Playing New World "normally" is actually a good experience

New World has nosedived since launch, going from 900,000 players to barely 20,000 now at peak. Instead of rehashing all the ways it failed, this post will focus on an experiment to play it "normally" and my experiences from doing so.

TLDR: If you don't try to grind to endgame, you can actually have a decent gameplay experience in New World. The developers should stop listening to the complaints of players who rush to endgame because they are deliberately ruining the gameplay experience for themselves.

At the time of writing this feedback to the developers, we have just finished Weaver's Fen (but not yet completed any of the weapon quests).

Guidelines for the Experiment

Here are the "rules" we adopted when conducting this gameplay experiment:

• Zero PvP
• This game mode exists outside of normal gameplay progression, especially when the various levelled systems encourage zooming to maximum levels for everything.
• This in turn has an extremely disruptive experience on gameplay with the focus on repetitive grind, and it ruins the rest of the gameplay experience in the game world.
• The game modes in PvP do not encourage any actual progress through the game in general except progressing in PvP survivability. Trying to be competent at PvP basically means you will ignore most of New World. We wanted to play New World, not just repeat certain quests and game modes (e.g., Outpost Rush).
• Zero Pay-to-Win - no Trading Post
• There are simply too many bots and too much Real Money Transactions in the game, and the market is flooded with goods that are the result of botting or materials from botting.
• As a matter of principle, we did not want to support any of this, so we did not use the Trading Post at all.
• Even if illicit trades were not an issue, we still did not want to simply pay-to-win by buying stuff off the Trading Post to shortcut development. This mentality encourages grinding for gold to buy your progress instead of actually playing the game. We did not consider this to be a satisfying experience and therefore did not do so.
• Finally, buying materials would distort our impression of overall materials availability by gathering.
• No Expeditions or Group Content
• Simply because no one is around to do that content anymore. Given the current game population you hardly cross paths with anyone. We did not want to waste our time with this.
• The main story quest progression is generally no longer blocked by Expeditions, so it is not necessary to actually do them anymore.
• Limited Grind
• We tried not to stop to grind, e.g., cut trees endlessly to level our trade skills.
• Although we did want to also advance our trade skills, we tried to strike a balance between doing so, but still playing the game.
• When we did grind, it was generally to process a build-up of materials in our storage that was taking up too much space and thereby hampering overall gameplay. So we stopped to acquire the necessary materials in order to process the materials and in doing so reduce their strain on storage.
• Followed the story quests
• Doing Town Board missions quickly accelerated our level to 60 (current maximum) but we strictly followed the zone levels. We did all side quests in a zone when we could before moving on.
• Did not use Gypsum
• Getting to level 60 prematurely also meant access to Gypsum, a later introduction to the game. You can simply harvest things to get your three daily Hidden Bags and enough Gypsum to make one gear crate to improve your Expertise beyond 500.
• We actually did NOT do this when it was apparent that this broke the gearing acquisition process. You can basically get a random gear score 500+ item every day to use, while you are still in a zone much lower level than maximum.
• Being overgeared can make fights too easy in lower level zones, and we did not want to do so.
• We were already overlevelled and somewhat overgeared in comparison to the zone we were in, and basically throwing away every quest reward gear.
• Further, we could in general cautiously handle the common mobs in Elite zones in the non-endgame zones. While it gave us a good sense of satisfaction at seeing the power creep of the player, this is already pushing the boundary of what makes adventuring combat exciting and fulfilling; as well as the intent of Elite Zones.
• In line with this we definitely did not follow zergs in endgame Elite Zones to collect chests.
• Faction Rank
• We did break zone progression-by-level in order to do Faction Promotion missions. We were able to do all missions solo except (at this time) the final promotion in the endgame zone.
• Because it is our opinion that the Faction promotions were intended to be solo, we have for the moment deferred attempting the final promotion in a zone too hard for us based on our gameplay guidelines.
• This did not seriously affect the experiment as in general there was nothing we wanted to buy in the Faction store except zero-gold-cost Material Converters in order to keep the faction tokens from going over capacity. The last Faction Rank does let you buy a type of Gypsum, however.

Daily Procedure

• We start at the Town Board and the Faction Representative, to collect quests.
• For Faction quests, we did just three per day for the daily reward multiplier.
• In general, you will accumulate tokens faster than you will want to spend them, since almost everything still costs gold to buy but has limited use.
• We typically completed three Faction quests, then tried to cherry pick the next three for the next day. If we could take an Elite quest with higher payout and were able to complete it, then we did so. Otherwise we just finished three more to get them ready for turn-in the next day.
• For Town Board missions, we completed as many as we could easily do, whenever we were in town.
• In general, Town Board missions were a cost-effective and time-effective way of using up materials we gathered as part of playing the game, and of improving our Trade Skills.
• That said, many skills are not represented on the Town Board, such as Engineering and Furnishing, and we did not stop to grind those.
• The change to let players move stuff between storage for free was a great quality-of-life improvement that made Town Board missions much more feasible, especially the Provisioning ones.
• We checked our Tools
• Typically we carried two sets of tools: One for use and one spare.
• Instead of repairing tools, we just Salvaged them. Then we crafted another tool, hoping for good Traits. If we didn't get a set of good traits, that tool was basically slated to be used until it broke and then replaced.
• In this way, the repeated crafting also slowly improved our Engineering without a focussed period of grind. But without Town Board missions, it was extremely slow going.
• We checked for quests and systematically cleared the zone of quests.
• By this time, depending on the number of Town Board mission and the nature of Faction quests, about an hour or so would have already passed.

