After 10 hours of closed beta decided to share my impressions.
A small introduction for those who do not follow the latest news. So, access to the closed beta this time was given to all players who pre-ordered the game. Testing began on July 22 and will continue for 2 weeks – until August 2. The official release is still scheduled for August 31st.
It was a surprise for me to see such a huge interest in the game. New World shot at the top of Steam, having collected a little more than 200 thousand players in the peak! Not a bad result for a closed beta version!
Despite the huge queues (some players waited 4-5 hours to get into the game, but eventually got an error), complete server instability in the early days (to be fair, the developers warned about this) and even burnt Nvidia 3090 series video cards (a problem touched only products from EVGA) – I still managed to get into the game … on the 4th day of the beta test 🙂
Instead of an introduction
After a short introductory video, the game prompts you to create a character. Looking ahead, I will say that it is not yet possible to change the appearance after creation. But I am 99% sure that the developers allow any modifications in the future. Now the form of options is not so much – you can only change the face, hair and hairstyle. There are options to add scars or tattoos. However, nothing new (c).
What’s really “innovative” is the lack of gender selection. No more men or women! Instead of gender, the developers suggest body type: masculine or feminine. I think this is the right approach and representatives of all genders will be satisfied 🙂
After playing around with the look a bit – and creating a truly brutal pirate – I caught a login error that threw me into the main menu. The whole process, of course, was lost. It is not yet possible to save the modification, as well as to share/borrow someone: so I spat and decided to trust the god of random. You can see the result above 🙂
The beginning of the game was not surprising at all: familiarity with movement, strikes and parries. The first thing that fell out that you can try on. The first meal to give me strength for the long journey. And, painfully familiar, the yellow quest location marker. Here it is so banal, oh brave New World!
The starting location with sunken ships was crowded. Monsters hardly had time to resurrect, and the sound of swords and axes did not stop for a second. Everywhere there were players with a Twitch icon: yes, the streaming service is directly integrated into the game and allows you to connect your channel out of the box. Because I personally am not a fan of this service, but I still decided to look at the functionality and create my own page – just in case. You should not subscribe, because there will be nothing there until August 31, so I don’t consider this an advertisement 🙂
Territory, factions, the visual component
After completing the first training quests, players are offered to go to one of the nearest cities. Since there are three factions in the game – Marauders (green), Covenant (yellow) and Syndicate (purple) – the game will randomly select a starting city for you. Not very convenient if you decide from the very beginning to play with a friend/group of friends. Somewhere up to level 10, it will be difficult to meet and complete tasks together.
Faction affiliation mainly affects only the side in the conflict, a little more on access to equipment and tasks. You can get equipment in other places, and the tasks differ only in the description. It is allowed to change the faction, but only once every 4 months. There is no longer any difference between the parties, no special bonuses or cosmetics – which is a bit sad.
The rest of the territory remains free and is one of the features of the game: constant battles for fortresses and adjacent lands. After all, initially (a couple or more years ago) New World was presented precisely as a PvP-focused MMO. Only recently the developers “turned the sails” towards the PvE component. Whether this was their original plan or whether they could not stand the flurry of criticism from “PvE casuals” is a mystery to me. But the problem of New World’s self-identification has not disappeared. It is still not known what kind of audience the developer company is trying to please.
Don’t be fooled by looking at the world map: it’s much bigger than it looks. It takes about 10-15 minutes in real-time to run from one city to another. And here another bewilderment arises: do I constantly do this on foot ?! There are no mounts or vehicles in the game. Judging by the conversations on the forums, they are not planned initially. But if you look at this topic, not all players are enthusiastic about this approach.
On the one hand, the game has fast movement between cities, but only after visiting the city at least once. It is not free and costs some amount of nitrogen (azoth) currency. It is not difficult to get it: by completing daily tasks. The cost of moving depends on several factors: distance, the number of things in the inventory, as well as the faction that controls the city (if it belongs to you, then it is cheaper).
