How Bleak Is New World's Future?

How Bleak Is New World’s Future?

Intro

Dead World. For the longest time New World was considered one of the biggest failures in MMO history, barely retaining 2% of its launch day player peak. The game was riddled with bugs, rampant exploits – ranging from invincibility to item or gold duplication – , lack of content, and what felt like a beta testing phase with some make-up on it.

Although the game has been through a VERY rough patch, it’s undeniable that the game has improved quite a bit and that with the Brimstone Update the numbers are starting to look more like an actual healthy MMO. 

During the second and third quarter of 2022 Amazon has done an amazing job gathering feedback from players and addressing their concerns both feature-wise and bug related. The communication that AGS has provided to the community – both on the forums and their developer update videos – has been absolutely stellar and has placated some of my concerns. What Blizzard says, Amazon actually does. The question right now – besides “Will it get better?” – is: “How long will it last?”

In this article we are going to go over everything I consider important for the game to gain new players and retain old ones.

But before we go in, please like, comment and subscribe lest the algorithm Gods forsake me and I fade into the same obscurity that New World was in 5 months after launch. Now on with the article.

QOL

Starting off, we have Quality of Life. There have been numerous quality of life improvements in the game exactly because the developers listened to the community, even though their vision of the game was completely different from theirs. Changes like:

• Fast Travel costs being reduced to almost nothing
• Larger storages
• No costs for taking and depositing items in other towns
• The removal of tuning orbs
• Group finder
• Fixed taxes
• Ability to queue up to Dungeons, OPR or Arena from anywhere
• Unlimited Tier 1 ammo
• Server reset time for chests and crafting cooldowns
• Linked Trading Posts
• And opening inventory while running

– would not be possible without extensive player feedback.

But the sad reality is… for every problem that has been fixed there’s 2 or 3 that yet remain. Currently there are no loadouts. The group finder is barebones. The trading post filter is just bad and your storage has no filter at all. The map filters are useless, and what’s needed is not even there. The group UI is nothing but HP bars, and those bars are inaccurate. War Leaders cannot be distinguished from the rest of the army, and your war group is barely visible.

It’s safe to say that the UI and UX is very, very behind from the rest of the game. In its current state, the UI is frustrating at best and rage-inducing at worst.

So let's take an example of what frustration that frustration actually is and where it comes from.

Say your friend is online and he wants to do M10 Ennead while the mutation is out. They have time to do one or maybe 2 runs before his girlfriend comes home and they watch some Netflix. You open up a Lobby using the group finder and go to the nearest storage shed to search 20 different storages and find your Ancient Ward gear. Then you do the same to find your Corrupted Ward gear. Meanwhile you have 5 DPS who applied on group finder. In the group finder you can see their weapons’ type and their gear score. Great, but do they also have their ward gear? What are their attributes? You start messaging each of them and wait 30 more seconds for them to reply. They link their gear, you accept their request and you enter the expedition.

You do really well, you go up and defeat the big scarab boss and you reach the Corrupted area. Time to stop, open your bag and equip your Corrupted set. The problem is, you have to find it. During the first third of the dungeon you have looted a lot of gear – most of which is useless – so your corrupted set got buried deep into your inventory. You finally find your gear and you equip it. Oh… the attributes don’t match and now you have to respec. Your rapier perks are also on their PVP spec so you have to respec that too. You clear through the corrupted area and defeat General Crassus. Time to switch gear again. You switch your gear, you respec again, you go up to Anpu & Heru and you finally clear the expedition. That “1 or maybe 2 runs” that your friend said has now become 1 run and now he has to go.

Wasting a player’s time is the worst mistake a developer can make, and that is exactly what New World’s User Experience is at its core. A big and frustrating waste of time. Quality of life changes have been slowly rolling into the live version of the game every big monthly update, which – in my opinion – is very slow. At this pace it would take at least a year for all these improvements to be rolled out into the game – a time which not many players would care to tolerate.

Solo Play

In recent years, solo play in MMOs has become a major selling point for MMOs and a critical reason as to why people keep playing some of them. Like it or not, it’s common knowledge that – while the MMO genre was on its last legs – solo players were the ones that kept it standing and slowly revitalized it.

During its initial launch, the solo experience for solo players was absolutely horrible. The main storyline would send you into isolated areas that you could not beat solo, and force you to group up or get stuck. Dungeons were not accessible because of tuning orbs, and you had to spam the chat to find other people to do them. A lot of these design issues made New World impossible to penetrate for solo players, who quit in droves after reaching levels between 30s and 40s.

If you’re a solo player and you loved New World at first but ended up feeling ignored by the game’s design at first, you’re in luck.

