..is not only the name of a game I recently bought, but also how it feels playing New World at the moment.
One thing at the time, and let’s start with the game named No Rest for the Wicked. It’s an top-down ARPG, with a slower pace gameplay than, say, Diablo or Path of Exile. It’s more like an Isometric Souls-like than Diablo-like, from what I can tell. It seems really awesome, despite only being in Early Access. I’ve promised myself to stop buying Early Access games, but when the games in Early Access is only roughly €30, and as polished as this already is, I feel like I can make an exception – especially when it’s so close in combat to Souls-like as it is.
I’ve also bought a few more books for the collection! Over the years, I’ve been collecting some tabletop roleplaying game stuff that I was in contact with as a kid. It’s just me re-buying some of the books I had back in the day, and buying the ones I didnt have – which was most of them.
There’s a few sections of this collection – first off, it’s the miniature models I’ve shown a few times here already. I dont really collect the “old” stuff of these, but I just try to get as much variety as possible – militias, skeletons, monsters, beastmens, etc. Last year, I kickstarter-backed a company making miniatures, and a few weeks ago I got the shipment finally – 400+ minis, almost 15 kilos of it!
Secondly, the publisher of the main tabletop rpg I’m collecting, also published some fantasy books. It was a series of 51 fantasy books, some being Conan the Barbarian books, Gary Gygax’s books about Gord, a few books of Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World series, and a good chunk of the Elric series – and finally I’ve gotten my hands on the last one. Now I proudly own all of them!
Not only that, there’s quite alot of books and boxes I’m trying to collect, of the actual tabletop RPG itself. There’s four different editions I want to get my hands on, and a total 17 boxes and 42 books – and so far, I’ve gotten 11 of the boxes and 28 of the books – not all of them complete, though. I still miss some items, mostly maps. It’s getting close to being complete! It’s a mix of rules, expansion rule-sets, sourcebooks, bestiaries, adventures and handbooks, and in this case, I’m mostly aiming to get everything from Edition 2, 3 and 4, as well as the “Expert rules”, which was a sort of “expansion” to Edition 2. When 2E first came out, they expanded upon it in lots of ways, with extra rules and such, which came to be known as “Expert”. It was simply just an expansion of the rules. 3E only updated the basic ruleset of 2E, which meant that the Expert-ruleset still functioned with 3E.
When finally Edition 4 came out, they reworked it in its entirety, integrated the “Expert-rules” into the base ruleset. Therefore, basically any “Expert-material” is fully functional with both Edition 2, 3 and 4, and as long as you do some minor conversions between them, all three editions are fully functional with each other, so long as you mind the Expert-rules. Any adventure published for 2E, will absolutely work for 4E, as long as you do minor adjustments and conversions, just as an adventure published for 4E will work with 2E or 3E the same way.
Back in the day, we used to play Edition 4 along with some material from the “Expert”-rules, but the books I had access to myself was the 3rd edition stuff, so with a bit of tweaking, I made 2E and 3E stuff compatible with 4E, and it worked like a charm. I’m definitely not opposed to get the books and boxes from Edition 5 and later – but my main focus is to get everything published between 1982 and 1994, which is the year fifth edition came out.
But 5E is not on my “to get”-list as of now. If they were, it’ll be 15 more books and boxes, however, it was generally regarded as a huge step down in quality from the previous editions, and we just never got around to play with it at all. It was set in a different area of the planet that was the official game-world, and it introduced more races that was vastly different than what we had been used to, and all the rules were apparently made different for the sake of being different. I know that our DM didnt want to deal with it too much, so we kept playing 4E. Me and some friends were actually making our own stuff according to the 4E rulesets for upwards ten years after 5E came out.
The editions that came out even later, we dont talk about, loudly atleast. It was a completely different dev team and publishers – the IP got sold to someone else, who thought they could breathe new life into it. I think they failed, pretty disastrously. That, which was basically trying to lable itself as 6E, 7E and 8E, was published with few addendum-books and few years between the editions, and was set in a completely different world than the first 5 editions. Personally, I consider them a flop, and not actually 6th, 7th or 8th edition of the game. They’re a completely different TTRPG altogether in my opinion.
