Across The Desert By Track And Shrine: Notes On New World's Brimstone Sands.

Belghast put up a long, post today, detailing some of the major ways New World has changed since its fall from grace last year. He knows the game far better than I do, having not only engaged extensively with the previous endgame mechanics that I completely ignored, but also having levelled to sixty under both the old and new regimes, so I don't plan on elaborating on anything he's covered.

I did, however, already have a vague plan to post a bullet point list of a few things specific to Brimstone Sands that I'd noticed since I came back to the game, things that seemed like improvements to me. I even went to the trouble of jotting down a few notes, so rather than waste them, here they are.

• Brimstone Sands Is New World's First Expansion
  

It's not been billed as one and Amazon haven't taken any money for it but after a week playing it I can't see it as anything less. To be specific, it reminds me surprisingly strongly of the kind of expansion I'm used to from EverQuest II. 

There's a central questline that leads you through the new zone, which feels like it could be about the size of the three or four EQII zones that make up the average expansion these days. There's the new hub city, the new mob models, the new crafting materials and recipes, and the wealth of upgrades that almost immediately invalidate what you came in wearing. It all feels very familiar.

My first Legendary weapon. Shame I don't know how to use it.

It feels like it's going to be about the same length, too, at least as far as the storyline goes. I've been following the main questline pretty slavishly and so far I've opened just over half the zone. I'm guessing that means I'm about halfway through but I haven't looked ahead to check. 

It might be a bit less. So far I've had six Legendary weapons from quest rewards. I'm assuming all fifteen types are coming - it would be a bit unfair if anyone got right to the end of the chain and found their weapon had been left out.Of course, they may not be distributed evenly. I'm pretty sure I got at least one from a side quest. Either way, there's plenty still left to do.

• They Don't Call It The Empty Quarter For Nothing.
  

The changes to fast travel that make it almost as easy to teleport around Aeternum as it used to be in Tyria, before ArenaNet decided they'd rather people used mounts, presumably because you can't sell skins for waypoints. This morning I was jogging across the dunes on my way to a quest objective, when I decided to take a detour to open a Spirit Shrine, the game's version of a waypoint. When I got there, I could see another Shrine so close by I was able to open it as I ran back without taking a detour. 

There's no shortage of jump-offs, then, but the problem hasn't only been one of availability. (Or cost, for that matter, another non-issue now it's been reduced to almost nothing.) Part of the difficulty with Shrines has always been ease of access - or rather lack of it. Travel doesn't really feel all that instant if you have to fight your way through hordes of wolves to get to the bus stop. Too much of my time in New World has been spent either fighting or running away from endless guards, undead and wildlife, all of which seemed hell-bent on chasing down and killing anything in a hundred meter radius. It certainly put me off using the Shrines that weren't right on the roadways, which hardly any ever were.

Got the place to myself again, I see.

In Brimstone Sands you can hike for miles across the desert trails without coming into aggro range of so much as a single scorpion. Mob density throughout is exceptionally light. If you go off-track and head out into the scrubland you'll be very unlucky to meet much more than the odd jackal. Even when you start poking around the many ruins and collonades that litter the landscape, you'll find their forgotten treasures largely unguarded.

It makes exploring a genuine pleasure. I have to make a detour when I want to kill something, which makes me feel like I have agency, rather than as though I'm only in the gameworld on sufference. One can only hope for a similar sanity pass across the rest of Aeternum.

• Sneaky Sneaky Dodgy Guardy
  

Whereas the vast tracts you need to cross to get to quest locations are largely devoid of annoying interruptions, the larger temples, crypts and complexes that form your primary loci of interest very definitely are not. They're well-guarded and daunting to explore, as they should be.

Let's see any of 'em catch me up here!

That doesn't mean you have to hack your way through a score of mobs to get to every checkpoint. I mean, you can, if that's your thing, but if you want to play it smart there's often a sneaky approach that'll get you to your quest objective without a weapon being drawn.

I've had as much fun working out covert routes to glyphs and chests, sneaking behind pillars, climbing up broken walls and shinning along aquaducts as I've had going full berserker on the sentries on gate duty. It adds a welcome degree of puzzle gameplay to even out all that combat and I find it just plain fun.

