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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
New World vs AoC- Things not to do
Exiled King
Member, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
If anybody played New World preview recently, please post up your comments. I was NOT a fan of the preview, granted, I know it was not a full release and they most likely left out core components.
-PvP: New World PvP is a complete joke, as its supposed to be skill based, the whole Faction war was a complete crap shoot. 10v1, 20v3.....it really made no sense how the PvP worked, no details were given and it was just a bunch of people spamming the same 3 skills over and over again with 5-20 people running at a few people and just wiping them out. I really hope AoC team sees how flawed that system is in NW. You can have a siege battle in a tiny area where 50v50 is happening, it was not fun at all. Open world questing with PvP flagged would give you 10% bonus exp, but honestly it just wasn't worth it because you would constantly get ganked by 3-4 people that were lvl 40+ and your over here at lvl 20 just trying to quest.
Not only was the PvP pointless unless you want faction points but there was nothing else to make people toggle PvP on, no drops, no experience, nothing was gained that was useful. it was boring since everyone had the life staff and could teleport 40 meters away, making it fight, then run away before you die concept. Nobody wants to chase somebody down for 30 minutes for one kill that offers nothing in return.
-Crafting: The crafting in the game was subpar. Basically you collect mats, bring them to the town and click make. It was completely bare bones and half-assed. At least in final fantasy you actually had to go through a set rotation of skills in order to make a good item, NW was more RNG and extremely boring. I don't understand how you can turn mats into other mats within seconds but when you make an item it does 1 at a time until your que is over. I hope AoC team sees the flaws in this approach and they make it more "skill" based and more complex creating a more in-depth experience where only talented crafters benefit.
-Quests: Kill, search item boxes and deliver items. THIS IS SO BORING!!!!!! NW felt like a cookie cutter MMO, offering nothing new in terms of questing. I understand you don't need to reinvent the wheel but at least make it a bit more exciting to quest. I really hope AoC will make the quests actually fun and inviting over just the same delivery quests over and over again. One of the best experiences I ever had was in Ultima Online, almost all the quests were completely different. Even Final Fantasy had some pretty interesting concepts and humor brought in.
Also don't have quests marked on the Map but the quest items are in a completely different place, so many people in the game were extremely confused on where to find the items, mobs or letters you were supposed to find. Half the time the quests turn in wouldnt even show you WHERE to turn it in. This is a problem if you have a large Map and multiple towns, your never going to remember the NPCs location if the quest complete text doesn't tell you....all that was stated was "turn quest into (NPC name) to complete", its like WHERE THOUGH?!?!
-Fast Travel: One thing I am concerned about in AoC is that there is no fast travel unless your in a family or your scientific node is level up. One thing I did like in NW was that you could recall back to an Inn but it was only every hour you could do this. I would like to see something similar in AoC because even though i understand the concept they presented, I'm no fan of walking simulators. There has to be some way to fast travel in AoC that everyone has but not something that could be abused.
-Hit boxes: jesus christ, where do I start? In NW you run up to a mob, use your attack button and the attack misses on every first try. Please for the love of god, don't let us experience this in AoC! So much time wasting watching your character swing and miss attacks because the hitboxes on the monsters are not working properly.
In game VoIP: NW has in game mics, honestly this is a great feature but brings tons of toxicity to the game. People in town would go AFK and just blast annoying as music or some voice track over and over again where you cant even hear your friends talk while in discord. It was almost impossible to find somebody's name to mute them especially when you got 100-200 people in town. I really hope AoC does not allow voice comms in game.......this was a complete fail for NW. Not to mention the constant cursing and annoying children crying about everything.
-Housing: Not a big fan of housing that forces you to load into a different shard. IE: you click on enter house and a loading screen pops up and you load into another zone. i know AoC doesn't have this right now which is another positive for AoC.
Quite frankly, I was not super impressed and I have heard the same sentiment from hundreds of other people. What is everyones thoughts? Just thought i would make a thread and see what other people saw that they don't want AoC to have in the game or atleast make a conversation about some of the gameplay mechanics.