Several years later, they tried to re-release the game, basically just republishing their own version of the game, to “celebrate” the 30 year aniversary of the original IP – Yes, they bought an IP, remade it in their own vision and set it in a completely different world, and then years later republished their own stuff as a celebration of the IP they bought and vandalized. Some years later even still, they tried to republish the 3E mixed with the Expert rules and 4E. I mean, they published it, so they didnt try – but I dont think it was a huge success, as they later sold the rights to another company, which also made a kickstarter for it.
Their version was more of a continuation of 3E with Expert ruleset. While I – in a way – got disappointed, because I liked 4E more and hoped this version would be more like 4E, I must say that I do like this edition alot more than the “flopped 6E” – so much so, that I actually consider this the true sixth edition of the TTRPG. Atleast it’s set in a world, that for now is implied to be the “original” gameworld, which is a huge win in my book.
Also, as a side-collection, I’m trying to get my hands on the Falcon books too, by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson. They’re solo-adventure books, basically a book filled with paragraphs that, when read in different orders, make several adventures in one book. It’s a sci-fi setting with a time travelling agency, where you play as one of the agents trying to hunt down criminals – and depending on your dice rolls and choices, you stop reading one page, and start reading a specific paragraph on another page, riffling through the pages back and forth in order to read “your” adventure. There’s six of these books; The Renegade Lord, Mechanon, The Rack of Baal, Lost in Time, The Dying Sun, and At the End of Time. So far, I’ve got the first three books, two of which I grew up with and played alot. They were my older brothers, but I probably spent more time with them than he did, and when I moved out I didn’t bring them with me, as they were not mine. But I made sure to get my own books later – it just took almost twenty years! The first two I got almost a year and a half ago, the third I got now just a few weeks ago. Now I just need to find the last three..
So, what’s happening in New World then? Not much. I still do the same thing as usual, trying to get ingame funds, playing M3’s, waiting for more content so that my old company members come back to the game. There’s not much else to do. I did however sign up for a competition – I dont really know all the details, as of yet, as nothing has been officially announced yet. But from what I’ve gathered so far, AGS is sponsoring a Speedrunning event of one of their latest raids, and they’re apparently working with a known speedrunner of this game.
So from what I understood, they’ve appointed a few content creators to be “team captains”, and over the weekend, there’ll be a 4 day event, where the “team captains” will be running this new raid. Which members of each team is completely up to the respective team captains, and the rumor so far is that for the North American region, two of the best speed running teams will get together and form one 10-man team. Usually, the North American teams are the winners in all other speedrunning events, so everyone is fairly sure they’ll win this too – however, it seems there’s regional competition. NA competes against NA teams, European teams against other European teams, etc., which actually makes this interesting.
How many team captains there’ll be? No idea. Will it actually be a regional lineup, or will it be a global one? No idea. What’s the detailed rules? No idea.
Thing is, AGS havent gone public with this yet. And apparently, they “forgot” about timezones, so their idea was to publish this event of the morning of Friday, for the event to end on Monday – but timezones makes this event go live Saturday for Australians, for instance, and in the evening for Europeans. And I’m not being sarcastic either – I saw a screenshot between the AGS representative and one of the content creators talking about this, and AGS just said “tomorrow morning”, referensing US-time, while seemingly oblivious that it wasnt the same for the one they were talking to. “Tomorrow morning” would be 6h later for the “team captain” at the time of the screenshot, but that was apparently not correct – as said hours came and went a long time ago. It’s like they’re so US-centric, that “the rest of the world” simply dont exist. I’m going to assume that “tomorrow morning” means “US West-coast time”, and that they wont share anything until 9:00 their time.
Which is all and well – except for the fact that it caters more to the US-player base so much more, as it gives them more time to plan and run it, than the other regions. And as the official announcement haven’t been released yet, people like me – who is not a team captain, but merely a possible team member of the running teams – know very little. I have to piece together the information I get from different sources, which means I’m not a hundred percent sure what this is all about; but this is what I’ve pieced together so far.
In roughly two to three hours, AGS will go public with a “weekly, weekend event”, where some – unknown number – content creators take the role of “team captains”, get a team together and try to speedrun the Winter Rune Forge. As I said, NA have the upper hand here, since they just merged two of their best teams into one and going forward with that team, while the rest of the regions team captains have a few players they usually Speedrun with and have to fill up with random players. As such, the other regions team captains have been probing their communities for prospective team members, and some information as to what it’s all about have been “leaked”, just to let these prospective players know roughly what they’re about to sign up for – which is how I know anything at all about this event.
