So yeah, yesterday was Summer Game Fest, and AGS had an announcement they had been hyping up for literal months. They released their DLC last year, which was.. lackluster, I guess you could call it. They did rework an entire area, added new mobs and all – I have no doubt there was a lot of work involved, but since we lost things while gaining these new things, I guess that contributes to us all feeling it wasn’t really a gain. Atleast not of any large margin.
But, it was still a bunch of stuff – just maybe not as much as one would’ve hoped from a paid DLC. I had friends that didn’t even buy the DLC because it was lackluster – among other reasons, true – and I had friends that played through all the DLC had to offer within weeks and even stopped playing after a month and a half. They haven’t logged in for almost seven months by now.
While this has been going on, we’ve waited for new content – anything new, really. The DLC was Season 3, and it was, as I said, lackluster. Then Season 4 came around, and with it came the Group Finder; a new dungeon, the Glacial Tarn; a few new artifacts; MSQ updates; controller support. So, the added content was a new dungeon and a groupfinder to find new ways to play the almost-endgame, because ofcourse the Group Finder wasn’t even for the endgame – Mutation level 3 was exempt from Group Finder. All we got was a few new artifacts – most of which I haven’t even seen being used anywhere – and one new dungeon. The rest was update to the early-to-mid game, in preparation for new players.
Ok, so that leaves us three months to go through with the same old as before for us veterans then, we’ll power through and wait for next season. Which was delayed for almost an entire month, first of all. Then, what did we get with Season 5? A new 10 man raid, which, granted, has been played a fair amount – they even did do events about it – a few more artifacts, also most I havent seen in use. And they changed cooking-skill a bit, and the coding of the combat. Oh, and they added the ability to use mounts in Out Post Rush. The rest was basically just readjustments of previously released stuff, like more MSQ updates, controller support adjustments, etc.
So, I say again – what we got for endgame was one instance of a 10-man raid, a few artifacts and nothing else. So when Season 5 came out, we had all been waiting for ~4-5 months, and all we got during this time was one dungeon and one 10-man raid – which was a re-use of their earlier “Soul Trials”, or MSQ-instanced story snippets – and a couple of new artifacts. That’s all the endgame we’ve got added in half a year. I’m not considering controller support, Group Finder, and those things as endgame stuff – as that’s mostly changes to how you play the early-to-mid-TO-endgame. Not endgame.
I mean, overhauling the MSQ and all of that isn’t bad, and I’m all for it. But it’s not adding anything to the endgame. It doesn’t give the players, who have been playing endgame for months-to-years already, anything at all to do. We’re basically been told to just…keep playing the same thing over and over for months. And that’s in a live service game, mind you. All we got during this time is a 10-man trial and a dungeon, and some new artifacts, most which isn’t used by anyone.
We’ve been waiting for so long now to get new stuff to do in endgame, and we’ve been told to wait for Summer Game Fest to hear “exciting, cool announcement of what they’re working on”, so ofcourse we were hoping for loads of stuff – atleast a new dungeon, a new raid, new weapons, a new entire area, maybe some boat/ship stuff. Stuff for us to do at endgame.
What was the announcement? Console release, cross platform play – meaning PC players can play with console players – and remappable buttons on controllers. Besides that, we got a new character creator, an overhauled MSQ, new UI, new combat code, a 10-man “long-raid” – I’ll get back to that one later – and swimming, new mount-type, a gearscore increase to 725, a PvPvE area with a new type of currency to buy PvP-gear, matchmaking and they made all the MSQ “Soul Trials” repeatable. It sounds alot when you stack it like that, but let’s parse it a bit.
So, for a new player, they’ll get a completely new and improved character creator, which is awesome. Hopefully stuff is better explained and all, so a new player will be able to quickly get in and know what to do. Besides being able to play on console and PC, and play with eachother, with remappable buttons – and this is huge, considering the default controller scheme they introduced the controller support with was horrible – and that with new UI and animation changes. With the current Group Finder and the new Matchmaking they’re going to introduce, it’ll be quick and easy to find people to do both instanced PvP and PvE with. They’ll enjoy a new tutorial, an overhauled, updated MSQ, with a bunch of Soul Trials and Dungeons and Trials and Raids, swimming and a PvP area. All this all the way up to 725 gearscore.