Observations - Part I - Early- to Mid-Game

Combat

• Given our guidelines for this experiment, Combat was actually in a fairly good place.
• Overland common mobs were suitably easy. Not so easy that you can simply wade through a half dozen enemies at the same time, but not so hard as to make moving around the game world tedious.
• Elite Zones and the occasional tougher enemy (e.g., alligators and bears) were therefore also in a good place because they were a limited geography of tougher fights for more reward (weapon skill, mostly).
• "Elites" is too broad a term and in general they are still overtuned for their supposed level / zone. Some Elites are group bosses and some encounters chain in more superior or Elite enemies as part of the sequence (e.g., the Weaver's Fen encounter involving Father, ghost Children, and ghost Mother) but there's really no way of knowing this is going to happen.
• As a "random" encounter you come across, this is fine since you can generally just run away if overwhelmed.
• But as a quest encounter, this is extremely irritating, especially when it is part of a quest chain that was meant to be done solo and which you followed along solo.
• Some are still overtuned (in general based on how they fight) as part of a "solo" mission to kill them, in comparison with the zone.
• The Gypsum crates are a level 60 / endgame feature and should not be factored as a gearing "workaround" to overcome these challenges, even if the player has unavoidably accelerated to level 60 through quests and Town Board missions.
• Using the same weapon over and over was extremely boring. We tried to mix things up a bit and also had a secondary weapon that was not related to the Attribute we focussed on. But things still turned out fine, so overall I think the common mob combat difficulty is still in a good place, especially as you can basically "change your mind" about what weapon you want to mainly use, at any point.
• Corruption Portals are way overpowered for their level (and corresponding reward).
• Supposedly "solo" ones especially, and they vary in difficulty according to the type and what traits the final boss spawns with.
• Higher level Portals are too tedious to do because of the aggressive Corruption. And the need to combat this with a lot of Corruption Tinctures and of a higher level means Arcana needs to be developed significantly to keep up.
• As a way to get Expedition Orbs, this is far too tedious.
• Melee weapons are far too useful to not carry. This ruins a lot of build diversity.
• Ranged and magic attacks generally are single-target no matter what while all melee attacks will hit all close-together targets. And Stamina refills so quickly that you can basically keep up basic light/heavy attacks indefinitely with melee.
• Attack rate is generally much higher, especially for one-handed weapons, in comparison with ranged and magic weapons. This is fine if the enemy can be kept at range or will stay at range, but not if they are in melee and staggering you with fast attacks or if there are more than one in melee and they stagger their attacks. So again, there is a lot of pressure to always have a melee weapon.
• The Musket is the worst weapon. You get maybe a couple of shots then you need to switch to any other weapon because every shot forces you to stop moving and reload, making you too vulnerable in close combat and too low-mobility to dodge ranged attacks.
• Blocking is very unreliable.
• The time window for a block once you see an attack starting is extremely small and possibly depending on lag or sync issues, it can seem impossible to actually block anything properly unless you are already blocking before they initiate an attack..
• For this reason, one of the best but most boring weapons is the Hatchet as the attack rate is very fast before a brief pause during the end of the combo chain. And with Berserk, you cannot be interrupted and the more you hit, the more you heal, so you can sustain damage and survivability. For solo adventuring, it is one of the best choices.
• Multiple enemies at the same time, especially a mix of ranged and melee, is extremely hard to deal with
• For example, the cave with Yonas and two tendrils.
• I had done well with full points in INT, and using Rapier, and Life Staff up until Yonas. Too much stagger from too many sources, and the fight was impossible.
• I came back with full points in STR, and using Hatchet, and Life Staff and I barely needed the Life Staff.
• Trying to do it as a "mage" with glove or staff would have been even worse than the Rapier.
• Special encounter design really needs to be sensitive to the gross weapon imbalances.
• For general overland, many weapons are viable except maybe the Musket.
• For tighter high-density spaces like forts, weapons and combat styles that move too much just end up pulling too many nearby enemies and can quickly result in being overwhelmed or at least drawing out a fight too much.
• For boss fights, design combined with overall weapon imbalance means some builds / weapon combinations can find the fight outright impossible.

