Originally Posted by Tethler
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
So, I feel like I've played enough now to give an honest review of the game. Warning: long
According to steam, I've spent roughly 140 hours in-game and I'm up to level 58 (cap is 60). I've experienced all of the content with the exception of the level 60 PvP battleground and the 2 level 60 1-group dungeons. So, I supposed I haven't seen everything, but I feel like I've experienced enough to pass judgment.
The good
Sound
The music score throughout the game is alright. It's unobtrusive but also mostly unremarkable. There are some places I've been when I took particular note of the music and thought it sounded nice, but for the most part, it's just there.
Sound effects in this game, however, are fantastic. Standouts for me being the pickaxe, the musket, and the warhammer. The clink of the pickaxe sounds so realistic, and I love that you can hear it ringing in the distance when someone is mining. The musket and warhammer both sound fantastic as well. I also really like that you can hear fighting in the distance while running around. I play with a headset and I get directional cues for where fighting is taking place. You can hear the metal on metal hits of combat, shouts that characters make from using abilities, and in some cases you can even hear what weapons people are using, despite them being like 100m away on the other side of a hill. This also scales based on the number of combatants. So a fight involving 10 people sounds a lot more chaotic than a fight involving 2.
Environment
The game is flat out gorgeous. The environments look fantastic and the atmospheric lighting is the best I've seen in an MMO. There are a lot of biomes represented with a coming desert area sometime in the nearish future.
Combat
I find the combat to be fun/rewarding. It's kind of a Dark Souls lite style in that you need to be mindful of actions. If you try to faceroll through combat you'll find yourself getting chain staggered and having to use a lot of food/potions to recover lost hp. Activated abilities often lock you into animations, so being strategic is essential. Utilizing blocks and dodges and timing your attacks makes a world of difference in your combat efficiency.
Weapon choice
Weapons in New World kind of function as your class, somewhat similar to FF14. Currently there are 11 weapons (Fire staff, Life staff, Ice gauntlet, bow, musket, sword and shield, hatchet, rapier, warhammer, great axe, 2h spear) with void gauntlet announced and daggers and pistols datamined. Every weapon can be equipped at any time if you want to change your playstyle. You can equip 2 weapons and hotswap in combat to juggle different weapon cooldowns.
Weapon skills level up independently of your character level and cap at 20. Each weapon has two skill trees, and each weapon level gives you a skill point to spend in these trees. You can get a total of 3 activated combat abilities from a total of 6 and you can focus on 1 tree, or go into both. There are also a lot of passives with powerful effects which gives a lot of room for a variety of builds for every weapon. The weapons don't max out super quickly, so it takes some time investment to put out the big pee pee damage in a new weapon. Personally, I leveled as a tank using sword/shield and a great axe as my secondary. I made an effort to level them at the same pace and I hit level 20 in both by character level 55. I had also dabbled in musket, hatchet, and warhammer, getting them each to level 7-10, so I suppose I could have capped my mains sooner had I focused. I've heard some people say that they focused one weapon only and capped it around level 35.
Leveling options
Everything you do in New World gives you xp. Sure, typical quests can get you levels, but so can gathering and doing tradeskills. You can do fishing 1-60 if you really wanted, but it would take a long time. You get quite a lot of xp from PvP kills as well, so you can level that way if you like. Straight up grinding mobs in high density areas or grouping in elite areas also gets you levels quickly. Dynamic corruption portals (similar to Rift, if you know anything about that game) also reward excellent xp and are crucial to farm for end-game crafting materials. With all these options, you can simply change up what you want to work on if you find yourself getting bored doing something.
The bad
Game lore
It's frankly uninteresting. The main story quest is completely forgettable and has an anti-climactic ending. There are 0 cutscenes after the tutorial (some would consider this a plus). The world is strewn with glowing blue pages and books with lore, but nobody reads them because it's usually dumb shit about some farmer that is now a zombie, or a ghost or whatever at the farm you found the note in. Everyone pushes the button to add it to their journal for the xp and don't bother to read it.