It’s huge. It’s definitively a massive game to start from the beginning with. They’ve also tweaked the game in such a way that you’ll able to play it alone or with friends, so hopefully you’ll never be “locked out” of anything by not having anyone to help you through something. If I were to buy the game on console, my son and I could easily play the game together – and we’ll have a blast levelling up together.
But. For existing players that have been playing the endgame for months already and are in desperate need for new content, what did we get?
We can go back and re-do Soul Trials, a 10-man “long raid” and PvP area, along with matchmaking for instanced PvP, while re-gearing from 700 to 725, and a few months after console release, the console players will reach endgame to play with us. Oh, we also got surface swimming – no more lakebed walking – and a new mount-type. As for how the mounts work in the game atm, it’s all basically just skins, so we got a new skinline for mounts; Bears.
Matchmaking for PvP and the PvP area is mostly for PvP’ers, and what that means for them is that they’ll….keep playing the same PvP stuff they already do, except for being – hopefully – matched against equally skilled player, however that is calculated.. And honestly, I do believe the PvP area will be old quite quick, even for them. Players usually love to find ways to “break games”, and PvP’ers in particular. My bet is that the “meta” within a week will be something that abuses the hell out of players that is unfortunate enough to walk in there alone, hoping to find out what the area is all about. Like coordinated ganking, just for the sake of griefing other players, for instance. Sure, on paper, whatever is done in that area, they’ll get something called “doubloons”, a new currency that will be used to either purchase, craft or upgrade PvP-gear. Whether or not that will replace Azoth Salt will remain to be seen. But on paper it seems like an awesome thing, but knowing PvP’ers, they’ll find a way to play that in a way that is unintended, that makes the game mode “unfun” for others as much as possible. PvP communities rarely let the chance to be a bag of dicks go to waste.
For PvE players then, we’ll get the ability to ride Bears – reskinning of mounts, basically – and we’ll get the ability to swim on the surface of water. No words of whather or not we can dive, but atleast we’re not gonna walk on the bottom of the lake anymore. And then we’ll get to replay Soul Trials, and if I’m not mistaken, I think they’ve said we can bring in teams into them. We’ll also get an increase of Gear Score, meaning all our current gear is obsolete and we’ll have to grind to get the new best stuff, and apparently one of the most efficient way – or perhaps the only way? – is to play the new 10-man “long-raid”.
So what is a “10-man long-raid”? It’s a mix between dungeons and the raids they’ve had so far. A dungeon is a 5 man instance, where you fight through hordes of mobs, solve puzzles, reaches checkpoints and kill bosses, culminating in a hard bossfight, after which you win, gather your loot and leave.
Raids, so far in New World, has been a group of players just fighting a boss, one way or another. The first raid was the hatchery, which was a 10 man arena, where you had to fight a few waves of mobs, and when those waves were killed, any player that had died had the ability to rejoin the arena, at which time a new wave of enemies came. Rinse and repeat a few times, and eventually “The Boss” were fought. When succeeded, you got loot and left, and you had an hour time-limit for doing this.
There also was a 20-man raid – a huge arena where you were fighting a huge sandworm along with a bunch of smaller mobs. On launch, it was hard, and lots of attempts were failures, despite the three hour time-limit. As people got better, they managed to figure out ways to complete it, and eventually the world record is just over two and a half minute. However, since, the gearscore has increased from 625 to 700, and the rewards for the game is still the old rewards, 625 stuff.
Besides that, it has been another trial, the “Winter Rune Trial” as mentioned, it’s a 10 man fight with a small puzzle, which goes from a few mobs, to a large lizard, and when that’s done, you run deeper into the instance to fight the last boss, with a similar, but slightly more complex puzzle as you’re fighting.
It’s nothing crazy, it’s fairly straight forward – fight waves of small mobs, culminating in a bossfight, varying degrees of difficulty, scaled up in difficulty to adress the fact that you’re ten people fighting.
It might not sound like it’s that much difference between these two things, but it actually is. Trials, so far, seems to be a small arena which you fight timed waves of enemies and hard bosses – call it gladiator fights if you want, and you wouldn’t be terribly far off. Dungeons, meanwhile, is a complex instance, where you fight enemies as you progress further and further into the dungeon, and you can even ignore them if you want, reaching new checkpoints after checkpoints while you’re trying to fight the bosses.
