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so just tested new world lol...
Chicago
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
was really hoping new world would be something to play casually until ashes launch but after 12 hours i can say its not for me, even with the absolutely amazing character creation and the beautiful voice acting my character does every time she casts a spell i just couldn't get into it, now with all my eggs in the one basket with ashes i really hope ashes does a better job lol,
the combat in new world ruined it for me, that and the generic same quests you pretty much do over and over, the fact that you lose your entire quest progression if you die with pvp enabled the list goes on, if anyone else has the same opinion please let me know what you would like to see ashes do different from new world
the combat in new world ruined it for me, that and the generic same quests you pretty much do over and over, the fact that you lose your entire quest progression if you die with pvp enabled the list goes on, if anyone else has the same opinion please let me know what you would like to see ashes do different from new world
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As for the quests i just found them average/standard, nothing to praise it about, nothing to trash it about.
Those are problems i simply don't see Ashes having.
Aren't we all sinners?
2K server capacity in 2021 for an MMORPG (especially one of this scope) is definitely ludicrous.
Aren't we all sinners?
well if you do decide to play make sure you choose the lowest pop server to try it out. If you spend 2 hours waiting in queue you will be voiding your ability to refund the game.
I have two hours between work and sleep.
Ill pass on NW. I wasnt into the philosophy of it anyway. I dont care for optional content, I want a solid, continuous world.
But it's sad to see how much the core things of mmo are left out:
Classes
Weapons
Abilities
Roles
Guild gameplay
Player interaction
And are being replaced with:
Costumize character
Lifeskills
Gathering
Instanced content
Housing
Story mode
it wouldn't be so bad if the replacements weren't poorly implemented. Even the gathering, something I quite enjoy, is rendered inane due to how the crafting is handled in tandem with the amount of gear gained from pvp/questing/dungeoning.
Because the crafting stations are tied to the town needing to upgrade them, it will take weeks before we see max level crafted gear when you can reach max level in 2-4 days. People will be farming max level content for gear by this time next week while the crafters will barely be at lvl 30 gear regardless of their skill level.
And players are to blame. They want a massive variety of easy/achievement ticking content, simulations of jobs, one character-can-do all, instead of meaningful gathering and crafting. Why? Because they want to play solo. "Oh yeah I crafted a chair, ima go sell it for 15g, there are 100 chairs being sold around me just like mine. Now Ima go catch a fish and sell it for 14g."
Meanwhile everybody else is ABLE to make a chair and catch a fish, without having to sacrifice, let's say, rune making proficiency.
So yeah, a million ways to craft and gather, 3 skills per ability hotbar, no class pride, definition, or even purpose, just customize your characters playstyle and off you go to faceroll the worlds mobs and gather every shinny item-rubbish.
Slap whatever look you want on your gear and you are rdy. Wearing robes, liking plate armor? No problem. Holding axes for the stats? Liking daggers looks? We got you fam. Transmorg is the end game OR take a look at our cash shop.
We are all adults here. We dont like "No" because we have wallets.
And only when you feel like it, you shall PvP in a fps or tekken-like combat. In a safe environment.
I blame the players. They affect developers direction. That is why I need AoC. To put the adventure back in the world and the feeling of achievement about my characters progress.
Obviously it doesn't have the depth and density that ashes wants to create, so what, It's a completely separate thing, stop making this a forced competition.
Appreciate it if you can and if not just don't play, we don't have to be like this.
Lulz... Sleep
Making it to class was difficult
I figured all of this out in the open beta test. I didn't buy the game for other reasons that you didn't mention in the OP, but regardless, the shortcomings should've been obvious.
Mention them. It would be a much better post than "just have fun with it".
Plus the devs can get affirmation for their AoC vision from our feedback.
Its MMO, but its not a MMORPG, thats for sure.
I watched some review videos and also a stream.
LazyPeon mention that the quests are basically ALL THE SAME: kill xx and open xx chests. Very odd system. Its like the whole leveling process was getting in the way of the game design. The 'end game' IS the game. Everything else is a grind, by the look of it.
Don't care for the combat, animation nor character movement; it reminds me of a console game.
Gameplay Loop:
The gameplay loop for New World is based on Territory Control, and everything else services this gameplay loop. To be better at territory control, you character levels up, equips better items, and improves their weapon skills. To actually declare war, you complete "faction missions", to move the influence bar. Once your influence bar for a particular territory is complete, you can declare war and have an instanced 50v50 fight against the enemy guild.