Solo experience has been one of the main focuses for AGS during the past year. The starting experience up until level 25 has been entirely reworked, and the rest has all but been confirmed to be coming. The quests that previously forced you to group have been nerfed. The group finder helps and the removal of tuning orbs help find expedition runs much more quickly, and respec costs have been adjusted so you can switch much more easily depending on your situation.

Although some content – like wars – are still impossible to get into alone, the list of content that doesn’t require grouping is quite extensive – most of which is endgame content.

Endgame Content

Endgame Content is the backbone of any MMORPG. After all, the leveling process can take – for some people – as little as a few hours and can be thought of as a tutorial phase for the game which starts at level 60.

As with every MMO, the endgame of New World can be divided into PVE and PVP.

PVE

PVE is the favored child of Amazon when it comes to New World, having added an extensive list of content for it during the past 7 months. New World’s endgame PVE repertoire includes:

• 5 level 60 regular expeditions, only 2 of which were present during launch.
• 7 Mutated expeditions – or Mythic Dungeons, for the Warcraft players watching.
• And World bosses with loot as an added incentive to farm them.

Now although these numbers might look low in the eyes of a player, the pace at which AGS is releasing these feels consistent and NOT lazy. During the October Developer Update, they also announced a brand new expedition focusing on the Varangian Knights, a new mutated expedition, and the first ever New World raid – The Devourer.

New World’s PVE side is a rich enough world to keep players hooked for tens if not hundreds of hours after reaching level 60.

PVP

While – as I stated – PVE is the poster child of Amazon, its counterpart – PVP – seems to be the black sheep of the family.

During the whole year that the game has been out, the PVP side of it has seen a stunning total of 1 content update – the 3v3 Arenas back in the May patch. Currently New World’s PVP content is limited to:

• Outpost Rush – a 20v20 capture-and-control-the-point mode which has suffered from weapon balance issues and an astounding content drought, being housed in a single map ever since its release back in 2021. OPR is an amazing idea which falls short in execution.
• 3v3 Arenas – the old but newest addition to the PVP of New World. A quick 3-rounds-to-win team deathmatch mode. It’s quite fun and really disheartening to new players, but – after a few dozen games – the glaring weapon balance issues show up once again.
• Territory Wars – By far the most captivating and fun PVP mode in the game and the ultimate endgame goal that New World has to offer. Territory Wars are plagued by a few glaring issues, namely it’s extremely high barrier or entry and the boring chore-like quests you have to do to trigger one.

PVP is the ultimate endgame content in the game, but its rewards are very far from what you’d expect from “ultimate endgame”. The Track rewards were added at the same time as 3v3 Arenas and were a good option for getting gear, a bit of coin and umbral shards. Today, however, all of the previously mentioned rewards are not only outdated but an active waste of time. If you choose PVP to get gear, you will be outgeared by mutation runners. If you choose to make gold from it, you are getting very little for the time you’re spending. And if you’re looking for umbral shards, you’re overshadowed even from a Mutation 2 run. And if it’s not already bad enough, all the rewards are RNG bound and never guaranteed.

PVP is an overlooked part of the game, even though the game was initially advertised as a “Player vs Player centric MMO”.

Closing Thoughts

The main problem I have with my job as a software developer is that it doesn’t matter how hard or time consuming a project is, people will rarely compliment your work and will instead focus on the issues of what you delivered. And what you deliver will almost never be without issues. This problem is amplified in game development. Although I understand the difficulties the developers go through while making and upgrading the game, I still find a few issues with the way things are being handled.

Currently the rate of updates feels really slow but steady, which is completely fine.  The problems arise when you notice that some aspects of the game completely outpace others in terms of fixes and content releases. While PVE gets a lot of updates a lot more frequently, PVP has been left to rot. While some issues regarding quality of life have been fixed or repurposed, the list of time sinks and the amount of frustration that comes from New World’s User Interface and Experience, is too big to tolerate.

So is New World dead or will it die in the near future? The answer is simply NO on both accounts. Over the past several months Amazon has done a good job, taking a game on life support and awakening it for its year long coma. They have shown their resilience in the face of a terrible community backlash, and continued to work on and improve the game. That kind of behavior assures me as a player that the worst timeline in New World’s development is already behind us, and makes me realize that the game is barely one year old. At the end of the day, what takes many developers months to design, sculpt and code, takes players a few hours to consume. So be patient, take it slow, and enjoy the game.

Outro

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I know the it's missing some other details, but at this point it’s already long enough. I will probably get more in-depth for each specific element of the game in separate articles.