I loved New World when it was first released. It was my type of game, exactly. So much exploring, gathering, grinding, crafting, trading, home ownership and home decoration. It was fantastic. Unfortunately, it was also plagued by bugs, glitches, and exploits. The moment they created a fix for one thing, they'd break twenty other things and the game was in a perpetual state of disarray because of the never-ending fixes that just broke. more. things.
For me, the final straw was a mix of when they changed fishing rewards because too many bots were exploiting it, and when they nerfed the life staff because of a glitch in pvp when it was fine in pve, and when they kept turning the trading posts off due to various exploits and item dupes and gold dupes and god knows what else. My secret plan to be a master gatherer and crafter and rule the trading post in order to become a millionaire and own the best designed manor on the server was shattered and I uninstalled the game.
Yesterday, largely thanks to a post by @asynckronism, I redownloaded New World to see if things had improved over the months since I last played.
The first thing I noticed was that there were no longer a hundred odd APAC servers to choose from. There was only one. Thankfully I still had my house, all my stuff, and if my friends ever decide to play again we're still in the same guild.
Unfortunately I couldn't make a new character to dabble around with for an hour or so to get the hang of the game again. I'm terrible when it comes to returning to games. I often start a new character to restabilise myself and understand things again before jumping onto my main character, but, in New World, you can only have one character per server and APAC only has one server. So I had no choice but to throw myself into the deep end and be overwhelmed by the thousands of STUFF thrown at my character when I logged in.
I was in Everfall, my home city, and it looked so different to what I remember. And there were actually quests available when I had previously cleared Everfall of every single quest. And I didn't know what to do.
Blinking, I finally looked at my storage shed and was pleased to see all my stuff was there. I vaguely remembered that I was in the process of levelling up my jewel-crafting and that's why I had a tonne of gems and metal at the ready. I went to the trading post to look at prices of the things I had on me and was astounded to see the price of various things. 0.03 gold for some of my gemstones. 100 gold for one of my legendary fish that was once worth 900. Prices were whack. How was I supposed to afford to pay my taxes with trading post prices like that?
Trundling off, I went to my house and was pleased to see that even though I hadn't played for 8-9 months, they took pity on me and renewed my perks for the week. Also, taxes were now a mere fraction of what they once were.
Thank zee lawd for that.
Overwhelmed by the city and not remembering my abilities or anything, I decided to run off into the wilds and just... gather. Things would slowly come back to me whilst I did what I always did, surely. And they did.
I ran around willy-nilly, not really choosing a direction, and gathered various ores and flowers and then fished. Then remembered that I had dedicated fishing gear I had crafted that I should equip to be a better fisher. Soon I was catching fish for the event currently on in-game and soon I was wincing as I remembered how hot this game made my poor laptop run. (I'll be getting a new gaming computer soon; can't wait to no longer burn my fingertips on the keyboard because the CPU and GPU are directly underneath it and are 98 degrees Celsius even with Throttlestop active and everything undervolted.)
Within a couple of hours I was back in the groove of the game and knew all the things again.
I can't really tell just yet if things are better than they were or not though. That being said, there are a few little quality of life improvements that I wish were in the game at launch, such as: being able to access any storage in any town you've been to no matter which town you're in; although you still sell at the trading post you're accessing, you can see and purchase goods from all of them; crafting menus now have an exit or continue crafting option when finished; taxes are much much cheaper... just to rattle off a few.
What I need is to find a group and do an expedition to find out if combat has been fixed. I remember my fire staff randomly locking up for no particular reason and refusing to activate abilities and healing once was fun but then they nerfed it to fix exploits in pvp. It'd be cool to see if somehow it's fun again. It'd also be cool if devs worked separately on pvp/pve so that pve doesn't get ruined because of a few schlongs in pvp. Out in the world it seems fine, although my life staff is being a bit wanky at times, eurgh. At least the fire staff seems fixed though. I remember hating the amount of stagger enemies delivered upon you too, and they still seem to do it. Ugh. Nothing worse than being knocked all over the place and not being able to do anything.
I'm enjoying it again though, and I'm really liking this new music thing they've implemented.
