Game Review - New World Aeternum

Previously we had both good and bad to say about New World. With the Aeternum revamp bundling the Angry Earth DLC into the base game, it's time to revisit New World and review it again.

We'll go over only the main issues and present our final score.

• Tab Targeting
• This was quite controversial when it was announced but personally it felt like a great improvement to the game, at least for the viability of ranged weapons, especially magic weapons.
• The feel of shooting in the game was never really as good as a real shooter game, and there was far too many melee encounters so ranged weapons rarely got off many shots that connected before enemies closed the gap. And only a few weapons actually had the ability to aim.
• Overall this greatly improved the viability of ranged weapons in PvE and put you on more even ground with enemies that did have ranged attacks because they certainly had very good target lock.
• Battle Pass
• The Battle Pass is in two parts -- the season track and the season Journey.
• The season track is very easy to do and you are not time-gated in how quickly you can do it. Easily one of the best battle passes in MMORPGs IF you consider only the battle pass track.
• The Season Journey objectives get really tedious and there is nothing worth getting until the last two Chapters. For this reason, Throne and Liberty's battle pass edges out as superior.
• 
  
• Story
• In terms of how stories are told, this iteration is finally decent, on part with the type of storytelling in a game like SWTOR where you have a few cutscenes for the main events, plus voiceovers.
• There is some attempt for characters to emote while they talk to you, but it's subpart with often awkward or unnatural looking animations. But this is still better the at-launch version years ago when they just sat there and talked at you with a dialog box with a wall of text.
• Unfortunately the actual story is, to be honest, rubbish in every way.
• Pacing is completely off. You are not introduced to Factions promptly and directed to join one when it is so critical to New World in terms of guilds and PvP. If you follow the main story strictly and especially if you wandered off to also do some sidequests, it can be a very long time before you encounter a mission to join a faction.
• The use of the names of mythical figures is a very weak storytelling device especially when their depiction is so different from established myth. This feels like a lame attempt to avoid trying to make their own world and lore and instead steal something recognizable, especially when some names like Circe and Gilgamesh are just cameo name-drops.
• The player makes highly dubious choices, such as willingly corrupting the Angry Earth just to purify a Corruption artifact, when the reason for purifying it and the ultimate outcome is not even clear compared to simply trying to destroy it.
• The storylines make increasingly little sense. For example, in Ebonscale Reach, you cure the Empress's son of a grossly disfiguring / mutating condition. She doesn't believe you and says she will take her son and sail away. ...But who is she taking with her since we cured her son? Did someone manage to somehow clone her son who had this unique illness?
• The storyline is clearly a tour through the various zones and trying to forcibly make sense of what is already there, instead of telling a good story.
• The main problem is that some of the elements don't make much sense at all. For example, the "lost" are presented as mindless zombies, yet pirates are also "lost" and they still have leadership, motivations, and can even be negotiated with. From launch, the underlying world building and lore is inconsistent and any attempt to explain it will inevitably fall short of being plausible.
• Unique elements of Aeternum such as the Lost and the Corrupted are depicted as more mundane fantasy elements of undead and demonic cultists, further weakening what was unique about Aeternum as a fantasy world.
• There are various cartoon segments that just tell you the backstory instead of building it into the story to let you uncover the mysteries of Aeternum and the motivations of the key characters.
• Most of the plotlines are completely predictable and end in a pointless fight that could have or should have been avoided.
• Currently there is a bug with some of the main story Trial stages where the boss sometimes won't even show up, meaning your progress is stuck. It doesn't happen to everyone but it's hard to say when it will be fixed.
• PvP and Cutlass Keys free-for-all zone
• A complete waste of time for the main reason that Amazon Game Studios is still very slow (or outright refuses) to acknowledge there are severe exploits, much less ban cheaters for using them. There is no shortage of videos detailing exploits on Youtube and players who have been cheating for years without being banned.
• Even assuming you don't mind being seal-clubbed by cheaters, gearing up to a competitive gear score is tedious and also time-gated with the system of getting the special "coconut" in the FFA area.
• Failure to address exploiting and cheating can spill over to PvE as well: Why choose teammates for tough group content like Expeditions or settlement Corrupted Invasions who can't output cheater-levels of damage so you can all have an easier time?
• Only one Expedition (dungeon) is worth doing.
• Because of the gear it drops.
• For everything else, good luck getting into one with the matchmaker. And this is just endgame max-level Expeditions. No one even bothers to do the earlier ones.
• Crafting is still terrible.
• It takes a huge amount of time and resources (unless you buy RMT gold to buy botted goods in the auction house in mass quantities) to not just level up your crafts to make something useful, but to craft the same thing a few dozen times so that you get a useful array of traits on the item.
• In contrast, you can just go farm some relatively weak named mob in the overland and every couple of minutes get a piece of purple or legendary gear with fairly decent fixed traits.
• Obviously we cannot let crafters just sit in town and churn out piles of best-in-slot items, but the disparity between the two methods is just too wide to make crafting a satisfying pursuit no matter how satisfying the actual materials gathering process might feel.
• Here, New World actually did something right by not forcing you to manually equip the proper gathering tool every time, unlike other survival games, as players are generally not dumb enough to try to use a pick axe to harvest a mushroom, for example. Tools have their own equipment slots. Nevertheless, this is in fact not a novel feature as an older game like Villagers and Heroes did exactly the same thing.
• This, despite adjustments to crafting since launch where they basically reduced the amount of materials needed and the rate of learning with the ability to buy time-gated research boosts from your Faction.

The best part of New World Aeternum is the improvement to how the story is told.

Everything else is the same.

Final score: FAIL.