On the other hand, I didn’t have much trouble running on foot. Opening new points of interest increases the level of the character, this time. Some locations offer side missions or random events (indicated by a question mark), for the passage of which you can earn more experience – that’s two. And the third reason – the game is simply beautiful. At maximum graphics settings, New World looks stunning compared to the competition. Destiny may not be up to par… but after looking at a 12-year-old WoW, I felt like I was looking at Minecraft 🙂
What we should thank the developers for is the graphical optimization. Although the frame rate drops noticeably as the players in my field of view grow, I have never experienced drops below 30 fps. Even with a hundred people in the city. It is hoped that with massive battles for territory, this will significantly increase the comfort and enjoyment of the game.
Character, inventory, crafting
Amazon Game Studios (AGS) decided not to invent anything new and took one of the well-performing models. The character has experience, which affects access to content and attributes. Accordingly, each attribute affects the main and secondary choice of weapons. For example, dexterity has a big effect on rapiers, while intelligence has a little less effect on rapiers, but a lot on staves, etc.
Each weapon can be pumped: the more you use, the higher the level. As a result, more skills are unlocked: both active (you can use a maximum of three) and passive. It’s hard for me to say if this is good or bad. Again, I’m not a fan of 100,500 active skills and multiple rows of icons on the screen. And a small number of weapons (for sure) will allow you to fine-tune the balance between different classes of players and types of battles (1-on-1 or sieges of settlements).
With as many as three simultaneously active skills, it seemed strange to me not to find support for the controller and/or any plans to release New World on consoles. Wangyu that the developers are still porting their offspring to the current generation (PS5 / Xbox Series X / S) in the near future. And if the game gets mod support, then the fans will immediately finish the game from the controller on the PC.
Again, there is not much to say about the inventory. The same good old equipment grading system (from basic grey to legendary purple). Equipment has power, weight, stamina, and upgrade holes.
Management is quite convenient, through keyboard shortcuts, things can be repaired, disassembled into parts, or simply thrown away. Every (on) dressing thing affects the appearance. I personally liked the overall flavour – as for a person a little tired of the dominance of Asian trends in this genre – New World is like a breath of fresh air with the style of the 17th-century conquistadors.
A few words about the built-in store. The developers are rather evasive in answering questions about the monetization of the project. Because the game does not (yet) provide for a subscription model, battle passes and other comfort elements (such as experience scrolls to speed up levelling), AGS plans to make money on cosmetics. But this is only in the near future, and what will happen next is unknown. Probably, they themselves have not decided and will continue to “probe the soil.”
In addition to skins, in the store, you can buy clothes dyeing, as well as emotions, home decoration elements and… that’s all. In the beta test, the developers gave everyone some free currency to look at the store and one skin to try on.
This is where New World has spared no resources, in the direction of crafting and social interaction. Despite another classic approach (how many times have we seen the skinning of dead wolves?!), it looks organic and, most importantly, structured.
Each attribute of the character affects a certain skill: for example, strength increases the speed of mining ore, and intelligence increases the collection of herbs. As a result, pumping ore smelting and weapon forging does not make sense for a mage. At the same time, general skills (such as cooking) do not depend on attributes and are available to everyone.
You can craft basic things “on the go”, for this it is enough to set up a camp in the middle of a road or forest. More complex things require special equipment, which is available in the villages.
There is also the concept of min-maxing equipment, i.e. The “coolness” of a thing depends on its randomness. I’m not sure if this system matches the one in Black Desert Online. But I hope not.
Combat, quests, achievements
The most important thing in any MMO – for me – is the feeling of combat. As an example, I can cite the well-known Elder Scrolls Online. Despite the wonderful world, variety of activities and a good balance between classes, I was able to force myself to continue playing regularly precisely because of the disgusting combat component. To avoid the usual questions, I played ESO for about 400 hours.
In New World, this is all right. I liked the way the character strikes, be it a sword, a rapier, or a fire staff. And there is also a bow and a musket! There are several types of damage, there are status effects and so on. As I wrote above, a small selection of weapons and active skills clearly benefited the game. I deliberately tried almost all the options available in the beta and now I even find it difficult to choose one when the game officially releases.
The parry and roll system reminded me of the modified Dark Souls: in addition to mana, there is stamina. When you block or jump, it is consumed. Again, everything is familiar and without innovation. The network part, even despite the beta, is done at a decent level: I did not run into situations where the game did not register a hit or I received damage twice. But this only applies to the PvE part.
