Lifting The Veil On New World's Halloween Holiday

Halloween, as I'm sure I must have mentioned many times, is not my favorite holiday. Just calling it a "holiday" seems weird. No-one gets time off from work to celebrate, do they, except maybe witches and warlocks. Except isn't it their busiest work day?

I guess we could do with a new word for these sorts of quasi-historical affairs that have been hijacked by the manufacturers of cheap plastic tat. Festival, celebration, plain old event... none of the regular labels quite fit any more.

Where I come from, Halloween didn't really become much of holiday (I'm sticking with that for now.) until I was an adult out of college, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say I never saw anyone celebrate it until then. It certainly existed before that as a cultural moment, not just an archaic throwback. There was a xenophobic attempt to deny it as an American import following the success of E.T., but that movie didn't even introduce trick or treating to these shores, let alone the rest of it.

I had heard of Halloween before I grew up. I think I first came across the concept in an Agatha Christie novel I read when I was in my early teens (I forget which one but it was written in the 1950 or '60s.) and I vaguely remember someone in my primary class having a Halloween party, to which I don't believe I went. I just didn't know it as anything anyone paid much mind.

When I was a child, it was mostly our local holiday, Guy Fawkes Day that was an absolutely huge deal around that time of year. Second only to Christmas in anticipation and excitement and falling on November 5th as it does, it tended to eclipse Halloween to the point of invisibility. Over the decades, the two adjacent celebrations seem to have equalled out to a large degree, with Halloween taking over as the smaller, more personal option, all parties and kids out with their families after dark, while the myriad back garden bonfires of my childhood have retreated to municipal parks and sports grounds for organized displays, taking with them most of the intimacy with danger that made bonfire night so thrilling in the first place.

Elsewhere, Halloween rules unchallenged and supreme. Every mmorpg has to have its own version, often the biggest in-game holiday of the year, almost always at least the second-biggest, after whatever they call Christmas in imagineland.

I've done most of them to death by now, EverQuest II's "Nights of the Dead" and Guild Wars 2's "Shadow of the Mad King" especially. I'm not saying I no longer have any interest in them at all but I certainly don't feel any stirring desire to log in and run through the card all over again.

I'm always up for a new take on the old themes, though, so when I logged into New World and saw the orange, autumn leaves, drifted into piles in all the corners of the town, along with the inevitable, obligatory carved pumpkins carefully placed in prominent positions, I knew I'd have to take a closer look. Then Tyler Edwards dropped by the comments to let me know there was a Halloween World Boss and people were zerging it, which put the witch's cap on things for me.

I logged in for an hour last night to figure out how things might work in Nightveil Hallow. I was quite optimistic. Amazon Games seem to have a good handle on how to do seasonal and holiday events. The last couple I've visited have been well-designed - fun to play and rewarding as well.

This one appears to buck the genre trend in that it's relatively small and compact. Unless I've missed something, it consists of a single, introductory quest, which isn't even mandatory, and the aforementioned World Boss, the demonic "Baalphazu, Marquis of Terror".

Baalphazu spawns, repeatedly and quickly if last night is anything to go by, in any one of half a dozen mid-high level zones, Brightwood, Ebonscale Reach, Weaver's Fren, Great Cleave, Edengrove, and Mourningdale. I only saw him in Ebonscale, where he's confined to a specific, partly enclosed area. I imagine it's much the same in every zone where he appears, making the fight quite localized and unlikely to disturb people going about their regular business.

This guide recommends grouping up and people were forming parties in general chat but there's no requirement to do so. I picked up the quest from Salvatore, standing next to the giant, bubbling green cauldron in town, then watched the map until I saw the icon appear to say Baalphazu had landed.

It took me a while to get to him. Fast travel is trivially cheap now but the locations are still fixed and not always convenient to where you need to be in a hurry. The fight lasts a few minutes, though, so there's time to get there before it's all over. 

My first time, there weren't that many people. Those who were there seemed nervous to begin but after a bit we got started on the supporting cast, pumpkinites of various kinds and strengths. Killing a bunch of those seemed to agravate their Lord, who materialised in the center of the clearing and launched into whoever was closest.

The fight was a bit of a blur. I was trying to take screenshots - always a mistake - and as a melee character I had no option but to get in close. I didn't actually die but I had to retreat out of range far more often than I closed in to attack, to the point that when the boss finally fell I got no credit.

I wasn't bothered. It was just a recce to see how things worked. The next time Baalphazu arrived I was much more aware of his attacks and the need to dodge them but more importantly someone was putting out an impressive amount of AE healing, meaning I didn't have to rely on my health potions and their lengthy cooldowns.

I wouldn't say the fight was fun, exactly. It was a typical world boss zerg battle - a couple of dozen players in a scrum at the feet of a giant creature you could barely see for the light show. I like those kinds of fights so it suited me. It lasted about eight minutes, something I can say with a certain precision because it just so happened I got the ten minute warning from GeForce Now just after it began. 

It certainly added another layer of tension, knowing I was going to be forcibly excluded from the server when the on-screen timer reached zero. Fortunately, we had our target on the ground with a couple of minutes to spare. I just had time to check that, this time, my quest had updated and then I was back at desktop.

I left it at that for the night but this morning I logged back in and did the hand-in. The rewards were crafting patterns, gold and event currency, but also  - much to my surprise - all of the reputation required to buy anything in the event store. I was expecting to have to grind that rep out somehow, something that's been a longstanding feature of the game, including previous holiday events, but apparently rep grind is another thing we don't have to worry about in Aeternum any more.

I was also very surprised to see how affordable pretty much everything in the store is. It's true, you'd need to kill a lot of Baalphazus to earn the tokens to buy everything but after just the quest and one kill I already have enough to buy literally any one of the things on sale. 

There's some good stuff in there, too - GS 600 weapon patterns that would be a huge upgrade for me, for a start, plus some striking outfits and a house pet I'd quite like. Enough to persuade me to zerg the boss a few times more before the event ends, for sure, although it's true I never need much persuasion to join a zerg.

The real problem, as I found out when I went to make a hatchet from one of the patterns I got out of the loot chest, is that you need 150 skill in the relevant crafting discipline. Mine's nine. Bit of work to do there, then.

What I'll most likely do is buy the patterns I want and stash them. I did the same for the winter event. One thing I'm not short of in Aeternum is storage so hording is always an attractive option. Then, if I ever get back to playing regularly, I'll have a handy, moderately achievable goal to work towards in raising my crafting skills.

Whether I ever will play regularly again is a matter that's largely out of the hands of the Amazon Games development team. It's going to have a lot more to do with how much time I can find for any games at all. Free time seems to be at a ridiculous premium right now for someone who only works a couple of days a week but that's how its.

All in all, though, Nightveil Hallow looks like another good holiday event for New World and another solid Halloween effort for the genre. In other New World news, I also completed the access quest for the new zone, Brimstone Sands (It only takes a few minutes.) so that's where I'll be going next.

Read all about it here, I imagine, but not until next week. I'm taking the weekend off  blogging because, sadly, I'll be working instead.