Logging in almost as soon as the game became playable on Steam, I set myself the goal of getting to Level 10 and I'd have made it, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky other players. It may not be a free-for-all PvP game any more but I'd rather fight players than lag any day.
It was fine when I started. A bit choppy in the really busy spots but generally very playable. By the time I was closing in on Level 10 about three hours later, though, my screen was a slideshow and the game was unplayable.
As well as the real world location of your server, you also have to pick an in-game starting location. I wasn't expecting that. There are three choices: Cruel Vista, Deadman's Anchor and Cascade Harbor but nothing to tell you the difference between them.
It's an important decision because you can only make characters on one server in each location. There's a warning about it in case you planned to play with friends. I imagine the choice sets PvP factions in the way you had to choose between Albion, Hibernia and Midgard in Dark Age of Camelot. I always liked that set-up.
Since I didn't know anything about any of them and since I'll only be here for a week, I just went with the server at the top of the list, Leyroot (Cruel Vista). Once that decision was made, up came a cinematic with a rather good opening, the camera swooping down to street level from the rooftops to reveal an intimidating figure in ornate plate armor. Then the action moves to a sailing ship at sea and... cut!
My turn again. On to character creation
Options there are good, if limited. Two genders, plenty of hairstyles and skin tones, several faces, all the basics. None of the extreme body modding you get in imported MMOs, which suits me. I like playing around with sliders but I like not being tempted to even more. I wouldn't mind being able to change the color of my eyes, though.Character duly created, it was back to the cinematic, which, it turns out, had merely paused, not ended. The mini-movie continued, now with my character in the central role. A nice touch. She waited on deck, attentive, while someone explained the plot. Then a monster appeared and the screen went black.
At least it's traditional. And New World is turning out to be a lot more of a traditional MMORPG than many people seemed to think it was going to be. Or wanted it to. Not me, of course. The more old-school it cleaves, the better I like it.
The first few minutes couldn't be more familiar. As you struggle through the waves to shore the game tells you all the basics, like what keys to press to move (WASD - did you guess?) and hit things (Left Mouse Button. Yes, it's one of those).
There isn't a lot to learn but I still didn't like some of the choices I was given. Who uses "E" for Interact, ffs? So I changed the ones I didn't like, which you're free to do. Problem solved. Oh, except for "Hide UI", which for some inexplicable reason is hard-locked to Alt-H. I hate multiple key combos. Ah, well. Blogger problems. No-one cares about those.
Speaking of blogger problems, we're not allowed to say anything about previous alphas or betas or whatever they were, which, while not being anywhere near as frustrating as not being able to say anything about the game at all, is still annoying. All I'll say in conclusion about the opening few minutes of the game is hmm.... déjà vu. And bear in mind I wasn't even invited to the more recent test.
From then on, for as far as I got in my first session, the flow felt linear and quest-driven. Hardly surprising or unreasonable since at this stage it is mostly an extended tutorial. It definitely feels more like a traditional quest-driven MMORPG than an open-world survival game, even if much of what the quests are teaching you could be regarded as surivival mechanics.
I checked my settings anyway and found they were all defaulted to "High" except for the overall graphical quality, which for some reason was set to "Low". I know I have an ageing PC that barely qualified as mid-range when I bought it more than five years ago but still. Surely I can do better than that.
I flipped the rogue setting to match the others. Things looked a lot better after that and I didn't notice any deterioration in performance. That didn't come until later. There are two more quality levels above that so I imagine most people are seeing something even more spectacular than I am. I might experiment further, although everything looks pretty enough to be going on with on "High".
Town was bustling. It was here that I began to run into technical problems. I'd had to take an unexpected break for an hour to go cut up a large chunk of one of our trees that the gales had just brought down in my neighbor's garden. By the time I got back it was late-afternoon on the East Coast and the crowds were thick on the streets.
I went from NPC to NPC, learning how to use the bank and the crafting stations and generally being groomed to become a useful member of society. Talking to NPCs felt strange. None of them spoke out loud, which did seem odd in a game this slick and polished. Maybe that's why they need another year, to record all the voiceovers.
I'm so used to voice acting in MMORPGs now it's jarring to find it isn't there. It wouldn't matter so much if the text was worth reading, I guess. Don't I always say I can do the voices better in my head? It's not as though the quest dialog is bad, not by any means, It's competently written, grammatically correct and the NPCs are keen to talk about matters that feel like they ought be intriguing and mysterious. It just feels a little flat and unconvincing. Decent voice-acting would probably cover that.
