Spring Cleaning In Reverse

There's just one more day left for New World's Springtide festival, after which any event currency left unspent will melt away like the morning mist. So I thought I'd better get on and use mine, while I still had the chance. No sense leaving right to the last minute then forgetting about it.

Of course, there was the slight problem of what to buy with the fifty or so tokens I'd collected. I'd been logging in to grab them most days while the event was going on but I didn't really stop to ask myself why. Free stuff, y'know?

I did take a quick look at the holiday vendor right at the start and I could see there were a lot of armor skins, plenty of house items and some consumables but I didn't bother to look much further than that. I figured, when the time came, there'd be something I could buy. I mean, clothes and furniture are always welcome, right?

Well, the clothing was all pretty horrible. New World has some very odd aesthetics when it comes to appearance gear. I used to think it was because the good stuff was in the cash shop but now I think there just isn't much good stuff at all. 

The heavy armor looks like armor, which is just not how it's done in MMORPGs, while the medium and light look like someone had a lot of old curtains and sofa covers lying around and thought they might as well make something out of them.

Too-bright light, slightly scary plant.

The Spring Collection includes a Beekeeper's outfit, which appears to be historically accurate, more's the pity, plus a Springtide set that might do service for a touring company production of Julius Caesar.  There's an in-game Preview feature that lets you see what you'd look like wearing this stuff and I'd include some screenshots, only it uses a peculiar mechanic I couldn't get to grips with.

Instead of showing a separate image in a window, like almost every other game, New World shows you wherever you happened to be when you used it, only now you're wearing the item you selected. Since I had to be at the vendor to see the gear, that's where the Preview put me. The problem was, every time I tried, someone came and stood right on top of me, obviously also using the vendor.

What with that, the terrible lighting and no way I could find to move from the spot I was on, I pretty soon gave up trying to get a good shot. I couldn't even see the gear well enough to decide if I liked it or not. I had to tab out and look it up online to find out I didn't want it.

As well as the skins, you can buy patterns with which to make your own gear, the real thing, with stats. For ten tokens a pop you can get a pattern to make 700GS items, which would be great if I could wear them. Since I'd have to buy the expansion to be able to equip anything that high, I didn't bother.

Aerial Pinwheel. How does it stay up? Magic!

I did grab a few of last year's patterns, which make 600GS gear. Those were very much cheaper and most of my gear is well below 600, so it would be a decent upgrade. Of course, I'd need to be playing the game properly for that to matter but still. It could happen.

The consumables I didn't really look at. I'd been getting a ton of them from the daily gifts anyway and once again they weren't going to be much use if I wasn't out there fighting Corrupted and Lost and the rest of the crew. There were also a few one-off items but I didn't know what they were for and I couldn't imagine I'd ever find out so I struck them off the list, too.

And that just left housing items. Fortunately I love decorating so that was just fine with me. The only problem was going to be where to put them all.

I bought a big, four-poster bed and a chaise-longue, which were clearly going to take up a lot of space. There was a surprisingly wide range of lighting, wall and ceiling lights, table and standard lamps, more than one kind of each. I bought all of them. 

Naturally there were baskets of flowers. There were also a couple of oddities, like some large bags of "pigments" and a hovering device called a Pinwheel. I loaded up on those too.

I can't help thinking these would look better in a palace. Or a cat-house.

I think the only house items I didn't buy were one of the flower baskets and a banner. I thought the banner would be a wall hanging but my next-door neighbor in Mourningdale has something on their porch that I think might be one and it's actually a big pole with banner at the top and some flowers growing up it. It looks good. I wished I'd bought one once I saw it. might do one more round of the camps before the event ends tomorrow so I can get one for myself.

By the time I'd finished placing everything I could barely get up and down the stairs. My bedroom looks particularly cramped, even after I took out one of the beds that was already there.

I know I complained last time about the size of the rooms but it's not so much that - it's more that I seem to have acquired a hell of a lot of furniture for someone who hasn't actively played the game since a few months after launch. It's partly because Amazon keep giving house items away with the Prime Gaming deals but mostly because the one thing I keep coming back for are holiday events and New World seems to have those pretty regularly.

In an irritable report on a recent Q&A with the devs, MMO Bomb revealed that "Going forward, the focus will be less on Seasonal narrative content". At first I misunderstood that to mean less holiday content and I actually felt mildly relieved. It doesn't mean that, of course. It's not that kind of seasonal content they're talking about.

Flowers in barrel from this event. Other flowers... not sure.

Troy Blackburn at MMO Bomb also transmitted the apparent annoyance of the NW player-base with Amazon Games' constant harping on about the much-hyped "June Announcement". Even as a casual observer - and even more casual player - I have to agree that whatever it is they're keeping secret, it's going to have to be something truly spectacular now, just to justify the fuss they've been making over it.

Most of the speculation I've seen revolves around either a Console port or conversion to some sort of Free To Play business model, neither of which seems worth waiting months to announce. I guess either would potentially bring in a surge of new players, which seems to be one of the main expectations everyone has for the change, whatever it turns out to be, but plenty of other MMORPGs have either added a console client or gone F2P but none I remember ever chose to make a big secret of it like this.

If it's not that, though, I don't know what it might be, unless they're going to announce that Amazon's next big in-house video project is going to be a New World TV show. That would be a big deal and it would make a great setting for one, too. 

I doubt it's that, though. What I do think is that when we find out, pretty much everyone is going to be disappointed. I'll be happy to be proved wrong but I think it's a safe bet I won't be.

Failing some amazing development that none of us has even thought of, then, I expect my next visit to New World will be for whatever the holiday after Springtide might be. When it comes, I just hope there's something to get other than furniture. My character lives alone and she already has four beds...