New World’s PvP quests (or, for the unfamiliar, “player vs. player”) tend to lead players of different factions to the same area, so when our journals told my group member and I to go mine some ore in a valley with only one passageway, we immediately grew nervous. We crouched towards the entrance and, seeing no one deeper inside, made our way in. As we got to mining, a shot whizzed past us. We turned around and returned fire, seeing our attackers trying to close the ground between us. What ensued was a minutes-long ranged fight, both sides taking turns poking their heads out to fire off a round out of their single-shot muskets. After a few good minutes we had peppered the enemy faction members down to a point where they decided to retreat. We got back to mining and before long made it out with our haul and our lives.
Every now and then New World creates these tense moments for players, putting them in situations where sweating is all but inevitable. More often than not, however, Amazon’s new MMO seems content with offering the same few activities on repeat with little to no variation in their presentation. While some level of this is to be expected with any MMO, New World seems to suffer from them at an enhanced rate. It’s especially disappointing because when New World shines, it manages to create a striking experience that I’m hopeful will be recreated in future games.
For a game called “New World,” there’s not that many original concepts here. Every gameplay element seems to be borrowed from somewhere else. The easiest example to point to is the combat system, which feels like somebody read about “soulslikes” and tried to create one without actually playing one. There’s your swinging weapons, some magic as well as bows and muskets. For a singleplayer game, the system is pretty basic. But for an MMO, the real time combat felt novel and interesting enough to keep me wanting to learn new abilities. There wasn’t a time when fighting either enemies or players where my equipment felt clunky or out of place.
At the same time, I never felt like I learned an enemy’s pattern while fighting them. It always seemed easier to tank an enemy’s hit rather than dodge or block them, so that I could get off a few more swings and end the fight sooner. Without a good stagger or Iframes systems, encounters typically boil down to standing next to an enemy while you both deal damage to each other.
Outside of combat, the game’s main activity is gathering and crafting. There’s an assortment of different skills in each category, with higher levels allowing players to gather better materials or craft better items. While this system in itself isn’t revolutionary, it does provide something a bit unique to MMOs: something to do while you walk. Quests in New World will send you across the map to accomplish some fetch or culling quest and while these aren’t particularly interesting, walking to them often is.
It’s easy to set off towards a quest and end up with a full inventory of gathered materials on your way there. With a leveling system similar to RuneScape, it’s nearly always worth it to mine the iron vein or chop the particularly large tree on your way to a quest. I fell into a sort of rhythm, where I would take all the quests possible in a town and then head out and gather along my way. Back in town, I would turn in all of my quests for actual xp, then go do my rounds at crafting stations to level individual skills.
While this rhythm was fun for a while, there was no variation to it when I got to higher levels. Eventually you just start logging a higher level wood to refine higher level timber to craft a higher level axe, ad infinitum. I’m a big fan of games where the numbers just go up and I get to feel good about that, but I like them a lot more when they ask me to figure out a new way to increase the integers every now and then.