It’s weird how things work. I was playing Overwatch on a stream I had labeled something like “let’s see what weirdos we meet”. Well, in one game someone started to sing so I sarcastically asked if they were joining American Idol. We went back and forth, they ended up adding me to friends, inviting me to their Discord, recommending New World, and before I knew it I had added like 6 more people to my friends list. The really funny thing was that I had been commenting that it’s been years since that’s happened.
Anyway after a few days I bought New World and so far I like it. It’s the first time in a while fighting some random named mob has made my heart race like I’m back on my Nintendo fighting a boss in Zelda 2.
Pros:
The game world is beautiful. Wait until you see the water even on medium settings, or the lighting in an evil zone, or when it’s dark.
NPCs are all voiced.
Fighting animations overall, are really good. The hits FEEL like something and getting hit hard makes you feel it. I almost wish I had a rumble pack to go with it.
You have to aim to hit mobs so it’s a lot more active than WoW. You can also dodge with a roll (or a scoot with heavily armor) away from hits.
Healers can solo, not the greatest, but I can exp non-stop swapping between the Life Staff and Void Gauntlet. Update: I can kill things with the life staff often times much much better than a fire staff at the same level.
Crafting is interesting and feels real. You can cut down trees, pull up herbs and veggies, mine stones and ore, skin animals (and it actually LOOKS like skinning too, not just like making a playdough ball), collect honey, fresh water, etc. Recipes look real, such as needing wheat and eggs for pasta. Update: Leveling crafting is very tedious. You have to pick many herbs, for example, to get the next level. It’s not just one herb one point.
Weapons and armor drop frequently. Update: the itemization is all over the place. You can get a cloth (light) piece with stats that below on medium or heavy, or a light piece with the stats you want, but an attribute that isn’t even on your skill tree, much less a skill you have.
Weapon skill trees are relatively simple.
Keybinds are really only 3 skills, left and right mouse clicks. Update: This can be a little boring for obvious reasons.
There are 3 factions so it’s not as likely that 1 side will dominate the only other side like WoW.
PvP is scaled so in theory (as I’ve been told) a level 23 can take on a 60. You don’t have to flag for pvp if you don’t want to.
Weapons and your stats clearly tell you what effect it has on other things. For example, for a Life Staff it will tell you it’s effected by Focus. More points in Focus will show you it effects the Life Staff. A sword may tell you it needs Str and Dex. There’s no guessing.
Everyone can do everything. Want to pick herbs? You can. Want to mine ore? You can. Chop trees? Yes. Fish? Yes. Cook? yes, craft, yes, jewel craft yes stonework yes mill wood yes. There is a huge reason why games like WoW limit you to two choices with a few others “who even cares” extra choices that affected nothing really. In a way this is a bonus but also a con, because literally everyone is swooping up that herb, or that ore. EVERYONE. Now it’s in your best interest to focus on something because everything is so hard to level but the game doesn’t guide you to do so. I’m still on the fence about it. On one hand I don’t want to fight EVERYONE over herb nodes. But I also love gathering so being able to pick the world around me is nice.
Cons:
28 levels in and most of the mobs are Lost and Corrupted, aka, zombies.
Storage is unique to the town you are in. Just think about that when you need to craft something with a ton of items.
Food is realistic but complicated. A simple ingredient like cheese needs milk and yeast. To make a buff food, you’d need meat, carrots, onions, potatoes, for example. At Wow’s absolute WORST, you needed a cooking fire (which you also do in New World but only in a town at a cooking spot), meat/fish and SPICES. Which you could buy anywhere. I think the worst were the feasts but for obvious reasons because lots of people could eat from it, but that was just a few kinds of meats or fish and spices.
The Void Gauntlet left click animation feels like throwing a baseball half-heartedly, and the sound of it is super boring.
The background music is so forgettable I often don’t even listen to it. This is a big deal because I always had the sound on for Lineage 2 or WoW, or Diablo.
The armor is super boring or ugly. I mean INSANELY ugly. Even the stuff in the shop for real money or whatever is just hideous. “vanilla” Lineage 2 or WoW stuff was better.
You can’t transmog (called SKIN) in this game to just anything, you have to earn or purchase specific items to skin. So if you find a random item that looks cool, you can’t always just use that skin.
Very limited player customization for hair, eyes, face, body, etc. You can be a bearded female with a receeding hairline if you were so inclined, but you can’t really be a super pretty girlie girl. There is no barber shop either, so you cannot change your mind. The best I was able to do was ‘rather plain’
Dying doesn’t even return you to NEAREST VILLAGE (like Lineage 2) or makes you do a corpse run. No, you return to the village you have your ‘hearthstone’ set to, unless you set up a camp. somewhere. Camps are like save points you set yourself with materials.
Weapons and armor generate with stats that don’t make sense. A void gauntlet may have Dex and Str (when it should have INT or maybe CON) or an axe will have Focus. Wow had this problem early on a lot.
Weapons and armor take damage, very quickly often times not only from use but ALSO from dying. And not just weapons and armor, every tool for doing everything. You need a sickle to gather herbs, a pick axe to do ore and rock, an axe to cut down trees. You have to literally obtain these things, and they get damaged over time. AND I just found out, these items can be upgraded!!! In WoW you use the same pick axe forever! It never breaks nor needs to be upgraded.
Literally EVERYTHING takes resources. Want to fast port somewhere? Resources. Set up a camp? Resources. Repair armor? gold and salvage resources.
There are no mounts.
Fast travel requires being at a shrine, so there’s no flightmaster that costs barely anything or a waypoint that costs nothing once you’ve found it. The cost depends on how far you are going, and how much you are carrying. I feel like is absurd because you are capped at 1,000 azoth, but a single portal can cost 100 of that.
Towns have tons of taxes, think Castle Taxes in Lineage 2 but worse. Property taxes, trading taxes, crafting taxes.
Fishing is more complicated than it needs to be. It’s similar to Lineage 2, you cast, get a nibble, then have to play a whole game to pull it in without breaking your line. You can also put on bait.
And this is nitpicky but I’ve been in a few bars in a few towns already and there is NO ONE in the bar drinking (like npcs) and you can’t actually buy drinks. Why not? Could be fun for RP.
But all in all, I like it. I’ve only been soloing so far though.