Going to share my experience of the past 3-4 weeks that will envelop the game, late game, ags and our community. The aim of this isn’t to offend anyone, just to share my perspective and see what you guys think. It will be a lenghty read so please be patient and maybe grab a snack!
Reached level 60 and a literal second later I just wanted to put the game away, it kind of felt pointless to continue on, and I’m not sure why? Maybe someone also experienced this?
Came back to the game the next day only to turn the game on, run around and gather for ~30 mins and turn it off again.
Ended up watching youtube videos of how players spend their time after reaching lv 60. The game does not offer any help in that regard, no direction as to what you should try doing, where to get better gear and so on. After xp became obsolete all side missions, faction missions and town boards immediatelly felt like a pointless chore, rather than a fun activity (although I love grinding in other mmos I played).
Tonight I discovered Outpost Rush and being a pvp focused player I got really excited and thought that this will be a great oppurtunity to get better gear while doing my favorite activity - pvp. Besides, from what I’ve read I got the impression that the main point of late game is pvp. 4 out of 6 matches were a landslide vicotry/defeat depending on which team the hatchet exploiters were placed. They were mass reported but came back only to “contribute” to another match. I asked what people thought about there being so many exploiters and Outpost matches finishing in just a few minutes. And their answer cometely struck my competetive gamer soul. “There is no difference, they HELP us finish matches faster” they said. It turns out that it does not matter how many kills you get, or wether you win or lose, everyone gets the exact same stuff, and exploiters make the process much faster. Then it turns out that the gear you get from pvp matches does not increase the watermark which makes gear grinding in pvp pointless…
Throughout these matches I also encountered the following problems:
Could not switch my weapon (I was not fighting at the time).
Could use life staff abilities with my great axe equiped. This one is a big red flag and I haven’t seen anyone else encounter this issue?
Could not cast self targeted healing, the skills would just cast to random places, which is extremely annoying when you’re in a heat of combat.
Could not damage other players no matter how much I would hit them, their health bar wouldn’t even show up.
Enemy players would start crouching really fast in their healing circles and regain all health almost immediatelly.
After this epicly disappointing experience I decided to submit feedback and describe the issues I encountered. And this right here was the cherry on top. The feedback window bugged out 3 times and would not let me delete text, copy and paste. When trying to delete text (I was fixing typos) it would leave some letters which were impossible to remove. It took me 4 buggy attempts to submit the feedback about the bugs in the game, the sense of irony was unmatched.
I realise that there is no mmo that had a great initial launch, all of them encounter problems in the beginning. Not on a scale like this though… Having spent more than three weeks with the game I can honestly say that I enjoyed the beginning of it, the initial impressions were great apart from the unresponsive combat and copy/paste areas/cities/dungeons. However I constantly get the sense that it is just skin (graphics) deep in any direction I stumble. Pardon my french but it just feels like a little gold covered poop-nugget. Yes, it looks amazing but once you get closer you see for what it really is. I’m a coder myself, not a game developer, but I have some experience writing software. I might be wrong, but these feel like problems that are quite impossible to solve with just patching, that will just create more problems and the entire code of the game becomes an untracable mess. The updates seem like a huge risk to breaking systems that you already have in place. It’s becoming apparent that a ground-up rework/engine change is the only way to go here. These are alpha state problems too… no, perhaps even pre-alpha as you try to decide which engine to go with.
The communication (or rather the lack of it) from AGS deserves a comment too. Having worked in a couple of big companies myself it is clear that corp talk 101 is hard at work. This manifests as creating spaces for people to rant and express their disappointment without engaging with them, and saying “sorry, my bad” once in a while when you can come out as the good guy or the victim. The classic “criticism pacifies” strategy. Other manifestations of corp talk include calling something a “performance improvement” when in truth it is a nerf or a complete removal of a system altogether. Also posting completely irrelevant content to social media and when people complain about the state of the game you simply cry out “please do not confuse social media content with development,” and afterwards when a person posts feedback on the forums like they’re supposed to you just completely ignore them, once again the consumer is pacified by the act of criticism and you don’t even have to lift a finger.
The fake halloween event was quite insulting as the only way to “participate” (get a skin) is to get Amazon Prime. Clealry there wasn’t even an attempt to make a festive in-game event. I guess it’s understandable having in mind how deep in you are at the moment. Hopefully there’ll be something for Christmas.
My last rant will reflect on the community around New World. Guys… what. the. fuck. Never ever defend a corporation! You’re a product to them. A battery to sustain their existence. A way to get more money. I mean it should be so clear by now that everyone got tricked into buying something that was falsely advertised and an unsatisfactory/unfinished product. Self-soothing and justification from some of you only paves the way for the normalisation of a phenomenon like this. If AGS will get away with it, then any developer will be able to do so in the future! It is the lowering of consumer and gamer standards right before our eyes. It got to the point where we try to conciliate ourselves by saying “oh but I didn’t expect a full finished game, or even a good game, just a base game is okay.” But it doesn’t take a genius to see that we didn’t even get the base game, I mean all the fundamentals are completely broken! Now some of you will come to the defense of the devs and at first sight rightfully so, they’re people too. They have families and dreams and halloweens and Christmases. And I’m sure most of them come back home overworked and grumble to their significant others about their day. I’m sure that some of the devs are passionate about New World and want to make a great game, however the primary aim of companies like this (and especially with amazon behind them) is to make as much money as they can, the quality will always, ALWAYS come second. Trust me, first hand experience. Most importantly, please remember that this “human factor” does not in any way relieve them of the responsibility to deliver a satisfactory consumer experience, just like it wouldn’t in any other industry in the world. Never ever defend a corporation (or a sister company of one). And for heavens sake have some respect for this wonderful hobby of ours for that was what brought us all here!
