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[New World] Where we ask the REAL questions! Like, "What is Launch?"
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They fell for the internet hype about open world pvp mmo's that never ever do well. Like dating back to mother fucking shadowbane pvp focussed mmos never seem to do well at all ever.
I've watched streams of this and it just feels like Age of Conan with less interesting combat and no horrifying finishers.
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Combat seems less janky overall but still needs significant improvement. I don't care for so many skills being tied to specific weapon types. It's one of the things that killed GW2 for me, though I'll reserve judgement until I get some time with it.
I've chosen to think of the game as Outward done by a big development studio. Janky blocking and combat rolling, some food and weapon crafting and a bunch of, "What's that over there?" exploration.
The sound design is nice. The three thousand campfires outside of the starting areas is not. They need to cull that shit.
I think I just want SOMEONE to make a good new mmo since the genre is SO dead right now. Nothing is on the horizon that I have any faith in.
The whole point of the delay is apparently to add content, so they've got time there. My concern is more about other parts of the system that are still super rough, if they don't actually go back and fix those I'm not sure actually having content will be enough to save it.
I don't think it speaks well of their current content if they are running a preview with "our pve content is just a place holder" like that's a major part of the game to still have in the place holder stage especially since this month was their original launch date.
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Generally, I'm finding the PvE experience extremely uninspired. The claim to allow for flexibility with three weapon types, but switching weapons during combat is all but impossible with the horrible stunlock system they have elected to use. For a PvP game this would make sense, since you want players to specialize but for a PvE game.... not so much. Having a total of three skills (that share a cooldown across weapons if you do manage to switch) also plays into the PvP design paradigm and also completely fails to be compelling for PvE. The quest design would have been called shallow in a game released 20 years ago; its unforgivable in a modern game. Even the MOB design is not particularly exciting. I'm pushing level 20 and have really only seen zombies, red glowy pirates, and animal "monsters". I keep thinking about the first days of beta with DAoC when about half the MOB types were a placeholder goblin and it still had more gameplay variety than this does now. Even the crafting options seem to have been designed to hold together a strategic PvP style backdrop, with dropping a remote camp to develop a forward base where you can respawn close to a fight being one of the very first things they teach you. Having said that, the combat system needs some major tuning as a whole. Really the way they have it set up is that there really are only two weapons in the game: hatchet and life staff. I think this could system could be fixed with only a few minor tweaks, but MMOs are complicated things and it might be as easy as one could imagine. Generally the combat system doesn't work right now either.
I think they need to really make a decision where they want this game to go: an niche PvP MMO that will not appeal to most players, or an uninspired PvE MMO that will not appeal to most players. Either way, this is not going to be a WOW-killer or even the Next Big Thing.
You hit the nail on the head. The game used to be just 100% PVP focused, but then at some point they decided that that's not going to bring in enough money, so they started tossing in more PVE things and reducing the overall focus on PVP. Now we're here, where the game just doesn't do either quite right.
They tried to pivot but didn't want to commit to it.
You have to be level 5 in engineering (if I recall right) before ammo unlocks, so just make a few bows or something.
Also, charcoal is made at the smelter, just go chop some wood. There's a charcoal button along the left side of the screen, because their crafting UI is really inconsistent.
Yea that one took me a while. "WHERE DO I GET CHARCOAL?!"
Oil seems hard to come by. Seems to only spawn in one specific area. It's SUPPOSED to spawn in any marshlands but it didn't seem to.
The combat is growing on me. It's still not great, but since I switched to sword/shield and slowed down, I'm starting to appreciate it more.
Quests are still awful. I've found a (very) few that weren't "go to the place, kill zombies, search chests" and while I appreciate the effort to have variety, those differences are somehow even worse. Things like collecting five random drops from a MOB that only spawns every 10 minutes - while competing with other players for the spawn, the kill, and the loot. Things like collecting five guaranteed drops from a competitive gathering node that only spawns every seventeen minutes (I timed it) while dealing with random MOB spawns nearby and being the first one to tap the node. These are problems that were solved 20 years ago, why does a modern game still have them?
The lore is actually not horrible, but they really have the Destiny problem. Good lore that no one every will see because it has no real effect on gameplay at all! Again, this is a problem that has been solved. Does the dev team actually play games??
The crafting system is actually pretty nice, but doesn't seem to have a reason for existing. I grinded to craft a full set of level 20 gear and then within 5 levels had replaced it all with better drops or quest rewards. Sitting at level 32 now and I've already gotten a couple of level 35 rewards that are ridiculously great. The jewelry crafting in particular is completely useless since easy quest rewards eclipse anything craftable.
I'm sticking with my initial assessment of "uninspired". There's a lot going on in this game that is really not bad! But it just doesn't tie together. It's like a movie with good writing, decent acting, great special effects, but awful direction.
They did lower the tax rates. Temporarily. At least until the War time slot was finished. Last I saw the tax rate was around 3% to 5% which still seems high to me. And I think they -finally- queued a Forge upgrade. But people really dislike them, even within the same faction.
