September 30, 2021

Thoughts on New World

By some miracle, I was able to download New World and have it complete on release day (even with my 5mb/s speeds) – but because of the nature of the extra long queues, I didn’t make my character until the second day of release. Not really a big deal, but the guild / company I had signed up for filled up and had no more room for me because I couldn’t rush and get into game. I took that as a sign that perhaps it was not a good fit (the guild, that is) and joined up with some friends who are playing casually.

I haven’t seen much of the game yet, but I already have thoughts that this game simply isn’t going to work for me. First of all, combat is pretty rough on my hands. It’s a game where I need to mouse click a lot (where as with BDO combat, I can just hold down the mouse buttons and then ping my combo buttons while I’m holding them down). I think it might be easier with a controller, but for now after an hour or so my hands hurt. Crafting is neat and pretty intuitive, you go out harvesting, process those harvests, and craft items from that. As you get higher skills you can craft and harvest more items. Towns contain craft machines and they have tiers, so I assume the top tier stuff is going to be in dangerous lands that you might not initially have access to.

Everyone keeps telling me that the game is beautiful – but honestly, coming from Black Desert Online, the graphics are not really something that pull to me. There’s a lot of the main faction colours (purple, green, yellow), the name tags are distracting, and because it’s an MMO of course there are some.. unique people out there. I’ve seen more offensive names than I care to admit. I understand that this is a mostly pvp-centric game (granted the pvp is opt-in) which tends to suggest a certain type of gamer playing, but it surprised me none the less.

The game is not bad but I was already happily playing an MMO (or two, if you want to count FFXIV) when it released, so in order to pull me away from those games where I was perfectly content, it has to REALLY be something special – and sad to say, I’m just not finding that yet. I do plan to continue to play and give it a fair shot, after all two sessions is hardly enough time to really decide when it comes to a game like this, but as of right now I’m not really seeing the staying power – and it has nothing to do with the queues, that’s just a part of a new game release, and waiting to log in doesn’t actually bother me since I am lucky enough to simply be able to plan ahead.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Nomadic Gamer