-PvP: New World PvP is a complete joke, as its supposed to be skill based, the whole Faction war was a complete crap shoot. 10v1, 20v3.....it really made no sense how the PvP worked, no details were given and it was just a bunch of people spamming the same 3 skills over and over again with 5-20 people running at a few people and just wiping them out. I really hope AoC team sees how flawed that system is in NW. You can have a siege battle in a tiny area where 50v50 is happening, it was not fun at all. Open world questing with PvP flagged would give you 10% bonus exp, but honestly it just wasn't worth it because you would constantly get ganked by 3-4 people that were lvl 40+ and your over here at lvl 20 just trying to quest.
Not only was the PvP pointless unless you want faction points but there was nothing else to make people toggle PvP on, no drops, no experience, nothing was gained that was useful. it was boring since everyone had the life staff and could teleport 40 meters away, making it fight, then run away before you die concept. Nobody wants to chase somebody down for 30 minutes for one kill that offers nothing in return.
-Crafting: The crafting in the game was subpar. Basically you collect mats, bring them to the town and click make. It was completely bare bones and half-assed. At least in final fantasy you actually had to go through a set rotation of skills in order to make a good item, NW was more RNG and extremely boring. I don't understand how you can turn mats into other mats within seconds but when you make an item it does 1 at a time until your que is over. I hope AoC team sees the flaws in this approach and they make it more "skill" based and more complex creating a more in-depth experience where only talented crafters benefit.
-Quests: Kill, search item boxes and deliver items. THIS IS SO BORING!!!!!! NW felt like a cookie cutter MMO, offering nothing new in terms of questing. I understand you don't need to reinvent the wheel but at least make it a bit more exciting to quest. I really hope AoC will make the quests actually fun and inviting over just the same delivery quests over and over again. One of the best experiences I ever had was in Ultima Online, almost all the quests were completely different. Even Final Fantasy had some pretty interesting concepts and humor brought in.
Also don't have quests marked on the Map but the quest items are in a completely different place, so many people in the game were extremely confused on where to find the items, mobs or letters you were supposed to find. Half the time the quests turn in wouldnt even show you WHERE to turn it in. This is a problem if you have a large Map and multiple towns, your never going to remember the NPCs location if the quest complete text doesn't tell you....all that was stated was "turn quest into (NPC name) to complete", its like WHERE THOUGH?!?!
-Fast Travel: One thing I am concerned about in AoC is that there is no fast travel unless your in a family or your scientific node is level up. One thing I did like in NW was that you could recall back to an Inn but it was only every hour you could do this. I would like to see something similar in AoC because even though i understand the concept they presented, I'm no fan of walking simulators. There has to be some way to fast travel in AoC that everyone has but not something that could be abused.
-Hit boxes: jesus christ, where do I start? In NW you run up to a mob, use your attack button and the attack misses on every first try. Please for the love of god, don't let us experience this in AoC! So much time wasting watching your character swing and miss attacks because the hitboxes on the monsters are not working properly.
In game VoIP: NW has in game mics, honestly this is a great feature but brings tons of toxicity to the game. People in town would go AFK and just blast annoying as music or some voice track over and over again where you cant even hear your friends talk while in discord. It was almost impossible to find somebody's name to mute them especially when you got 100-200 people in town. I really hope AoC does not allow voice comms in game.......this was a complete fail for NW. Not to mention the constant cursing and annoying children crying about everything.
-Housing: Not a big fan of housing that forces you to load into a different shard. IE: you click on enter house and a loading screen pops up and you load into another zone. i know AoC doesn't have this right now which is another positive for AoC.
Quite frankly, I was not super impressed and I have heard the same sentiment from hundreds of other people. What is everyones thoughts? Just thought i would make a thread and see what other people saw that they don't want AoC to have in the game or atleast make a conversation about some of the gameplay mechanics.