Gearing - Drops and Crafting

• Gear drops were adequate for the combat in the zone, but most of the drops (and all of the quest reward drops except jewelry) were basically Salvage fodder, even if they were superior Blue items:
• Inferior to the same type of weapon we currently have.
• Attribute unrelated to the weapon.
• Attribute on armor unrelated to the Attributes we wanted to focus.
• Trait for a skill we did not have.
• When we started getting armor with the Luck attribute, we started to use them regardless of the other attributes, but it is not clear whether we were getting anything substantially better. Blue items for example were still extremely rare.
• With our no-grind policy, Crafting did not keep up, even though Armor and Weapons are represented on Town Board missions.
• What we could craft basically costs too much in resources (which translates to resource gathering time) in comparison to the results.
• Basically the randomness of Traits means whatever we crafted, even if it has a higher Gear Score than what we were using, was likely going to end up Salvaged.
• Considering how many pieces of gear we Salvaged, it felt foolish to waste any resources crafting anything other than Tools (which cannot be obtained from random drops).
• Especially as the same materials consumed would ultimately be needed to refine higher-Tier materials, or be used in Town Board missions for valuable Settlement Standing.
• The best outcome of levelling Tradeskills seems to be Repair Kits, which trades useless Charms for repair free of gold cost.
• Crafting is basically therefore very unsatisfying in terms of combat gearing. There is not enough reason to do so and what you are doing early-game and mid-game is worthless.
• Crafting for any other reason is also too grind-intensive, especially as Engineering and Jewelry are not represented on the Town Board to help progress.

Faction Missions

• Mostly the faction missions were fine and doable whenever I got them, except for the final one. The zone is so tough that even the Expertise > 568 player who was trying to help me had a rough time.
• Their initial strategy was to just run through until the mobs de-aggroed and reset, but eventually they hit a too-high mob density.
• Aside from the tedious grind to get to 568 average gear score, it would have been pretty tedious to cautiously make their way through the zone. Even on the way to that area, they wanted to just skip all the common enemies on the road.
• The sudden difficulty spike was very disappointing, especially considering the main benefit of that final faction mission is to be able to buy Gypsum from the Faction store each day -- in comparison, you can get Gypsum can get just from harvesting nodes each day. And in the meantime, there is nothing to buy from the Faction store.

Gathering

• Gathering overall was fine, except when materials piled up and I had to stop and grind-gather materials to process them.
• On-the-road gathering felt like running across treasure and it was a good feeling.
• Grind-gathering focussed my attention too much on gathering and then it felt too much like a chore and that I was sacrificing making progress in other ways, such as progressing story arcs.
• Worse than gathering materials was gathering catalysts, which were only random drops from supply crates and therefore highly unpredictable. The shortfall was made up with Matter Converters, but only because the use of Solvents is under-represented. Flux and Sandpaper were overly in demand because of their use in metal/precious metal and wood/stone.
• Once Starmetal starts to be more common in 30's and 40's zones, there is a marked shortage of Iron, forcing players to go back to lower level zones to farm it just to process the increasing amounts of Ore that accumulate.
• The nearest comparable resource, Fibre, does not have this issue. There's typically still more than enough Hemp to more than provide enough Fibre to process Silkweed and Wirefibre. So it's a smoother experience of gathering what you need with much less stopping to grind.
• On the server I was running this experiment, low-level and mid-level zones were essentially devoid of other players.
• Very rarely would I see one or two other players, and they would typically be farming materials. And when that happens, a single other player in the area would easily take all the materials, and they might very well stay to wait for respawn.
• When high-tier in-demand materials like Orichalcum is concentrated in a region, it then becomes very prone to never being available because players start to frequent only that area for that resource.
• For example, the several nodes of Orichalcum in Fort Damnation. It's easy to get into, and whoever gets there will basically use up all the nodes for a long time before respawn. Then if they decided to just camp there or bot there, basically no one else dropping in will get any nodes.
• The shared supply chests model is a much better one because everyone who overcomes the challenges to reach the chest will get the reward.

Story

• Overall the main story is very weak, and doesn't really get interesting / intriguing until late in the Restless Shores when we discover more about the box we saw in the opening movie. This makes it hard to keep up motivation and momentum to follow the story.
• Furthermore, the momentum of any story arc is slowed by distracting yet feels-necessary mechanics, such as town board missions, faction missions, and stopping to grind for materials just to process what you have.
• Being able to more or less gather what you need as you adventure is very important as it saves the player from special grindy sidetrips to gather.
• The quality of life improvement to link all settlement storage and allow content transfers for free was a big help as it removes a lot of tedious or unfeasible inventory management and greatly improved the ability to complete town board missions without additional harvesting grind.
• The side stories in a Settlement had better momentum but overall still fell short in how interesting they were, although some of them certainly had some humour to them.
• The new story arc involving the Varangians feels much better as at each stage the player is given a tidbit of interesting information about them or their goals, compelling the player to keep following the quest to find out what is going on.