However, it seems that this new 10-man “long-raid” is more of a dungeon rather than a “Trial arena”. It’s supposedly a complex construction where you progress deeper and deeper while ultimately fighting three difficult bosses as a ten man group. In my opinion, it sounds amazing, and the best part of it is that it’s dropping better and better loot, giving you the ability to upgrade all the way up to the new gearscore cap of 725. Sounds good, it’s awesome, sounds fun.
But it sounds too little, too late. We’ve been waiting for months – half a year or more – and we were basically just told that we are to wait for atleast four more months, before we get meaningful new content.
Which, honestly, is kind of in line with many other games – how often does, for instance, WoW release “more content” between their expansions, which is roughly two years apart? They dont – however, they release such an extensive expansion that it actually holds most players for that time, be it the new cosmetic goals they put up – I was grinding for so long just to get the Dragon Mount, Vial of the Sands. That alone took alot of time. I also remember the vendor mounts, if I’m not mistaken, they cost so much that it took time just to get those alone – let alone all the other stuff you had to do. New World doesnt have that type of content release. It has a “seasonal” release of content – every three to four months they drop a smaller-than-WoW-expansion content batch, and in between they fixes bugs and what not. But the issue is, the sizes of these content batches has been abysmal, and are simply not enough to retain players, making the playerbase smaller and smaller each month. I wish New World would adopt the content release schedule WoW have – with enormous content batches once every year or every two years, enough to actually last us that long – and on top of it they’d have these “seasons” where you basically get this pass filled with rewards for leveling up the season pass.
As it is now, the season passes with rewards for just playing the game seems to be the intended content they drop. It’s ridiculous and very frankly, not enough.
But the reason I say that it’s too little, too late, is the fact that we, the current player base on PC, had been asking for content for so long, and every time we asked for it, AGS just said “we’ve got cool stuff to announce for you in June, we just cant talk about it yet!”, as if to tell us that what we, the PC players, are waiting for will be announced – they will announce content for us, just be patient and wait. They told us that for months.
And now we just found out that the majority of the announcement was..
…that they’re releasing the game, completely reworked, on consoles, with crossplay, full controller support, overhauled character creation and MSQ. The majority of this announcement wasn’t for us – it was for people who had never played the game, but might buy and play it on console.
When we asked for updates on more content and a roadmap to let us know what kind of content we have to look forward to, they told us to sit quietly and wait – just to then basically ignore us and try to sell in the game as if it was a fresh launch to consoles. That which we were promised, never happened. We were promised content, a roadmap to see what we have to wait for. And all we got..
Was a console commercial. The content aimed for us were, simply too little, too late.
I have no doubt I’m going to buy the game on PS5, delete a character on my PC and play with my son, experiencing the start of the game and leveling up along with him. If nothing else, I’ll buy the game and play it while on the couch myself whenever I feel like it. Dont misunderstand – I really do think the console release announcement is great, and what they’ve done with the game in preparation for that is nothing short of awesome!
But consider, last October AGS released their DLC. With that release, and since, we’ve gotten an area reworked – not added, one existing area reworked – and we’ve gotten mounts, artifacts, two dungeons and one raid, they introduced “influence race” – new type of open world PvP to trigger wars – a groupfinder for regular dungeons and Mutation 1 and Mutation 2, but not for Mutation 3, a level increase for both player level and skills, and Gearscore raised to 700. That’s it. That is the content that is supposed to hold us over until the 15th of October this year. An entire year. That content was supposed to last us an entire year. Sure, they say that they’ve remade a whole lot of the Main Story Questline and starter areas and such – but that’s not content “for us”. That part of the game is past us, months to years ago. That part of the game, that content, are for “potential new players”, not us. Sure, a few of us have started a new character to experience it, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was not endgame content that we’ve asked for – and besides, existing players starting over to experience it doesn’t add players. It just moves them around where they are in their progress – while we want more endgame stuff, some players just moved to the early game, which isn’t endgame affecting. And when they’re max level again, most of them are just going to go back to their main character again anyway, so nothing endgame-related has actually been gained by the playerbase.
For already existing players on PC, this was basically just AGS saying “hold my beer” when asked “how does one ruin a reputation the fastest?”