is the summary of all the problems you have currently in the game, i really recommend to read it and consider it. If you think and act in every especific point of this post, i swear you will have the community and your clients pleased with this actions.

Keep it up and don’t give up! New World have the potency of be one of the best mmos of all time, but you need to polish some things.

Nice post @Halcyon.

I can tell, despite the fact that you come across pissed on many of your posts lol, that you really do like the game deep down.

It does show a lot of promise. For what its worth, i do believe there is sufficient evidence to suggest they are listening to our feedback. They see the numbers just as we do. Its just going to take a lot of time. I imagine they have a balancing act going on, including new content(theres nothing to do) and core fixes(remove orbs, return of stagger).

On that last one, and i know its a topic you are the champion of, i agree with your views on combat and i personally wouldnt mind them going back to that - do you think maybe they moved away because if you make the skill level of the game too high, it will turn a lot more people away?