But then, I 've said the very same about the quest writing in Elder Scrolls Online, which many people think is some of the best in the genre, so what do I know? And quest text is one of my little things. I'm not sure most people would either notice or care. How many players even read the quest text to begin with?
For those who do, and who feel strongly about it, there's a feedback survey you can opt to take. It pops up after you close the game. Most of it is rankings. I gave nearly everything 80%or better because I really like the game.
They also ask for suggestions to make the game better and I said I thought the NPCs needed more flavor. My only other observation was that the survey asked too many questions that couldn't reasonably be answered after one session. If that's the worst I can come up with the game must be doing pretty much everything right.
This is a first impressions piece, though, and you don't have to get all that far or play for very long to have some of those. Mine are extremely positive. I like New World a lot. At the risk of breaking that earlier NDA I'll confirm I always did. It doesn't do anything you won't have seen before but everything it does, it does well. It's solid, entertaining, accessible and polished. What more do you want?
I'm very curious to see what else Amazon thinks needs to be added before launch that's going to take them a whole year. I'm pretty sure plenty of supposedly AAA MMORPGs have gone to market in a less finished state than this. I wonder if it's perfectionism or professionalism that lies behind the delay.
I guess we'll find out a year from now. I don't think they'll miss another launch date.
I sure hope not. I want to play.
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I'm glad you added the bit toward the end that said you loved it a lot, because that wasn't the impression I was getting up to then. I mentioned on Bel's blog that I'm looking for a game that would pull me away from EQ, FFXIV and DCUO for at least a year, but I'm not convinced yet.
ReplyDeleteThis did get me thinking about how much I would like a Gloomhaven MMO, though.
Yeah, the problem is, when I say things feel very "familiar" or "traditional" or what I was expecting, it can sound as though I'm disappointed, whereas, more often than not, familiarity is what i'm looking for in entertainment. New World is, on paper, not at all the sort of MMO I would expect to enjoy but from the first time I played it alpha I had a great time.
DeleteIt manages to include the fun things about survival MMOs but leave out all the irritating bits, I think. I'm not entirely sure how adding a bunch of repeatable PvE "quests" really turns it into a PvE MMORPG but it doesn't hurt. The game it most reminds me of at the moment is probably Black Desert although they're not that similar. It also looks likemit might have some similarities with Ashes of Creation, although that's a lot more obviously theme-parky. I certainly don't see it being any kind of competitor to heavily-plotted, story-driven PvE games like ESO, let alone a true theme park like FFXIV.
I'm certainly not looking at it as a main game but I think it will be a good drop-in for a few hours here and there fairly consistently. The addition of personal housing certainly should give me a sense of ownership, something the previous version only gave if you participated in the Company wars.
I was in an early alpha in the "PvP Sandbox" days. Apparently that did poorly enough that they ended all alphas for several months and then came back saying "PvP is now a side thing, but PvE and quests are where it's at!"
ReplyDeleteBel's and now your descriptions of how it is now are different enough from when I was "testing" as to sound like a completely different game, that simply happens to share the graphics and UI.
I got a Steam code for the preview this morning. I didn't really care for it before, but perhaps the different play style it's got now will be more to my liking, so I'm thinking I'll install it tonight and see what I think.
The thing is, that alpha you were in was the same one I was in and to my eye, this new PvE version is really similar to that original PvP version. I really can't see *that* much difference - in gameplay - to what I was doing first time around.
DeleteI think that's because in all the time I played the PvP version, which was a fair number of hours over most of a year, I never really saw any PvP. I think I had one actual fight the whole time. I barely saw anyone outside of a safe zone and when I did we kept well clear of each other. I know there was organized PvP going on because there were the messages about things changing hands but it might as well have been off in an instance somewhere for all I knew about it.
The gameplay loop seems scarcely to have changed. It's gathering, crafting and killing mobs to get to chests they're guarding. I would obviously need to play a lot longer to see if they've added a load more stuff on top, which they're pretty much going to have to do if they're going to hold a PvE audience. Fundementally, though, it still feels like the same game I played a couple of years ago.
Wow, your impressions are so different from mine. I played it last night for the first time, with my wife, and we were both so incredibly disappointed in how bad the game was. We're both looking for something new after 4.5 years in Black Desert and had high hopes this would be it - but it's uninstalled already.
ReplyDeleteMost notable, and I'll start with my conclusions: all the strengths of Black Desert are New World's weaknesses.