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Comments
I agree with you on what you said on IG VoIP. I don't want to hear someone else's <fill in genre type> music while I'm playing a game.
Housing - From what I saw in past updates, instanced apartments will be available, but so will free standing houses. However, the homes will be very limited, so most people will have an instanced apartment if you aren't lucky enough to grab a home in the beginning.
Fast Travel - I agree with fast travel, but it seems like only one type of node will give that - Scientific.
Regarding your "I know it was not a full release and they most likely left out core components." - sorry to say that, but it was supposed to be the released product, and thats all the game was supposed to have to offer on release, thats why the delay that everyone with at least one functioning braincell saw coming from a mile away.
If that's a full release product, i feel really sorry for them then. That game was so boring, not sure how they could add more content to make it worth playing.....
And yeah, the switch from PVP focus to PVE was visibly evident. It felt half assed for sure.
NW management has changed their minds on a daily basis.
Not exactly. They just weren't prepared for the amount of toxicity the initial open world PvP version of New World created. Instead of fixing it, they chose to completely change the game into a PvE game.
So basically you said what i said, instead of applying appropriate tweaks, which they had a ton of options of, they just scrapped the whole thing and start from zero, for the third time... No need to flavor it with excuses, excuses dont bother the consumer.
Once player found a way to spawn in and not appear on the nearby list. He then spammed voice with techno and cursing.
Any commend that's mouse driven needs to have a /slash command alternative like /mute player123
I'm not concerned about fast travel because I find it makes large game worlds small. If anything, fixed rings like EQ are best. With the scientific nodes, that's possible.
Ha, sounds just like my experience. Maybe even a control like /mute_town would of been very useful. The whole in town VoIP was annoying though. I remember EQ portals, that was pretty nice. I think im just a bit tainted/biased from UO where you could make a rune for a spot and teleport back to that spot anytime as long as you had the regents to make a portal spell, but if you didnt put the rune back in your book, anyone could steal that rune or loot it from your body.
NW has some nice ideas but that's just it.
Visually it's stunning and that's about as far as it goes.
The World
The world of Aeternum is one of its strongest points. It is very clear that a lot of time has been spent carefully constructing this world. Visually most of the zones are impressive and grand. So much fantastic scenery to explore. Where it falls short a little bit is how empty and incomplete a lot of it feels. Every zone is basically a copy + paste of the same few mobs with a slight change to their skin and a higher level. So many lovely little detailed parts of this map but no real reason to go any of them.
Combat
Its bad. The more time you spend with it the more it feels like they just don't know what direction they are taking this game in. The whole action/reaction based combat system feels like it has been designed with pvp in mind rather than pve. The whole blocking/dodging attacks and finding openings to deal damage yourself makes sense on paper. But NWs implementation in most situations is just frustrating. Every attack locks you into an animation, the recovery time after this before you can make another action like a block or a dodge is far to slow. So more often than not even when trying to avoid incoming damage you will take some, this wouldn't be an issue if it were not for the staggering. Every hit you take staggers your character or in some cases knocks you down and prevents you from doing anything for a moment. The problem here is most of the time you get hit again before you can perform any action. Resulting in frequent occasions where you fail to avoid one attack, which becomes you being chain slapped for hit after hit sometimes just sitting there waiting to be able to do something whilst half your HP is chipped away. Some people like to call this challenging, personally I call it not fun. When you're not being stun locked you have your 3 different weapons you can switch between at will. Each can have 3 abilities on a hot bar at once, and these 3 abilities share cooldowns between weapons. This is one of the most frustrating things ever. If I assign a hatchet ability with a 40 sec cd to my Q button and use it, then switch to my Staff which has a 10 sec cd ability bound to Q. I am locked out of using that ability for 40 seconds due to the hatchet ability. Suddenly you're doing all sorts of mental gymnastics trying to figure out the best way to configure your abilities to minimize screwing yourself with cooldowns. The only things i should be thinking about with my keybinds is personal preference. Further to this with only 3 abilities per weapon and cd's being shared you will find yourself a lot of the time having no available ability to use and are just spamming left click. I doesn't feel like MMO combat most of the time, i feel like i'm playing a single player hack n slash.