In order to level up, you do PvE and quests (especially town-hall resource turn-ins). In order to level your weapon skills, you kill stuff with those weapons. In order to equip good items, you mostly just ignore the crafting system and use the faction vendors (hilariously).
Broadly, this would be fine.
Unfortunately, the PvE is incredibly repetitive. There are less than 20 mob types that get copy+pasted throughout the world with different levels in different areas with super similar AI designs. It's supposed to play like a souls-like, but there isn't any hitstun and the mobs don't have reactable startup frames on their attacks, and their damage isn't punishing, so the optimal strat is to just spam m1 and then heal through the damage. See this extremely high quality explainer for more information here.
The quests are similarly repetitive. MMOs don't usually have a lot to work with mechanically - you tend to be able to either press `e` to interact or kill things, and that's the extent to how you can influence the world. The trick is how the MMO flavors it. Hopefully, killing things, dynamically causes other stuff to happen. Or there's some NPC talking to you. Or the things you're interacting with change in some way, etc.
For instance:
Say that you find out that there's a nearby gang of bandits capturing local militia-men and making them do forced labor in some nearby mines. You go around killing bandit-guards and then interacting with their corpes to collect keys. This lets you interact with the friendly militia's shackle's to free them. The militia need to be armed (more interaction), and then they'll help you out for freeing them. After you do this enough, it'll spawn the bandit-lord who is elite and very tough. With the help of all of your militia-men, you're able to defeat him.
If you check the mechanics, it's still just fighting and press-e-to-interact, but they've flavored it in a way that it's interesting. Tons of ways to do this.
New World never does any of this - they don't bother.
Faction Influence
If my company wants to take over windsward, we repeat faction PvP-flagged faction missions (the same 3) over and over to move an influence bar to 100%. These missions follow the same pattern: "go to an area and stay alive for 90s. In that area, click on box A, and then run to box B and click on it. While you're there, [chop 30 tree / kill 6 turkeys / whatever]" That's all 3 missions.
For reasons I'll get to later down in the post, it's incredibly difficult to stop someone from completing these if they're determined to do so (because it's hard to kill someone who doesn't want to die). You can probably stop them from clicking the boxA/boxB thing, but can't prevent them from just living for 90 seconds. This means that they'll eventually be able to turn in their influence missions and eventually be able to move the bar to 100%.
Besides, what are you even doing in that area? You presumably already own it!
So, what ends up happening is that the folks who take over an area don't defend it and then just go start working on taking over some other area. No PvP actually happens and instead you have merry-go-round faction missions where players just avoid each other (did I mention that the game rewards players for completing these missions with currency?)
Faction Population Balance
New World has a 3-faction systems, with no real incentives to be the losing faction, and economic incentive to be in the winning faction. You're allowed to switch factions (after 3 months), but not to the faction with the most number of players. Can anyone guess what'll happen? Green and Purple dominate every server, and Yellow barely holds any territory. The Yellow folks will get tired of not being able to do content (faction wars), not being able to collect taxes, and will faction switch to whatever the second-largest faction is.
This will make that faction larger until it's as large as the biggest faction, and Yellow will keep bleeding until the server has a basically even split of Green/Purple.
If they try to make it so that there's an incentive to be on the losing faction, then folks will intentionally lose. I have no idea how anyone green-lit a three-party system.
Once the servers are 2-party (3 months from now), that means that you are unable to PvP against half of the population in the open world (which is a shame).
Gear
There's a crafting economy that doesn't require any real specialization other than an investment of time, and one of the crafted items is gear. Unfortunately, there are no gear sinks. This means that once you have your BiS gear, and once the server is saturated with max-level gear and max-level players, crafting gear becomes worthless (like in every other MMO where they somehow forgot to do this). Gear can be repaired indefinitely.
Combat
This video can explain some of the fundamentals better than I can, but doesn't go into a few other gripes I have. The creator talks about hitstun and spacing, and those are super important for a system like this to function. I agree. The creator talks about how mobs need to have reactable telegraphs. I agree. They don't.
The combat itself also don't have any real form of yomi. The attacks worth dodging are reactably slow and can't be feinted. So, you just don't dodge until you see the huge wind-up, and then you dodge. There's no way to bait the dodge out and get them to mess up.
If your opponent starts running away from you, you have gap closers. Those gap closers can be dodged. You can run while holding your "look behind me" keybind. The gap closer cannot be canceled or feinted, so no mindgame there. There's a gap. Everyone moves at the same speed. All of the gap closers are also gap-creators. I have to use my charge to catch up. You wait for me to use it and dodge. After you dodge, you charge to create space. Repeat until you're safely in town.