If the information I’ve gathered is correct, each region competes against itself – so in NA there’ll be a few teams that compete against eachother, in Europe there’ll be a few teams competing against eachother, etc,. Each winning team will be rewarded with 20 Azoth Edition gamekeys provided by AGS – meaning each player will get two free gamecopies of the base game including some deluxe skins, no DLC – and that’s it. There’s also a possibility that the competition is global – meaning that every team competes against every other, no regional restriction, and if so, basically everyone I’ve spoken to so far are in agreement that it’s basically the same as saying that the two merged NA-teams will win this entire event. Two professional hardcore speedrunning teams that have won most of the community-driven speedrunning competitions so far over the last year or so, will almost be guaranteed to win over teams that mostly comprise of PUG-players.
However, the details will be announced later. This includes if there’s restrictions, including if there’ll be “PUG’s allowed” or if the teams are supposed to be comprised of the team captains usual team members – how this’ll be enforced I dont know, so therefore I do not think this will be a rule, but it is AGS, so I wouldn’t be surprised. The exact rules, times, if there’ll be a number of attempts, etc., none of these things are yet public.
And as a member of the discord community one of these team captains have, I saw them searching for potential players to play this event with. There was a vetting process – I had to show my gear and have it being approved, and so on, and improve upon any detail I needed to. No problems, I provided my gear that I use for both healing and dps in the Winter Rune Forge and said I was interested in both roles, whichever they needed.
Strangely enough, during the vetting process, I did not hear a single comment about my healing gear specifically. It was said that my gear was fine, with a few tweaks, but the tweaks mentioned was only for my dps gear, and then I was told that I could sign up for the dps role that wielded Greatsword and Hatchet. Great!, I thought, so I signed up and started to get the necessary stuff together.
I crafted a new hatchet; bought a new spear; crafted a new, very expensive Runeglass of Arboreal Opal to re-socket my Greatsword; I upgraded my three Ancient Combat trophies from Basic to Major, which was by far the largest expense; and then I purchased a bunch of the relevant coatings, wards and honing stones. I was spending loads in preparation for this, it was definitely more than I was comfortable with, but it was necessary in order to participate in the speedrun on the level that atleast was required of me. I usually hover around a few thousand golds, but lately I’ve been really grinding to get more funds, like running Elite Chests like crazy to find Golden Scarabs to sell, been running lots of max level mutations to find loot to sell, etc. I’ve slowly but surely managed to get a small fortune – compared to what I usually have – and I have now blown through most of it in preparation for this Winter Rune Forge Speedrun competition.
We’re still waiting for the official announcement from AGS, but in the meantime; a few hours ago, “my” team announced their roster for the evening, which I signed up for.
Edit – As time later passed, the “announcement” AGS said they were going to make, was nothing else but a list of team captains, and times they were supposedly streaming their runs. “My” team captain had a timeslot for three in the middle of the night. Very confused about this, I reached out to some of the people on the list, talked to them a bit, read conversations I saw they had had on Discord and tried to talk to AGS themselves, and I couldnt get a straight answer to anything. Not the rules, not the framework of the event, not if we were supposed to actually speedrun and stream at stated scheduled times, or if it was supposed to be a VOD, or if anyone hosted our VODs somewhere.. the team captain I was supposed to run with simply said that No, they weren’t running at that time, they didnt know why AGS had put them down for that slot, as they had said they were going to run at another time and still AGS put them down for the middle of the night, and that they were going to be asleep at that time.
Nothing against the team captain I was supposed to run for, because I wholeheartedly agree with what was said – but AGS does something like this.. it just confuses me to no end. I dont feel like I can participate in things with no rules or structures like that. And not two team captains told me the same things about how they had been explained how this event was supposed to work.
And AGS themselves? They were very vague about it all, and just referred me back to the “schedule-tweet”, as if that gave all the information necessary. I promise you, it did not explain a damn thing about the rules, structure or framework of anything.
So I stepped down from running, even if I wasnt in the starter-roster for the evening. I just cant do it. I cant run serious speedrunning competitions, at three at night, when I’m a single parent of three kids I need to take care of. Late evening is fine, even if it’s pushing it, but starting speedrunning at 03:00? No way.