PvP
The whole issue of being staggered by every hit is multiplied tenfold in pvp. Most 1v1's are usually decided by who gets the first hit in. From that point you just spam left click and get hits in over and over preventing them from reacting. As you can imagine once you add additional people it gets even worse. Get jumped by a duo whilst you're on your own? You're probably going to die before you can actually do anything at all. Over the course of the beta week you saw less and less people flagged for pvp because of how bad it was. If you weren't a large group you'd probably end up getting killed so why bother flagging at all when the only benefit is a 10% exp boost.
The siege system was also quite overwhelming. As an attacker we had to cap 3 points by standing on them and stopping the other team standing on them. We then could place some cannons and upgrade and try to damage a gate faster then they could repair a gate. And finally try to push into the castle to capture a final point by standing on it and preventing the opposing team from standing on it. Even if there were no performance issues here (There were tons) the actual siege itself felt no more exciting or special than a WoW battleground. An instanced 40vs40 where you attack a fort with fixed static destructibles. From my understanding each town could be attacked by a siege once per day within a 30 minute window and 80 people could take part. This system is supposed to be the endgame? A 30 minute a day event that only a small % of people take part in.
Quests
Not much to say here because there really is so little. Kill x number of this creature. Kill and loot x number of items from this creature. Or search x number of boxes in this area for x item. That's all the variety you get. MMO's released 15 years ago had wider variety of quests included. Its expected for this game to have some incredible new revolutionary take on questing. But to have a quest system in 2020 that is reminiscent of the early 2000's is just a joke.
Crafting
This is one area I did quite enjoy even if more work on it is needed. A variety of different skills to work on, a system that doesn't make early level resources lose all relevancy as you level. And crafted items that aren't completely useless. A few glaring issues though. They have localized banking and trading, which i think is a cool feature that can affect some decision making. With players setting tax rates in different cities do you go through the job of moving your resources somewhere with a lower tax rate before refining? Where do you set your home location as depending on what resource you might currently be farming. And with governors upgrading different workstations you may need to move goods in order to process them at all. All of this add's depth to the game, or at least it would if there wasn't a fast travel system. Which uses a pretty easy to replenish resource called Azoth. Local banking + fast travel are not really compatible features so i don't understand what they're trying to do here.
Furthermore you have access to every single tradeskill. If i can gather/craft from every skill what do i really need to trade for? Eventually every player is going to max out each of these skills and everyone can craft/gather everything they need. The only thing that will be worth trading is if someone gets a particularly high stat roll on a crafted piece.
The skills feel like they level a bit too quickly as well. The only thing that's been gating me on the preview is the cities having a daily cooldown to upgrade a crafting station. If you were the start the game after launch with upgrades cities I reckon you can max all your tradeskills within a couple of days. All in all the crafting system has a good framework it just needs to be expanded with a deeper selection of craftables and some tweaks made to encourage trading more.
That's the basics i could write pages and pages on this. So many little details that make me go what were they thinking. But in summary they have a beautiful world with nothing in it and a broken boring combat system. I have seen almost all of the combat in a single week. Even if played at a casual pace you'd probably be done with this game in under a month. Frankly I think it will need a lot longer than 6 months to resolve the core issues of this game ie combat and add a suitable amount of content to justify their price tag. The fact they were actually going to release this in its current state at all screams "cash grab"
I'll take another look if i get the chance to test again before release, but I certainly ain't holding my breath on this one.
I played NW more than I would like to admit, but I hardly enjoyed it. It has so many flaws and poor design choices that it made the game feel dull and never rewarding, even though it has some potential. I liked some ideas and the world and story are its strong elements, but I highly doubt Amazon Studios have what it takes to make it a good game and unlock its full potential.
