On the whole, I rather liked New World. OK, so the quests were truly awful and 100 hours elapsed between my being given the final main-story quest element (a dungeon run) and my being geared up enough to complete it, but the lore was well-constructed and the world was very nicely put-together (except for the towns, which in common with those of every other RPG in existence were confusingly or irritatingly laid-out). What I particularly found refreshing, though, was the way it encouraged players to make their own goals.
For example, in the end game there are areas containing chests guarded by elite mobs, and players self-organise "chest runs" to descend en masse on such areas to lay waste to the guards and loot the chests. There's no formal quest to do this, it's more of a "here's some stuff you might want" challenge thrown down by the designers that the players have accepted. Other such challenges, such as pop-up events ("corruption portals" here — they're FATEs in FFXIV and rifts in Rift) were not so attractive, though, and something of an inconvenience at times if they appeared right where the mobs that you have a quest to kill were roaming.
As usual, I knew when I started that I'd be leaving after a couple of months so I didn't join a guild. I couldn't really join one anyway, because the server population was so low. There are three factions in New World, and all members of a guild have to be in the same faction as each other. As is often the case when three-way inter-faction PvP is involved, one faction completely dominates, another just about holds its own and a third is nowhere. I didn't know what the situation was when I signed up to a faction, and happened to plump for the middle one. Its guilds were very PvP focused, because of the hold-their-own requirement, and they weren't looking for people who didn't perhaps enjoy having their heads handed to them on a plate on a daily basis. I think I only ever saw one recruitment ad for my faction, excluding plaintive ones in French, German or Polish that could have been for anything for all I knew.
I'm not usually too bothered by interfaces as I'm more interested in the world and gameplay design, but if an interface has negative consequences for these then I do care. New World is one of those games that has been built so console users can play, making it feel like a backward step for PC gamers (of which I am an example). That alone isn't too much of an issue, but one of its consequencess is that you can use only a very limited set of available actions. Basically, you get only three actions per weapon, and you can only equip two weapons at the same time; if you want to use an action for the other weapon, you have to switch to that weapon first — there's no automatic switching, because there are only three slots, not six, for console-interface reasons. The result is quite exciting action combat interrupted by needless faffing around. I almost (but didn't) program one of my mouse's side buttons to do 2 Q 1 so I only had one button to press instead of three when I wanted to use my secondary weapon's main power as a one-off.
I was, as usual, playing as a healer so I could be invited to groups. In the end, I only ran three of the instances available, and two of those were forced on me as part of the main story quest. I really can't be bothered to learn yet more dances to deal with yet more bosses with yet more of the same, tired, unimaginative behvaviours that they have in every other MMO — especially as in New World you get one shot at being resuscitated in a fight and then you're out of it. Boss fights don't have to be this unforgiving; it only leads to people abandoning instances prematurely with bad feelings about the boss, the game and each other. The fact that there were hardly any calls to run instances in normal modes, only the difficult ("mutated") modes, also contributed to my low participation in instanced content.
Weapon synergies were a big problem for me. If you want to be a healer in New World, you basically have to use a weapon called a "life staff". This relies on a character attribute called "focus". If you go up a level, you get to put points into attributes. Therefore, as a healer, you want to max out focus and maybe put some points into constitution so you don't die if someone throws a pebble at you. What do you use as a secondary weapon, then? Well, there's only one weapon that also uses focus: the "void gauntlet". It's clear that healers are meant to choose this, because it has a healing action associated with it (not a great one, admittedly, but it can also do big damage if you time it right, which I couldn't). Otherwise, it's either a ranged weapon that's worse than all the other ranged weapons except life staffs, or it's a melee weapon that's worse than all the other melee weapons. In short, for solo play you don't really want to be using a void gauntlet with your life staff, you want something that will actually take down an enemy (or group of enemies) within a reasonable time frame. I got along very nicely with a sword/shield combination, so levelled up with that. I used my life staff to pull enemies at range, then ran them through with my sword (which gave equal experience points for both weapons — really the only way I could increase my life staff skill). Unfortunately, though, swords need strength, not focus, so when I reached the level cap (after 70 hours of play) I had split my attribute points three ways (strength, focus, constitution) rather than two. This meant my healing wasn't as powerful as it was expected to be, so to contribute I had to grind up expertise (which is basically a gear score thing — I wound up with around 619 out of a maximum of 625). I can't say I believe this to be an ideal situation.