The company I am part of worked very very hard to start a new War and our slot is 2PM on the 1st. As soon as the notice popped up, all the blokes from NOAH were sending frantic PMs to my company telling us how we had "stolen" "their" War, and how they were going to do everything they could to support the other guys.
My point is that the political aspect of the territorial control game is actually pretty well done. I didn't think having such limited access to PvP would be a good thing, but it makes the small amount of PvP in the game really matter a lot. I think they could tweak it a bit more to make the factions also be meaningful, but they still have a year to work out the kinks. Assuming, of course, that they don't water it down so that no one is offended or put out by it.
I really liked Warhamer: Age of Reckonings PVP
But anything open world and unrestricted tends to turn into giant deathballs.
Yeah, that game was great for pvp. Only problem was the latency issues that forced them to scale back some of the larger scale stuff. I'm really surprised nobody has stolen that brand of rvr.
Well, they basically stole it from DAoC and Camelot Unchained is a thing (sort of...but probably not) so...
And yes, WAR was amazing for PvP. It's the only PvP game I've ever gotten my wife to actually enjoy with me. I'd LOVE to see someone re-create that. If they did it with WH40K I'd be even more excited! Of course that will never happen, but hey, I can dream.
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Also, man the Book of Knowledge was awesome.
You might think I'm being facetious, but I'm not. Stick with me here for a minute....
The PvP missions are basically the same as the PvE quests. They are not intended to be compelling or even challenging content. They are intended to make the players go to a place and more-or-less just hang out there for several minutes. Kill 20 MOBs, collect 5 items from static spawn points. Takes about 10-15 minutes total but it forces the player to BE in that location for those 10-15 minutes. But, here's the thing: if you are in a specific location for a few minutes, in a faction-based game with PvP enabled, then suddenly you have a recipe for conflict. The "fun" of the quest is NOT from the quest itself, but rather created by the emergent gameplay of the PvP.
The interest or challenge in a PvE quest is created by the quest itself. Find a hidden thing; Discover some story hint; Fight a mechanically significant boss; Traverse a difficult terrain; Tell a compelling mini-story in the game world! The game systems are used to create a challenge or make the questlines interesting and fun. New World's "quests" lack any of that, because it just isn't in the game's DNA. The game was designed as a PvP game and it lacks any of the 'hooks' that a good (or even something that would be considered halfway decent) PvE quest can be built from. There isn't a Quest Engine. Instead, what they have is "go to a place and stay there for 10-15 minutes". The quests in this game could literally be "go stand in THIS spot for 10 minutes" and they would be no worse than they are now. (It might actually be an improvement, to be honest!)
What is missing is tension. If the game had full-time PvP, that would create the tension. But just tossing a bunch of player into a PvP free-for-all is not going to be fun for most folks, so you need to give them tools to work around the almost guaranteed furball that is going to happen. And, amazingly enough, the game actually has those, but you don't realize it until you need them, and then you go "hey, that's why the game does that!"
Let's see why the game is built from the ground up as a PvP experience:
I really only tried running PvP missions for a couple of hours last night and had more memorable and FUN experiences in that short time than the past five days combined!! I suffered zero deaths (from PvP - I still died plenty to MOBs) despite playing alongside (and in a few cases, against) enemy players. I met several people in-game that changed from faceless nameless "other players" into real people in about 90 seconds due to their actions and how they reacted. I could tell the story of the guy who tried to "train" non-flagged players and then died (and we all laughed). I could tell the epic battle that I accidentally got dragged into and how I barely escaped with 5% health. I could talk about the ganker who fought me to a hair's-breadth from death and then danced with me before giving me 100 gold for the fight. (I guess I was entertaining?) I could tell how I ran into that same ganker 10 minutes later in a completely different area and he waved at me without attacking (even though he clearly could have killed me multiple times). I could tell of the low level wannabe ganker that was camping a major storyline objective and boasting about it in chat... until a much higher level player (me) just happened to wander by. I could tell of the many players who would "accidentally" hit other players and then immediately back out of the fight. I could go on. I had more compelling fun gameplay experiences in the few hours I was flagged than literally days of PvE play. (EDIT: Yes, I know that many people have had really bad experiences with open-world PvP in the past, but I honestly think that MMO players as a whole have matured and PvP doesn't mean "kill everyone with a red name". Maybe I'm too optimisitic.)
I guess the TL;DR version is this - This game has PvP cooked-in at it's very basic core design, and the "pivot" to a PvE game just doesn't work within that framework. Either AGS has a completely different game design to replace this travesty (and we wont see that until next year) OR the current game is destined to fail miserably in the grey area between PvE and PvP and doing neither of them very well. Or they could, you know, actually make a PvP game.
There is a market for it, but it is a niche market. Mortal Online is a open-world sandbox, classless, first-person locked, Guild vs Guild, full loot PvP game with little in the way of PvE (apart from hunting mobs) and that game is getting a sequel. EVE Online is still going strong and while the jury is still out on Camelot Unchained and Crowfall the fact that both were fully funded (and then some) pretty damn fast still highlights that there is a hungry market out there.
But as I said, it is a niche market.