Processing was probably the best as it's quick and easy and offers some bonus items if your skill is high enough.
Crafting...oh please no. That was abysmal. There was no real fun in it and the RNG for slots/perks was weak. The number of items was also disappointing (though, they may have many more items in the future). As an example, Tier X plate is all the same. Sure, you can die the pieces, but the lack of variation in the models fell short.
I love crafting as much as adventuring and hope AoC will have a crafting mechanic that is engaging.
I don't know how will be PvP in AoC but I'm very hyped with this game and I hope it will be very good, skilled and rewarded.
Please, make a MMO fully viable playing only PvP, there are too many people like that hate PvE.
Nope. You said "cater to the vocal masses", which is incorrect. They just didn't want to deal with the toxicity. So instead of addressing it, they chose to escape from it.
I would be willing to bet AoC has far more content as it stands right now then New World
New World has no endgame at all.
I heard a bird ♫
the "toxicity" which came in really dumbed down and pointless discussions of "they are killing lowbies", no, the problem was the shift between a PVP game, to a PVE disneyland, which was done because people were crying that there is not enough raids, not enough pve, not enough dungeons, and pvp is all they have, and they wont play a game like that.
So yes, i meant what i said. Either its incorrect or not in your eyes, thats what happened. And thats what led to an inevitable DoA of NW.
I got to say 3 days and I couldn’t load the game. I would seriously log on and look at the quests I have to do and log off. I don’t understand how those quests were given the green light. Worst quests I think I’ve ever participated in for any MMO.
I had a buddy of mine who loved playing the game (not a fan boy)...but I just couldn’t see it though. The world is great and the base of a great game, but it’s 2+ years from being a great game in development.
The AoC team needs to button down and take limited feedback from the community and stay true to their original ideas/concepts. Amazon murdered their own game to make a PvE minority happy.
Additionally, there weren't any fun systems in place as an outlet for PvP so people found open world PvP to be more fun and started exclusively doing that. As far as I know, there really isn't a sense of progression with winning sieges. Maybe if Amazon made sieges more fun, or implemented other PvP systems that were actually fun and rewarding, then less people would be so bored that they exclusively open world PvP.
I don't do pvp, but all the rest is lacking. Combat has been fun first, but it is clunky and the shared cooldown timer when using 2 or 3 weapons is a nogo. For an alpha the game is quite stable. Vanguard years ago would have been happy about that stability. Quests are year 2000 style repetitive. Even the destinations of the main story line quests are pretty similar.
What bugged me most as I played LOTRO years ago was endless running around (this I am a bit afraid of in AoC too...) well NewWorld already has it. Unless you own a home, you teleport once every... 2 hours? or you are running.
But there are other nice features as well. When you shoot your first bison and it turns and constantly runs away from you - prizeless. This creature never attacks. It is a real hunt. Nearly each creature has different styles of attacking you, making you cautious when you meet it the first time. Something done right.
You can only create one character per server. If you are a roleplayer or you intend to play a certain team with a friend/mate and one with your guild... if you want to play this role today and the other one tomorrow, you have work to do. Not the brightest choice. They went into problems with faction wars as they allowed more chars per account per server. But as with the initial problems they did not face them, they tried to follow the easiest path. There are lots of technical way to solve the faction war problem, but...
Amazon has lots to do and to do right, to make this game a success. And they have to find a path they really want to do and stick to it.
I mean i have to agree with most of your post, they really do have a long way go if its even slightly successful. And yes, Turkey and buffalo shooting was a nice added in feature, gave me a couple of chuckles. As far as net coding goes, the game was pretty stable, but there was quite a bit of lag i encountered in the 5 days i played. F
But watching the dev streams on AoC, it's pretty obvious they have a ton of more content and really thought-out the world impact, at least what they have shown so far.
One thing about NW that really grinded me the wrong way, was the player collision, IE: people blocking doorways or if somebody was in trying to hit a mob you couldn't hit the mob through abilities or physical attacks. The stun lock was also ubnoctious