I levelled up all the gathering skills to maximum (200) except logging, which was in the 190s. I maxed out two refining skills (smelting and stonecutting) and was also pretty good in the other three. I didn't max out any crafting skills, but was 150+ in all of them except furnishing and maybe armouring. Crafting was basically "assemble the ingredients, click the button, wait". Mercifully, the wait was much shorter than in Black Desert Online, or even Conan Exiles, but there was no FFXIV-like mini-game. Some kind of behind-the-scenes dice roll meant crafting attempts didn't always work, but the only meaningful cost was in time, not ingredients.
There was one skill or something (I never quite worked out what it was) that I abandoned: music. You could play instruments and give buffs to anyone within range who tipped you. I built up a formidable repertoire of musical scores, but never figured out how to play my instruments. In part, this was because the opening tutorial quest for music wanted me to practise in front of actual players, which was not a good proposal when I didn't know what I was doing. I therefore never invested any time in it. It might be a fun mini-game, it might not be; I've no idea which.
Some small touches I liked include the fact that fall damage didn't ever kill me. I've liked this since I came across it in The Secret World. It makes getting away from the top of the tower where you've just beaten the boss a whole lot easier. I also liked the way that chests weren't just random chests, they had a nominal purpose ("supplies", that kind of things). I particularly liked how some animal mobs didn't know anything about player levels so would suicidally attack you when you only needed to glance at them to kill them; this meant that distinct personalities emerged, which we had way back in MUD but that doesn't seem so popular these days.
There were some balance issues in New World, but not the usual ones. Because there were only ever around 400 players on my server, if that, the ones who wanted to do esoteric group content often couldn't find a tank or healer, and the ones who liked large-scale PvP battles had trouble getting enough players for a quorum; both these groups moaned about needing a server merge. The gatherers and crafters, on the other hand, were complaining that a merge would make it much harder for them to obtain resources because of the increased competition. A not-unusual view among non-gatherers seemed to be that gathering was a job for bots anyway, not players, so who cares?
Some random design notes:
If you want people to read your flavour text, give them time to do so before setting a mob on them.
The more difficult it is to communicate with people, the less likely people are to communicate.
Single quests that turn into long chains of walk-over-there quests give players a reason not to accept single quests.
Don't mix units. Fish have a weight in pounds and a length in inches, but distances are measured in metres and kilometres.
If a quest is broken, remove it, don't just leave it there broken.
If a node is ungatherable, remove it, don't just leave it there ungatherable.
If people fall through the architecture, fix it, don't just leave it there fall-throughable.
If I can fish up giant tadpoles, I expect somewhere to see giant frogs.
Chests fished out of the water shouldn't care how good the bait on your fishing rod is.
If you have staged quests, don't make those stages be easy, easy, easy, crazy hard.
I know you think everyone loves jump puzzles, but trust me, even those of us who are good at them find them frustrating.
Relentless mobs that will pursue you to the ends of the earth can get a bit tiresome.
I know the NPC really rates that hatchet she's giving me as a quest reward, but I'm going to dismantle it as soon as it hits my inventory.
All in all, New World was much better than I had been led to believe it was. I preferred it to Lost Ark, which I also quite liked for being a bit different.
As for what to play next, I probably won't crank up another MMO until maybe the Autumn. That said, after finishing with New World yesterday, I started a solo game of Conan Exiles. The interface has been changed since I last played, though, and as a consequence it doesn't look as if I can carry preconstructed building components around with me any more. That's going to be annoying.
Maybe instead I'll try restarting some of the partially-played games I have sitting around on my desktop waiting patiently for me to give them a second chance (Pentiment, Partisans 1941, Disco Elysium, Tyranny, ...). Finishing the two fiction books I have in second draft might be a good idea, too.
Oh, there's the assignment marking, too. Hmph.