Your game needs to have more than just killing players. You don't need a robust PvE side, with dungeons and raids and quests and the like, but you do need plenty of other non-PvP activities for people to indulge in. These activities should link back to PvP, if tangentially. Gatherers collect resources (from Mobs, Nodes, etc) -> Crafters turn resources in to gear and items for PvPers -> PvPers conquer areas with resources for Gatherers to collect and/or protect the Gatherers. As a simplified example of the basic game loop you should be going for.
Mortal Online, while certainly by no means a perfect game, does the above very well. You want cavalry? Someone needs to find, capture and train mounts. Someone needs to collect the resources to make the equipment for the mounts. Someone needs to be able to make the equipment for the mounts. Someone needs to be trained to ride the mounts in to glorious battle. Full loot means Crafters are always busy and thus Gatherers are always busy and someone needs to be searching for new sources of resources or protecting the Gatherers. Which means Guilds will come in to conflict with each other which then drives the industry ever further.
Point is, everyone, whether they are actually killing players or not, should feel like they are contributing to the "war effort" or at least the Economy of the world in some fashion.
1) The PvP is sweet!
2) But you can totally avoid it until you're leveled up and ready to focus on it.
And how well they pull off #2 is what has always made me love DAoC. You have incentive to go to PvP zones while leveling (more XP in Darkness Falls and the Frontier), but you risk getting ganked as a tradeoff. You can totally just level in safe PvE zones, and often it's more efficient to do that. And if you do die in a PvP zone, all you lose is time. It's not sandboxey when viewed against your Shadowbanes and various survival PvP games like Ark. It's super sandboxey relative to instanced battlegrounds, but that's the other extreme of the spectrum.
People like to think MMO PvP is something more than a mosh pit where time invested results in victory but it really isn't. Doesn't mean it can't be fun.
Catering to "professional" gamers and PvP Guilds is a great way to absolutely shit up the game for everyone else.
The best things they did was:
a) make it super easy to find a battle
b) make death relatively meaningless
c) make getting back to a fight easy and
d) rewarding everyone for just having a big battle.
Where all these games fuck up is they try to reward the winner and punish the losers, when that's not the point. No one's playing a game to be punished, and quite frankly, if your game is fun to play, the battle is it's own reward. For example, in Planetside, the bigger the battle, the more experience everyone who was in the conflict zone got. The very best thing you could do was to have these massive battles where everyone was killing, getting killed, blowing shit up, and trying to capture a base. And at the end, it didn't really matter who won or loss...you could get a fuckload more experience for losing a hardfought battle, than winning an easy one. Way more. In fact, it was almost to your disadvantage to quickly rout an enemy. You wanted to fight over a base for 30 minutes. The sooner it was over, the lower everyone's rewards.
So there was an incentive to fight, die, and kill. Sure, you got individual experience, so if you performed better in a battle, you were rewarded more...but the net net was EVERYONE getting a massive reward for fighting.
That's what all these games miss. The make the punishment for losing, so people avoid engaging in combat. And with more rewards for winning, the balance is always going to end up tilting in one factions favor, then it'll slowly start choking the game.
I just don't get why these developer don't see how rewarding the action is what you want to champion, not rewarding or punishing the outcome.
Its for devs who aspire to create "virtual worlds" rather than eternal war. For that kind of game, yeah making people able yet afraid to kill each other would be the point, although that takes a bit more design than just handing all the advantages to the winners.
You can't create a PvP game if you're trying to model anything on "the real world" or even create a "virtual world".
Why? War sucks. War absolutely sucks. It's why, despite appearances, 99.999999% of humans avoid going to war at almost all cost.
Heck, even look at EVE. A vast majority of players spend a vast majority of their time avoiding conflict. No one is really eager to have their shit blown up, and wars only really break out when someone feels like they are either guaranteed at winning, pushed so far that they have nothing left to lose, or arrogant enough to believe the first point. Otherwise, large scale conflict, even in EVE is relatively sporadic. When it does break out, for a very short period of time it's magnificent. But those are very short flashes in an environment where people are otherwise doing their best to avoid conflict.
Well, it was massive. It was multiplayer. And it was online. And it did exactly what it advertised. Large-scale, open world conflicts. It felt like a Quake fest brawler on steroids because that's exactly what it needed to be to accomplish it's core mission.
Which brings us back to New World. They're in the middle of nowhere and need to make a choice. Either this is a living world with an evolving story and strong PvE content.
Or this is a PvP focused killfest where the only real reward is killing someone else.
Otherwise, it's just going to walk down the middle of the road, being terrible at both until Amazon decides to pull the plug.
I was originally interested when the game was a Guild vs Guild battle for territory and siege warfare.
Now? Far less interested. And for PvErs out there what’s on tap seems anemic. PvErs have plenty of other, very well established options.
I still have concerns about the PvE and PvP content...I am a PvE person and don't care about PvP at all, so my natural concern is the PvP will affect the PvE too much or there will be too little content.
But GW2 was also my fav MMO ever so it CAN work for me, just not sure if they will get it right here. But at least the early game of this I have quite enjoyed. We shall see...