A Whole New World Of Adventure

With the New World preview only lasting a week or so there doesn't seem much point in knuckling down and skilling up, although from what I can glean from the Help channel (the only one I have on) that's what everyone else is doing.

From what I've seen so far, crafting is much as I remember it, so I don't think I'm missing out by not spending every waking hour chopping, mining, tanning and weaving. Questing is another matter. There's a whole lot more of a quest infrastructure than there used to be and plenty of lore and backstory to go with it. You need to get your quest head on for this newly re-tooled PvE iteration of New World, or so it seems. You can't just go running off into the wilderness doing your own thing, any more.

People in Help this afternoon were advising against random exploration altogether. Quests tend to send you to specific places to loot particular chests or stashes and if you've already been poking around to see what you could find you'll have trouble getting quest credit for the same chests when you need it.

By the time I saw that advice it was a bit late for me. I was already exploring randomly. I didn't ignore it, though. I made a beeline for the nearest available ruined village so I could start opening chests I had no business opening. Screw you, quest guy! I'm damned if I'm going to let an NPC tell me what to do!

It wasn't quite as childish as that. What I was actually doing was seeing how far up the map I could get before something killed me. It had occurred to me when I logged in that if I wasn't going to settle down and treat the Preview as though it was the Live game I might be better off dropping the main quest line and going walkabout instead.

My random choice of starting location had placed me in the deep south, which explains the whole sub-tropical mangrove swamp thing. Back when I wasn't allowed to talk about it I was in a much more attractive area, all pine forests and lakes. Now that I can see the in-game map, I could roll another character in a more northerly location but then I'd end up doing the basic tutorial steps again and I'd rather not.

So I took to my heels and jogged along the wide path that runs along the shoreline, intending to weave my way slowly north, hitting as many settlements along the way as I could manage. I full expected to get eaten by a bear before I got very far at all but that's not how things turned out.

Very soon after I started I saw my first potential death threat: several extremely large alligators wallowing on a beach by the side of the roadway. I pulled up sharply and took a screenshot before targetting one to see what level it was. Level thirty.

I gave the 'gators a very wide berth and carried on. No sooner had I left them behind me than up ahead I saw the unmistakeable outline of a skeleton. An ambulatory skeleton, wearing armor and carrying  a bow.

There's no mistaking the intent here. You can forget all that initial guff about historical verisimilitude and a quasi-authentic real-world setting. We're squarely back in generic fantasy land and I couldn't be happier about that.

Once again I stopped for a photo-op. I saw several skeletons moving through the brushwood. They were glowing. I wanted to get close to see why they were glowing but I conned them and saw they were far to tough for me.  Best not.

Jogging around a corner I was momentarily stunned to see a gigantic stone structure marching out into the water ahead. The backstory has it that there have been many previous expeditions and many earlier attempts at settlements, all of which have failed. On the evidence they left behind, some of them must have done pretty well before they fell.

As I moved ever northwards the landscape and the flora began to change. I spotted some spectacular and disturbing fungi. I'd have taken samples but I'd neglected to craft myself a sickle and anyway they would have been well above my skill level. You can't just cut up any old plant in New World. You have to start small and work your way up.

Soon after that little pitstop I got that close-up opportunity with a glowing skeleton after all. Be careful what you wish for, isn't that what they say? There were a couple of them guarding a large stone gateway across the path. I could have gone around but where's the fun in that?

Fully expecting to die, I put my head down and sprinted past them. They were slow to react and before I took any damage I was showing them my back. Which one of them proceeded to fill with glowing arrows. I knew they were arrows because I could see one of them sticking out of my arm.

Surprisingly, the undead archer only knocked me down to half health before I was out of range. He didn't follow so I stopped and ate a ration, which magically removed all the damage done. Truly, we are in fantasyland.

If only it worked that way in real life, eh? Broken your leg? Never mind! Here, have a donut. You'll be better in no time!

One more quick stop to examine a glowing rock (Lodestone, way too high skill for me) and I came in sight of a settlement. I'd left my home region of First Light some time back. Now I was in Cutlass Keys. Also, as I realised when I checked the map, I'd been heading east, not north, for most of my run.

Cutlass Keys is an attractive enough town with a large and imposing church. The game calls all these settlements "hamlets", which suggests either the word  has a very different meaning in the U.S. or someone doesn't own a dictionary.

I didn't stop long. I re-oriented myself to be sure that, this time, I really was heading north and then I set off again. Leaving Cutlass Keys, the landscape took a definite turn for the familiar. I was pretty sure I began to recognize some landmarks from my previous life. There were windmills and fir trees and bullrushes. It felt, if not like coming home, then at least like not being too far away.

