New World brings a bunch of good stuff we should learn from, and even more horrible stuff we absolutly need to learn from. I will do my best to compile what New World does great, and what we could use in our beloved project, and what we absolutly need to avoid.
The Good
Gathering
It's quite an amazing feeling when you walk out of a settlement into a large forest full of trees, bushes, rocks and rivers that are all gatharable. Every single tree you see can be chopped down. Every single rock can be mined. All flint nearby a river can be picked up. You can fish from anywhere there is water. When your done chopping down a tree, it falls down and stays there a little while. Sometimes you stumble upon a mature tree, requiring higher skill to gather, pushing you to keep chopping down trees and refining your skill. And the higher your skill, the more effective your skills become. You feel the progress with every single act. This is amazing. The feeling after coming back to a cozy settlement after a grinding session with bags full of material is great. And processing it, crafting it feels great.
Ashes needs to update the 2005 system of only being able to chop specific predefined trees, rocks, bushes etc. Ashes promises to be dynamic. And New World has proven it is possible to have a dynamic gathering system. And in all honesty, thanks to New World, this is non-debatable. We really cant come out with Ashes with a clear copy of the old school gathering system. We need the world to feel dynamic, and if we need to choose one direction to go with when it comes to gathering, New Worlds way is the best, by far.
To go even further than New World there are multiple things you can do. For example, make the gathering tools deeper. Let us modify them and progress our tools. Also, tie our gathering progression to certain abilities that we can choose from.
Fishing
This was actually quite something. Try the game out and try to fish. Please, do not go with the system we have in the alpha currently.
The Bad
*Playing with friends
The most r*tarded playing with friends experience I ever had. Probably ever, and always, even in the future. I jumped in with two other friends. We all randomly spawned in different zones on the map (there are 4). To counter this, we just decided to walk to one of us and start from there. You could not. YOU LITERALLY could not start progressing from a different zone. Only the player who naturally spawned in that zone could take the quests. To counter this, we remade our characters multiple times, going through the horrible tutorial until two of us made it to the same place.
A bit later, we learned that all tasks and stuff is personal, so we could not do activities togheter. All in all, the playing with friends experience sucked. Please, don't make it complicated to play with friends in Ashes.
*The faction system
To everyones suprise, one faction was bigger than the other, which led to them always winning and taking more territory. This led to everyone switching to that faction and all new players also picked it. Every battle for every node got dominated by the leading faction, with 5 times the numbers of the other factions. And you, the special snowflake with your 30 man guild that will beat the odds and defeat the mainstream faction? Sorry mate, you got burried alive under a pile of 500 zerg rushing players.
This would not be a problem, if stuff was not locked behind being in the winning faction. The dominating faction had many advantages, making it just stupid to not be in that faction. Better crafting, more quest options etc. When you got to a zone where a lot of players where doing quests, you would see the dominating faction, 10... 20 players just hunting one single player from a different faction. It was a mess.
*Repetitive enemies and quests
There were a few animals like pigs, cows, wolves, lynx and turkeys. And there were a few enemies like zombie pirates, zombies, and abberations. Thats it. Now kill 15 of these x300 quests. Also, many, many tasks made you go to the exact same location you had been before. You could pick up a quest to gather a squash in a zombie infested farm. Complete it and turn it in. And then directly after get the exact same quest.
In the end, I do understand this is
@StevenSharif game. But, it is a tried and tested strategy, to learn from others. Both from their succeses and their mistakes. I hope intrepid monitors New World, and learn from them. What to do more of, what to do less of, and what to avoid.