Unfortunately, I just didn’t have enough time to try PvP in sufficient volume. Judging from the impressions of a person who has been doing this exclusively for 50 hours, the players have hope:
In a nutshell, on the positive side, he noted:
- Does not lag during group battles. Yes, there are fps drawdowns, but not critical.
- Good attack, it feels accurate with hitboxes.
- Each weapon has its purpose and unique style.
- Spamming potions will not work. But there is an opportunity to easily escape, as discussed below.
Of the minuses:
- Some weapons are unbalanced (for example, an axe).
- It’s too easy to run away from the enemy.
- Combo attacks are almost non-existent.
- It makes sense to take part in PvP events, but it’s too early to judge how it will be in the late game.
- Stamina needs to be made a more valuable resource.
What about quests and other activities? Traditionally, the game has a main storyline. It opens slowly and depends on the level of the character. Training missions last about 5-6 hours (about 10-15 character level), in parallel, there are side quests. They are divided into faction quests, townships and random locations. Some give a rating and coins for buying various equipment, others develop the village and give experience, and random ones give experience and other goodies.
I don’t know if there will ever be an MMO that does NOT require you to kill 10 wolves and bring in their skins, but New World is definitely not one of them. A visit to a new city ends with the usual collection of all available quests and their subsequent grind to infinity. I hope that at least PvP battles will be more interesting, because. chopping down trees to the point of exhaustion, I have already seriously tired.
Of the other classic activities, there is some kind of random dungeon with groups from 3 to an unknown number of people, but the entry threshold there is from level 25 and I did not have time to get there. I also did not find any hint of a matchmaking system aka a group selection system built into the game – depending on the role of the character and the task.
I could not test the “achievements” beloved by different audiences. Although from time to time messages like “you did well, because you completed 50 quests” popped up in the upper right part of the screen, I could not see the achievements. Either they specifically turned it off in order to avoid spoilers, or my character turned out to be “special”. The only thing I understood is that some achievements can be used as a title. That is, all surrounding players will be able to see how you are “sophisticated” in some direction.
Marketing, success and the future of New World
It is difficult to meet a person who has not yet heard about the game. I think the company’s PR department should be given credit, but that’s not the only reason. It seems to me that people are just very hungry for fresh projects in the genre. After all, the most popular now MMO came out more than 10 years ago!
The Twitch platform will also play a significant role in the promotion, both in the initial and subsequent stages. For those who are generally in the tank, it also belongs to Amazon. And this is a serious boost for a beginner MMO.
Streamers themselves also did not stand aside. Although dtf did not write about it, the game attracted more than 720 thousand viewers last week. This is not 1 million, as it was with WoW: Shadowlands, but very good!
Does New World expect success in the future? If you look at the history of the gaming division of Amazon and the investigation of a well-known journalist (no, not Logvinov), then they made a lot of mistakes. But, as they say, you can learn from mistakes, and the parent company is definitely not expected to have financial problems.
Purely visually, the game feels great. Sounds and background music, the appearance of the characters, and the architecture of locations and cities. Sometimes you stop in the middle of a task just to enjoy the local beauties. Despite the classic techniques of the genre, they are done well and with high quality – and this is a good foundation for the development of the project in the future.
At the same time, the game offers absolutely nothing new in the genre. We have already seen all the mechanics before – all these standard roles and classes, typical weapons and skills, and the painfully well-known quest and levelling system. The feeling of deja vu does not leave for a minute, but I continue to gnaw on the same cactus again and again, but I can’t explain why 🙂
Having watched the development of the game from the very beginning, I can say with confidence that the studio has done a tremendous job. Compared to the confidential alpha version that I tried exactly one year ago: it’s like heaven and earth.
I really want to believe in the success of the project and hope that the developers will direct the game in the right direction. And that each player will find something of his own in it, whether he is a PvE casual player or a hardcore PvP nerd.
See you at Aeturnum!
p.s.
If you are interested in the game and want to support my work, here (regular and deluxe versions) you can pre-order the game through Amazon. The purchased key is activated via Steam and, in addition to access to the official release on August 31, will allow you to play another week in the closed beta version.