Getting Into Brimstone Sands

I didn't find any time to play New World over the weekend but on Friday evening I braved the GeForce Now queues (250-350 people; 15-20 minutes.) to finish up the access quest for Brimstone Sands so I could at least take a look around the new zone. The access quest itself is very straightforward. or at least I found it so, although now I've read the walkthrough I realise I might just have been lucky.

When I logged my level 60 character in for the first time in months, she happened to be in Ebonscale Reach. All I had to do was look at the map to see if anyone had a quest there for me, go to the marker, speak to an NPC by the name of Soulwarden Tomas Kovalenko, have a brief chat with him and agree to do what he wanted. And then do it, obviously.

I didn't realise until I read a couple of guides this morning as I was prepping for this post that each of the three factions gets its own version of the quest. The questgiver is always the same person and he wants you to do exactly the same thing but for some inexplicable reason there are three of him, one in Ebonreach for the Marauders, another in Cleave's Point for the Covenant and a third in Mountainhome for the Syndicate.

All these settlements are in different zones but as far as I know none of them have any particular, permanent or lore connection with the factions concerned. Why it was deemed necessary to triplicate the quest and clone the questgiver beats me. It seems like a wholly unecessary complication. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something.

Whichever flag Tomas happens to be flying, all he wants you to do is come up with three Frostcliff Berries and two fish oils so you can brew something called a "Desert Cerate", which is a fancy name for sunscreen. Yep, it's that simple: you're going to be out in the sun a lot; you're going to need to moisturise.

This is a game set in a fantasy world, though. If you choose not to follow health and safety advice, don't expect to get away with a painful sunburn now and a potentially life-threatening melanoma thirty years down the line. If you cross into Brimstones Sands without applying the cerate you'll drop dead on the spot. 

Or so they tell me. I didn't test it. I did as I was told, followed the quest marker to the bushes so I could forage the berries, looked up how to get fish oil because it's been a long time (Salvage a fish.), crafted the potion at an alchemy sation and used it on myself. Job done.

It must be one heck of a sunscreen because you only have to apply it the one time. Once done, it lasts forever. I have to give the Amazon Games dev team props for resisting the temptation to make it a consumable you need to keep crafting and using. I think most mmorpgs I've played would have made you do exactly that but these days AG definitely seem to be all about making the player's life easier.

With that done, all that remains is to jog on out to the zone line. It's quite a hike, too. One of the oddest things, coming back to Aeternum after a time away, is the absence of any form of transport other than shanks's pony.  How many fantasy-based mmorpgs can you name that have no mounts whatsoever? 

It's an anomaly that's due to change at some point, although no-one's putting a date on it just yet. The news was broken by megastreamer Asmongold a couple of months back and confirmed a few weeks later by AG, all of this in videos and livestreams I have no intention of linking, let alone watching, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Not that anything's likely to happen soon. As has been pointed out, Guild Wars 2 took five years to add mounts, so it could be a while yet.

In the meanwhile, we do at least have that amazing 10% speed bonus for sticking to the roads. It makes such a difference, especially when there's a guardpost every couple of hundred meters with a couple of musket-wielding heavies just itching to take potshots at passers-by. It's a good thing I was wearing my padded jacket.(Irony doesn't always come over in print, does it?)

By the time I finally cleared the last sentry point and saw the great, ruined gateway leading to the sands loom up ahead of me, the moon was out and night had fallen. Everything was shaded an eerie, atmospheric blue, not least the vast sweep of dunes stretching all around.

My first and only plan was to explore the new region and find out what it had to offer me. I wanted to see the sights but I also wanted test the waters, to use a highly inappropriate metaphor. I wasn't convinced I'd be able to do anything in the zone other than die, most likely a lot. My character has the number 60 next to her name but in every other respect she's entirely unfit for endgame.

I haven't finished the main storyline nor spent a single second upgrading her gear. She's wearing a mix of whatever she's had as drops or quest rewards, together with some pieces from the Winter Convergence Festival. I can't remember her gear score exactly without logging in to check but it's bumping along near 500; the bare minimum for endgame is said to be 600 at least.

I was concerned that even the lowliest creature in the desert would see me as easy meat but a few encounters with wild dogs and giant scorpions soon convinced me I had nothing to worry about on that front. I even launched an unprovoked attack on a pair of bandits and beat them, albeit by an uncomfortably slim margin.

Somewhere along the barely visible track I picked up a quest to kill a lion with an unlikely predilection for poultry. The lion had an appropriate nickname: Featherbane. I do realise Aeternum isn't Earth and thereby operates under its own, idiosyncratic rules but it seems lions occupy a very different ecological niche in New World, somewhere between foxes and ferrets.

After some minor detours I located Featherbane's lair, a cave where he (Or it might have been she. I don't remember seeing a mane.) hangs out with a couple of lesser lions and a slew of peacocks with an insane respawn rate. If you want to farm feathers, this is your spot.

My first attempt ended with the minor lions dead and Featherbane close to joining them but I couldn't quite close the deal. I respawned at the nearby camp, all wagons and pennant flags, and ran back for a second try. I lost my way (Sand pretty much all looks the same.) so it took a while. When I finally found my way back into the lair there were three other people there already and Featherbane's corpse was being skinned by a fourth.

We all waited for our target to respawn, a phenomenon that for once is at least covered by the lore of the land. I passed the time by skinning peacocks and looting the big chest at the back of the cave, from which I took a significant upgrade to one of my items, making me feel quite optimistic about the secrets of the sands.

In no more than a few minutes Featherbane respawned and I just about had time to get a few whacks in with my hatchet before we sent him back to his very much non-eternal rest. After that it was off to do the hand-in and pick up another breadcrumb quest, one which it turned out I couldn't finish.

At the time, I thought it was just because I couldn't find the NPC, although I would have expected the location to be marked clearly on the map and on the overhead copmpass. Now that I've read the aforementioned walkthroughs and guides, I believe it may be a problem with that unfinished main storyline quest I mentioned earlier.

The quest I outlined is called Strider of the Sands and it is indeed mandatory, if you want to enter the zone without immediately burning to a crisp. All of the guides also make it clear you need to be max level - level 60, which I am.

As the more detailed of the guides explain, however, if you want to do more than just wander the desert, looting tombs like some kind of cut-price Indiana Jones, you also need to have completed the main sequence quest stage "A Selfless Nature", which opens up at level 58 and apparently involves a boss-like battle, for which you need a group.

I jacked in the main questline long before that. I was pissed that all the PR hype about making the thing soloable came to nothing. Quests that swerve from solo to group always tick me off but claiming it's going to be fixed then not fixing it ticks me off big time.

Consequently, unless something changes, I won't be following the storyline into Brimstone Sands. It's a pity, if only because New World's storyline is quite interesting. On the positive side, there seems to be plenty to do in the new zone without bothering with the plot - ruins to explore, chests to open, side quests to pick up and many new crafting and gathering opportunities to discover.

And lots and lots of screenshots to take. The desert is strikingly beautiful in places and suddenly terrifying in others. I was taking a nice landscape when a giant sandworm tore out of the ground not a hundred meters away. I think I'll be able to find enough to do without plodding through the plot.

One thing I can affirm for certain - New World remains as intensely playable as it ever was. Whatever its faults, it has a gameplay loop that just flat out works, or it does for me. As with Valdheim, I could easily lose hours, days, just wandering around, admiring the scenery and picking stuff up.

And until something better comes along, I plan on doing just that.