Back when there was hit-stun, landing the first hit, or outspacing your opponent mattered. It put you at frame-advantage, and made it so that they had to respond to your pressure. Now that there is none, it's all about who can trade favorably, since neither player can really stop the other player from doing what they're doing.
Consider this. The hatchet has an ability called berserk that gives you a 10-second buff that:
once the buff runs out, there's a 14 second cooldown before you can reapply it. Can you guess the gameplan? Pop berserk. Trade favorably. After berserk runs out, switch to another weapon to disengage. Run around avoiding damage until berserk is available again. Repeat. wheeeeeeeeee
All of that said, everyone is total trash at the game, presumably because it attracted a bunch of MMO players when really the concepts are closer to fighting game concepts. It's been a lot of fun 1v5ing and 2v8ing above-level players using meta builds (hatchet / greataxe for open world, life staff / great axe for organized) before other players discover them. I don't think the game will be interesting at all in this state once players are actually good at the game.
It's pretty obvious the game was developed from a money maker perspective. Which often isn't how all other successful MMO's are designed. Every other MMO that topped the charts was designed from the perspective of making the best damn game they can make. Then how to monetize it to make it work from there came after.
When you think about money first you get mobile gaming. When you think about pleasing the customer first you get PC gaming at it's best.
U.S. East
Not to say that this explains all of my gripes above
That server limit the game has now would have served the game well if they kept this premise for the game alive, and they would have only needed the one server.
I honestly don't know about that. Not in it's current form. All of the progression is static and permanent. At least in the full loot pvp mode there's a perpetual churn of gear and a real sense of loss when killed which gives more value to being a good player.
Now after some updates sure it will most likely build up better than a full loot game, but will people come back to play it?
"Whoops, it's morning already. Ah well, may as well keep going!"
Yep, and people wonder why we're so protective on this forum! Not all feedback is good feedback!
My main reason for not buying NW is that there's very little risk/reward and reasons to PvP built into the game systems. There's almost no consequence for dying, especially when you can respawn just 15 seconds away at a campfire. Rewards for capturing territories are basically meaningless, and are only really helpful for leveling up faster or giving small discounts on taxes so that you can amass slightly more gold that you ultimately won't use, because the best gear isn't particularly hard to get. All of this made open world PvP boring and repetitive, knowing that the people you just killed would be back in 15 seconds like nothing happened.
The game is basically a shallow reward treadmill. It's annoying to see the vast majority of people running around basically playing a single player game because the flagging system lets them ignore everything around them as they beeline to the next mob. Players fighting over territory don't really care about gaining or losing territory, because if they really cared about the meager gold efficiency from controlling a territory, then they would spend all of that time farming instead of PvPing, the latter of which actually costs you resources making it negatively gold efficient.
I disagree with the OP about the character creator. I thought it was too limiting compared to what you can do in other games, but this had no weight in my decision because I play games for gameplay, not cosmetics.
I like the combat, which is apparently not a popular opinion. Maybe it's because I used mostly ranged weapons and enjoy fps aiming. If I played melee only, then maybe I would have a different opinion. However, the combat isn't better than other multiplayer games, and since there's no compelling reason to care about the PvP in this game other than just fighting other players for its own sake, then there's therefore no reason not to just play a multiplayer game with more tuned combat instead.
I like NW combat for a survival game. I don't know that I would like it for an MMORPG.
Combat skills are mostly based on weapons rather than character abilities - there are no classes.
In Valheim, I often feel like a Hunter as I Sneak around an backstab.
I don't feel like any RPG class in New World - but that's OK because I'm not expecting NW to feel like an RPG.
The mechanics feel great for a non-RPG.
The reason there are 10k long queues is everyone is packed onto the first few servers. I was at work when the servers went live and luckily for me my guild chose to reroll on a fresh server. The server we're on has zero queue at all.
This is where the head starts for Ashes can make Intrepid's life easier. If specific servers become overpopulated during the head start cut suspend new accounts until the population dies down. I know this would keep some people from playing with their friends but Intrepid could always allow free server transfers once the active population becomes more stable. Better to not be able to play with your friends for a few days than sit in 6 hours queues.
LOL
MMO and Survival game are not mutually exclusive. It's not an RP. And especially did not begin as an RPG.
The devs are now trying to turn it into an RPG.
(beaushinkle is the one who likes to try to create traps)