• You Call Them "Jumping Puzzles", I Call Them "Vistas"

I saw a certain degree of nervousness expressed in some quarters over Amazon Games' stated intention to add a little variety to questing in the form of "Jumping Puzzles". I suppose people were imagining something along the lines of the often challenging set-piece content in other games, for example Guild Wars 2. 

I've taken several quests so far that required me to climb to the top of something to open a box or read a glyph but thankfully none of them have been any more difficult than an average vista in GW2. Easier, really, since New World comes with a degree of automated parkour baked in., "Climbing" is mostly a case of positioning your character and letting the game engine do the rest. 

Getting up here was easy enough. It's getting down that's the problem.

As for jumping, if you don't quite make it across a gap, your character will often grab on to something and haul themselves up rather than plummet to their death. It turns what could have been a stressful, frustrating experience into something of a jolly romp, something which is beginning to sound like a fair description of New World itself.

• A Busy Map Is A Happy Map
  

As has been widely reported, New World's population, having bottomed out at around 1% of its former peak, has rebounded vigorously of late. The addition of Fresh Start servers have taken concurrency back into six figures for the first time in a long while.

The starting regions of those new servers must be heaving but where I'm playing the focus seems to be very much on Brimstone Sands. New Corsica, the full-service capital of the zone feels lively as a busy city should but even in the far-flung corners of the parched desert you can't go more than a few yards without crossing paths with another adventurer.

Thanks! I can take it from here!

As I discovered many years ago, when mmorpg designers began to move away from individual ownership towards a more collectivist approach, other players doing the same quest as you are always welcome. There's no longer any need to party up, although you can if you want to be sociable. Either way, you can fight side by side as you push forward through the ruins or follow in the slipstream of someone more powerful as they blaze a path towards your mutual objective. I like to take it in turns, leapfrogging from mob to mob, allowing  each player to kill half as many mobs as they would alone, while moving considerably faster towards the goal.

• Risk vs Reward... But Mostly Reward.

I'm not a big fan of risk vs reward. I like the reward part well enough. I'm just not so fond of the risk. 

In Brimstone Sands, the balance seems to have tipped very much in my favor. There's treasure everywhere. Epic items drop from jackals and scorpions at a rate that seems much more generous than I remember from other parts of the game and as for chests, their ever-repleneshing contents remind me of EQII's paradoxical pandas, the ones who boast of never leaving their homeland and yet somehow manage to find an  infinite supply of powerful gear to give away to anyone who wants it.

As for quest rewards, in addition to the aforementioned Legendary weapons there's a torrent of mats needed for their upgrades plus a steady trickle of the sought-after gypsum orbs used to craft yet more epics. My only real issue is that I don't yet fully understand how those systems work. When I've done my research, though, I should have plenty of resources to put my learning into practice right away.

• Brimstone Sands: More To See Than Just Sand!
  

This might be the biggest surprise of all. I've seen a lot of desert zones in mmorpgs and while I like them well enough, I wouldn't claim they're the most diverse of environments. Brimstone Sands makes a strong case for variety, while somehow managing to stay consistent with its theme.

It does help that one of the big threats in the region turns out to be the Angry Earth, Aeternum's druidic/elemental race. Everywhere the Angry Earth go, flowers bloom, something that seems to hold true as much in the arid desert as in the temperate zones from which they come.

Yep. Still in the desert.

Oases add a burst of welcome color but the real variety comes from the built environment. Graeco-Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids battle for attention with flickering science-fantasy engines straight out of the pulps. Aeternum has always offered a grab-bag of architectural styles but here the range extends well beyond the historical and into the phantasmal.

The natural world more than holds its own, creatively. Blistering pools of acid hiss and bubble, sending out clouds of bilious, olive mists. Wind-carved spires of sandstone stretch upwards from the sand like the deformed fingers of giants. And then there's the sky. The endless, sweeping, overwhelming desert sky, roseate at dawn, glaring at midday, subtle pastels at sunset, shimmering starfields by night. I do love me a good skybox.

I'm sure there's much more I haven't yet discovered. Brimstone Sands is deep with content and all of New World these days is a cornucopia of entertainment. As Belghast puts it "What You Know about New World is Wrong". 

Unless, of course, what you know is that New World's a very good mmorpg. In my opinion it always has been but now I think it's better than ever. Who said there are no second acts in mmos?