The world: graphically it looks *terrible* (IMO, of course): the world looks on par with a Korean MMO from 10 years ago. It's well-made, but the level of detail is so low (in comparison to BDO, of course). I had honestly forgotten there are games that exist outside student projects that looked this basic and empty - mobile MMOs have a higher asset count than New World.
The characters were atrocious: they genuinely looked like a student project. Character creation gave me flashbacks to Secret World (I loved Secret World, for years, but the characters and their animations were dreadful, this was one of the reasons for its initial failure). Character animations looked they'd been taken from an off-the-shelf programme like Mixamo, not made by hand - and very definitely not motion-captured, unlike, say, BDO. So low-rent...
Combat was *poor*: it was everything bad about ESO (slow, unresponsive, easily cheeseable) taken to the extreme - forget about APM, you could reasonably talk of actions per hour for NW combat. Again, felt like a student project that had taken the default choices of whatever commercial engine they were using (it's not Unreal, that's for sure). Animations of the combat were equally poor: particle effects? What particle effects?
It *felt*, although I didn't get to experience it, that the things BDO is weak in - meaningful social and group activities - New World had right. The UI (let's not talk about that: it's original-Skyrim-without-mods bad) seemed to indicate a lot of meaningful things I could contribute to, later on. Crafting looked deep and engaging too - although the lack of weight limit (also a BDO weakness), and the lack of readily available storage (*not* a BDO weakness) meant I had to stop the fun bit (gathering) after about 15 mins. Or drop everything, because there are no NPC vendors - I was actually penalised (in terms of time wasted and opportunity cost) for gathering.
I went ranting back to my guild in BDO about how poor New World was, and someone reasonably pointed out that 'someone coming from BDO might find the new game is weak in the things BDO is strong in' - but when the weakness is the core game play loop (the character, the animations of the character and the combat), I think it's more than that.
I liked the questing, and the fact that's new since May is a good sign that the game might be salvageable, except for the fact that character models and combat mechanics tend to be harcoded into the engine.
It felt, in hindsight, like the New World devs had looked at games like Destiny and Destiny 2 and Anthem and said 'sure they're smooth, but they're shallow and empty', and had focussed on not being shallow and empty - but forgotten to make it smooth in the first place. Even Funcom wouldn't publish something this weak.
(And yet: I've read your praises of it for months now, so I know there's something there that I cannot see).
The comparisons with BDO are interesting in that I definitely felt a strong similarity between the two games, although it's more as though they're part of the same sub-genre than they're exact matches. On the graphics, I wonder what it is we're each seeing. At one point I was wandering around one of the villages remembering when BDO first came out and everyone, myself included, was so impressed with the quasi-realistic representation of medieval architecture and street planning... and looking at the New World village, thinking "wow, we've really come a long way since then - this is so much more convincingly "realistic" ". And my rig can barely run the game on "High" - there are two graphic settings above that!
DeleteAs for the combat, I'm not one to judge because I have difficulty with all of these action systems, but only today Tyler at MassivelyOP was praising the combat through the roof! He said "what really makes this game shine is the combat. ... this is genuinely an evolution over what’s come before. New World‘s combat is as far above other “action combat” games as they are above tab target titles... New World could well become the new gold standard for MMO combat."
I mean, there are differences of opinion but this is like people seeing and playing completely different games!
Also, on the topic of the engine, which is Amazon's own, I believe, while I was in game someone asked in Help if other people were finding it sluggish and a whole bunch of people replied saying it was about the best they'd ever seen. I'm wondering if New World is going to be one of those games, like Vanguard, which looked and played perfectly on some PCs and barely ran at all on others?
I'm cautiously optimistic, although it'd have to be a pretty strong contender to pull me away from GW2.
ReplyDeleteStill, I worry that Amazon, despite its vast resources, will do a Google, and pull the plug on the project far too soon. An MMO is a long-term project; will the folks holding the purse strings at Amazon be ok with keeping the game running for 5 or more years?
Depends if it makes money, I would guess. Although one of the reasons they're supposedly making it is to promote their proprietary game engine, so that would be another motivation to keep it running.
DeleteYou'd think that with Amazon behind it --and the associated access to an infinite number of AWS servers-- that the framerate would be better. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteHow many of them begion with your character travelling somewhere then being attacked and waking up alone and in rags on a beach? Is it all of them?
Boy, Age of Conan's theme music just kicked in. Although if you'd have ended up in a dungeon like in ESO or the Hobbit/Man starting area of LOTRO, I'd not have been surprised either.
I thought all frame rate issues were client-based? I blame all slide-shows on my elderly hardware although I suppose optimization comes into it.
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