It was then that I saw the corruption. A dirty, smoky miasma across the water. The kind of  place any sesnible traveller would know to avoid. I ran at it, pushing through the bullrushes, wading through the mud. What else is an explorer to do?

Yeah, well, I found the answer to that one pretty quickly. Turn around and run back the way she came. There weren't any evil undead or demonic entities - those I could have fought. No, there was a big timer showing me my corruption resistance and it was ticking towards zero.

I didn't know what would happen if it reached the end and I didn't want to find out. I'm curious, not crazy.

On the other side of a timber-framed, open-sided, roofed bridge I came across signs of life. Or so I thought. A whole load of dead, stripped trees and some buildings I took to be a logging camp. Well, maybe it was, once.

I'd been exploring for a good while by then and my sword-arm was itching. I felt like killing something. Or unkilling something. We don't quite have the language for undead sorted yet, do we?

Thinking ahead for once, I set up camp on the edge of the clearing. That way, should it turn out I was in over my head, I at least wouldn't have to run all the way back from the Inn at First Light.

As it happened, I needn't have bothered. The undead farmers with their pitchforks were mere level nines and tens. One cook in a shack was eleven but he died just the same after a frenzied fight in close quarters.

With exquisite irony, the most dangerous moment occured when I'd sated my lust for slaughter and trotted back to camp for a rest. I'd no sooner settled down to let the warmth of my campfire hasten my recovery than a brute of an undead farmer tried to spear me between my ribs with his two-tine fork. I'd aggroed him on the run back and not even noticed.

My camp and the false sense of security it brought had nearly done for me but I dealt with the problem in the time-honored manner. I ran the hell away. The farmer gave up a ways down the road and stumped off back to his rotting crops. I abandoned my treacherous camp and jogged on.

Not far up the road came the next settlement, Windsward. I stopped there for a while to get my breath back. It was almost a picture-postcard village with a moss-covered stone bridge over a clean-water brook and an impressive statue in the village square. These liitle towns do nothing to create an impression of a wild and dangerous wilderness beset by ancient evil. They just make me wonder where the coach-park is and how many flavors of ice-cream the local store has to offer.

The sun was going down, filling the streets with a glow that made me wonder if the forest was on fire. If there's one thing New World has in abundance it's lens flare. I was starting to get tired but I thought I'd press on anyway.

As I left the village I got a warning telling me I'd neglected  to register at the inn. Cutlass Keys didn't give me one of those. I wonder why? I went back and spoke to the innkeeper but he told me if I registered with him I'd lose my registration back at First Light so I declined. As it transpired, that was a sound decision.

Outside the town I came across some peculiar hemispherical structures. Like much of the ruined and ancient architecture they looked somehow alien. It makes me wonder whether all of these lost, would-be colonizers were even human.

I took a selfie next to one and carried on. But not for long. As I followed the path I realized, too late, that some of the previous residents were still around. In undead form. Two skeletons set upon me. I had time to register their levels. They differed wildly. One was level nine, the other nineteen.

I thrashed about me wildly with my sword, expecting to die at any second, but to my considerable surprise it was the level nine who went down first. I turned to his higher-level companion and set about him too. I had him at half health when I died.

When you die in New World you have the option to wait for someone to revive you (fat chance), to revive at your camp site, should you have made one, to recall to your bind point in an Inn or to wake up at the nearest settlement. I chose the last, meaning I found myself standing in front of the innkeeper who'd wanted me to give up my residency in First Light. So much for his advice!

I'd done so well against the two skeletons, unprepared, I thought I'd go back out for a rematch with the survivor. Unfortunately, while my character might have been up to it, my computer wasn't. Things were already getting sluggish but the second fight was a jerky, stop-motion disaster. I could barely follow my opponent as he flickered about, far less hit him.

Dead once more, I decided to call it a day. Or a night. The moon was up, after all.

It then took the best part of ten minutes before I could open a web page or close the game. I don't know if this iteration of New World has a memory leak or whether it just has requirements that far outstrip my aging rig but either way playing for more than an hour pretty much stuns my machine into submission.

It makes me think I probably ought to be looking into some upgrades soon - it has been a few years, after all. Certainly, I'm going to need to do something about it before the game comes out, if I want to play it with reasonable facility. And I very definitely do want to play New World. The more I see, the more I like.

Next time I think I will roll a new character and start somewhere up north. I don't think my P.C. would forgive me if I tried to make the run again.