Unless real life friends start randomly playing this too though, I'm unsure if I'll be able to stick with it. I need me some social in my New World. When this game was first released, I wanted it to be theeeee MMO I could spend my days in; a proper "new world." It would be cool if I could get right into it again, now that it seems like what it should have been at launch.
I need to convince other people to play again. Hmm.
Until next time! :)
Posted from Kaelci Games with Exxp : https://kaelci.games/2022/08/06/returning-to-new-world/
It's been a good bit of fun again. I've found myself logging back in a few times since the recent update. Music is pretty ok some nice little perks but the fishing and the new quests for the new event have been keeping me moving. I'm not even level 60 yet lol
Haha, I'm not either! I just reached level 57. 😅 And most of those levels are because of gathering resources, not even questing. I think I'm currently halfway through the main story and I'm almost max level. Woops!
It's definitely a good bit of fun at the moment! 😊
lol I'm in that same boat I'm all about the gathering and building.
I'm dreadful at getting back into an past game again as well unless I play on an alt for a bit.
It's at least great to hear they have lowered taxes a bit. I do hope that kind of thinking carried over into other elements of the game to make them more player friendly.
Yay I'm not alone! My partner thinks I'm crazy every time I do it. "Just play your old character, it'll come back!" ... yeah, it'll come back, after a few hours and a headache. 👀
Yeah, they've lowered taxes, added a bunch of quality of life, it feels like what it should've been at launch. At the end of September, the game will have been out for a whole year. I hope they choose the occasion to release some new stuff. (and hopefully not break everything in the process)
I really like the setting and the overall look and feel. Too bad it did not met the (really high) expectations of the players.
For me it was too much PvP I think.
The PvP didn't really bother me — I just didn't take part in it. xD It met my expectations perfectly, and I think that Amazon really had a gem on their hands that could've been great... but they futzed around far too much and couldn't resolve bugs and had to keep turning off core mechanics of the game to fix things that were being reported all the way back in Alpha.
I think if it wasn't for that and they had the chance to actually work on the game instead of fixing it over and over for a whole year, it would've been a real winner.
Welcome back! I am glad you're having a better experience with the game, it definitely had a rough launch that left many players with a bad taste. I hope you manage to get some rewards from the event and find your new social circle. Good luck!
I managed to convince my partner to give it a try again. xD Now I need the rest of our group, haha.
I'm hoping that New World does something for their first year anniversary next month and maybe get some people back.
I've always wanted to play it even if people say it's dead, as a MMORPG lover myself. Unfortunately my processor is not enough, although soon I will make a change and it is very possible that I will buy it just to try it.
From what I have seen in many communities there are people who left it because of bugs, others because there was no one left.
It's not really dead per se, but when you consider when it first launched a million people were fighting to log in and play the game and now there's maybe a peak of 30,000... that's a pretty significant fall.
It doesn't seem dead though when you're playing. The servers have been merged so there are plenty of people around, and the servers never held more than 2500 people at a time anyway... which was where a lot of the population issues stemmed from. People were expecting a proper MMO with hundreds of thousands of people in-game, I know that's what I was expecting. Instead there are tiny servers of only 2000 people.
I don't think the game is disappearing any time soon; they're still updating it and adding things! 🙂
This caught my interest, when I got my new PC I am going to try it out.
It's a pretty good game, now that most of the bugs have been ironed out. 🙂 Hopefully you enjoy it!
I hope so too! (^_^)
mannnnnnnn. I kinda understand... but maaaan.
It's sad when peoples starts losing interest in such a fantastic game for bugs. But its a good news that this game has less bugs now.
I heard similar things about Cyberpunk also although they've fixed a lot of bugs till now.
Normally bugs don't bother me. But in this case, it was affecting core mechanics of the game and after they turned the trading post off for the third time, I just threw my arms up and left.
I had no issue with Cyberpunk. 😅 That game caught a lot of flack for nothing, in my opinion. The only issue it had was that the devs tried to force it onto lower-generation consoles instead of focussing on current-gen and PC, and that was what caught the hellfire.