Questing
The quests are repetitive. Go to a place and loot 7 items from chests in the area, or kill X mobs, or assassinate a named. They're pretty much all boring with the exception of the occasional unique quest. The only benefit to doing them is being sent out to places off the beaten path so you can see the sights you would have otherwise missed. The game is gorgeous, did I mention that?
Weapon balance
Plainly put, weapons are very unbalanced right now. Dex based weapons are mostly inferior to strength based weapons. This is compounded with the fact that strength based playstyle often uses heavy armor where dex based weapon uses usually go with medium or light armor. This means dex weapon users are, on average, doing less damage and take more incoming damage than strength weapon users.
Heavy armor users paired with a dedicated life staff user are incredibly tanky. I've seen videos of like 8 vs 2 in pvp where the 2 is a heavy tank and a life staff user and the 8 people can't take down the tank. Sure, they were also being outplayed to some extent, but the number advantage should count for more.
Magic DPS (fire staff and ice gauntlet) are great in large scale PvP due to potential massive aoe damage, but are more vulnerable in smaller skirmishes.
I'm sure the bigger balance issues will be worked on after more egregious issues are taken care of by the dev team.
Which brings us to
The ugly
Economy
The in-game economy is a mess. Everything is so devalued that a large portion of gathered tradeskill items are .01g each on the trading post. The volume of items acquired is far too high for demand to keep up with resulting in mass deflation. With the exception of cooldown gated high level components used in endgame armor and weaponsmithing, most items are near worthless. Even level 60 epic equipment items are often worth less than 100g. I'd consider myself an average player, not rich, not poor and I'm sitting on roughly 15k. When I hit 60 in 2 levels I'll be able to fully outfit my character in high level epics for less than 1k. They need to adjust drop rarity going forward to fix this.
Bugs
This is the elephant in the room. Good lord, the bugs. First, I want to start off stating that I am confident that these will get ironed out over time. There have been a lot fixed in the month since launch, but there are still some major issues.
Gold and item duping: There was a gold dupe in a small number of characters that had used server transfers. The affected characters were able to send money to other players and it wouldn't deplete their gold count. It happened for less than a day before being patched. Amazon stated they had logs, banned the people abusing and deleted the gold. I did see a reddit post a few days later claiming that a guy who had openly duped gold avoided the ban and was still in game. So it's likely some have slipped under the radar. Since the bug was a rare instance that only occurred in characters that had server transferred, I assume that the long-term impact is relatively minor.
Item duping came up as an issue after the most recent patch this week. It was also hotfixed in less than a day. Lot of people ate bans for it, but I'm seeing conflicting reports that duped legendary armor is still in circulation, so that's shitty.
HTML in chat: This was a thing. Big yikes. Someone last week figured out how to hide HTML links inside in-game items linked in chat. It was mostly used by dumbasses posting giant sausages in chat, but some more malicious users embedded code that would crash your game if you moused over the link. It was fixed like 2-3 days after it popped up I guess. This one was a pretty serious thing and a security risk.
There are a host of other minor bugs, like some passives not working. Some skill perks on equipment not working, stuff like that. These are getting fixed in batches.
Conclusion
This is the buggiest MMO launch I've ever experienced, and some have been pretty serious issues. Amazon has fixed a lot of them in the month since launch and has been fast to address the serious ones. They still got a shitload more on their plate though.
That said, the game is a lot of fun to play and it looks great. Most of the issues have relatively minor impacts on the PvE side of things, so if PvE is your jam, the game has a lot to offer. If you're more of a sweaty tryhard PvPer, you're gonna be in for frustration based on the current state of the game. Who knows though, if you started at level 1 now, by the time you hit cap maybe most of the rough edges will be smoothed out.
Me, I'm more casual than hardcore, and much more PvE oriented than PvP and I have been thoroughly enjoying my experience.
If anyone has any questions about anything above, or something I didn't mention, I'd be happy to give honest answers.
|
11-02-2021, 07:33 PM
Linear Mode
