Amazon's New World MMO

Pro Tip: MMORPGs are hard to make well. New World has a lot of the fundamentals down pat. Combat feels good, the world is attractive, there is a lot to do overall. It’s engaging, especially early on. But the finer details, like overall balance, progression, PvP vs. PvE, loot, crafting at the end game, housing, storage, player interactions–these things are all extremely difficult IMO to nail down. Especially as the more you do, the more different niches of players you run into expecting something besides what you are doing.

All I really ask (above and beyond basic functionality of course) is that a developer have a coherent vision of what they want to do, and that their execution reflects that vision. Whether I like the vision or not is important in terms of whether I play the game, but in terms of critical appreciation, I’m much more interested in coherence.

Those low level recipes that take fae iron are weird. I had a mistaken impression that was the next tier up, it is not. They’re just outrageously expensive low level garbage. The next tier up from iron is steel, which is made from iron, charcoal, and flux which you get from crates. After that is star metal. Avoid those recipes that take the really rare finds.

Yeah it’s a huge miss. Supposedly the BiS stuff is from crafting at the end but thus far it’s been a total waste of time at L48. My friends are all L60 and decked out in purple gear while I’m still schlubbing along without a single one since I’ve been focusing on crafting instead of dungeons and other stuff. Still got a ways to go since my Armoring and Arcana are 130. The grind on those are real 100+. :)

Hell, getting those to 100 is tough.

I made some of my own steel tools and I’ve made my own bags so far. Been using starmetal tools for days now but can’t craft them quite yet, though I can make starmetal. At this point, I’m using starmetal, layered leather, and lodestone bricks for xp via town quests rather than crafting.

I do wish it were easier to craft things that were relevant to you. Regardless, I am having a grand time in other respects.

@TheWombat well said. There are many things they did well.

My armoring is 137. Which mean means I’ve spent approximately 50 more hours than you leveling armoring. :(

Right? I swear I spend an entire evening harvesting hemp and iron and end up gaining a single point. Knowing my luck by the time I finally grind this skill up they’ll patch it so it takes 1/10th the resources at which point I quit the game and never touch it again, haha.

I’m fine with how long it takes, I just wish it had been more useful to me throughout the game. Right now it feels pretty unrewarding, especially with the economy pretty garbage. Hard to sell anything.

The higher types of materials you harvest give you more experience. Also harvesting other higher-tier specialized items is how you level your 100+ skills faster. The Shock Bulbs, Life Flowers, Dragonflowrs etc, for mining the elemental nodes. For both Mining and Logging there are animals that you can harvest that are in this category (Angry Earth dogs and bears). There are also areas in the game where you have a large number of higher-end materials to harvest, like the Defiler Excavation Camp in the middle of Great Cleave has unlimited gold nodes and a few platinum or Silkweed in Mourningdale. The main caveat here is that some of these materials are not very attractive to sell or require those lower materials to use for crafting and you can either stockpile large amounts of it on the Trading Post for extremely low fees (5000 Gold Ore at .1) to store for later use, giving to company crafters or just dump for absurdly low prices while you use your Storage for the useful or higher demand items.

You can recall any item you’ve posted on the Trading Post in any territory, regardless of where it was posted, avoiding going to it when you want to use it.

I will be streaming a war tonight at 6:30 EST on twitch www.twitch.tv/harkonis . I’m also doing a fundraiser with Extra-life for children’s hospitals. Robert Currie - Fundraising For Extra Life

The war will be muted for the beginning to avoid giving away tactics and callouts :)

Ran the third dungeon (depths) tonight. Pretty fun. Mechanics of the boss fights were quite a bit more intricate than the first two, but nothing crazy. I’m told people have had a hard time beating this one. We did wipe once on two of the bosses, but we were close both times, and a strategic adjustment got us over the finish line.

One weird thing is that almost all the chests are generic supply chests, not elite chests. I didn’t get anything good as far as loot (though I think a couple in the group did). Not sure if that is intended or not.

I kept dying in depths even after going full constitutional build. The voice call outs timing was seriously screwed up for me.

I just started playing this today and it has certainly grabbed me so far. A big part of that is the fun of trying to figure out how things work, but beyond that the combat is more interesting than most MMOs.

I’ve been playing fire staff and sword and board, but I am now trying rapier and fire staff. I may switch to ice gauntlet though for the slowing effects. At level 9 a lot of the bad guys zig zag towards me and it’s hard to hit them with the fire staff.

I love the free respecs. It’s really fun to try out different ability builds.

I’m still in the honeymoon phase but the nice thing is there’s no monthly fee so I can be as casual as I want.

So is this game hitting WoW pretty hard? It wouldn’t surprise me.

Was there a particular fight/phase you had trouble with?

Thanks! Was so busy playing, I forgot to ask for an invite. We did get up to level 27 so made some progress. At work now, but hope to get on when I get home this afternoon.

WoW’s already huddled in the corner from the drubbing FF14 has given it this year. It’s just piling on at this point!

Heh. WoW really needs a new version of the game, but I don’t think there’s even been a successful sequel launch of an MMO, at least in North America. AC2 fizzled. EverQuest 2 didn’t do so well.

planetside and guild wars maybe?

We had trouble in the Depths on the third boss. Our healer was a bit underleveled and that may have been why. Second run we had more levels, I brought my axe for DPS for that guy’s mines, and we breezed thru.

Yeah, after we wiped on that guy, we left our best dps down and I went up to tank the mobs up top (I’m a 50/50 dps hybrid tank). I also took aggro from the demons against the final boss.

Oh yeah GW2 is a success. Forgot about it. Not sure about Planetside 2.

Does the combat in this game require lots of twitchy mouse movement, or can one do everything with keypresses? Mousing hurts my hands. So does ultra-fast keyboarding, for that matter.

For ranged weapons you’ll need to use the reticle and aim. For melee weapons it depends, something like the rapier you need to have some precision but the great axe has wide sweeping strikes that mauls everything around you.

I would not describe the combat as being fast and twitchy, it’s fairly slow. More involved than a tab-target MMO like WoW, though.

Have you played Elder Scrolls Online? If you can handle that you’ll be fine here. The control scheme implies to me there’s going to be console/gamepad support at some point but no idea if and when that might happen.