Just Like Starting Over: New World Aeternum X Once Human: The Way Of Winter

After yesterday's extended diversion it's time to play catch-up. Two of the bigger gaming stories of the week were the relaunch/rebranding of New World as New World Aeternum and a new season for Once Human. And as it happens I've played enough of both to have some first impressions, so here they are.

The first thing I want to say applies to both of them: these are two highly playable games that give me very little of that familiar disconnect we've all felt when coming back after a layoff. Granted, it hasn't been all that long since I last played either of them but the core gameplay loop and the functional mechanics of each is so clear and clean it's hard to imagine it would be much different, coming back after a much longer time away.

Then again, in both cases the latest updates do strongly encourage, if not mandate, a restart. It's always easier  if you come in at the beginning instead of halfway through.

While the gameplay in each may be extremely easy to pick back up, I very much cannot say the same for the look and feel in the case of one of the pair. I spent more time - considerably more time - fiddling with the settings in New World Aeternum than I did playing the game itself, trying to make it look like the game I remembered or even just a game I was willing to spend more than thirty seeconds in. 

Here we are at last!

At one point I was strongly tempted to log back into my old (Now legacy.) character to check if I was misremembering how uncluttered the screen used to look. I have a vision in my head of New World as a clean, virtual world experience, not a jabbering mess of disconnected words and images but maybe that was beta. Whatever and whenever it was, I'm pretty sure the game never looked as chaotic and disorganized as this.

Some of it is personal preference, of course. I have a very strong dislike of seeing names and numbers bobbing about on screen so my first act in many new games is to go into the settings and turn off almost everything that displays over players' heads - names, guilds, titles - all the cruft no-one but the person playing the character ought to give a toss about. 

Then I do the same for NPCs, stripping out all the on-screen identifiers unless removing them fundementally breaks gameplay. Ideally, I like to have all information appear on mouse-over or, failing that, on a click. I want to be the one who decides what displays when, not the developer. 

I also switch off all floating damage and healing numbers, on myself and on the mobs. I can see that information far less obtrusively elsewhere on the screen or I should be able to, if the designers have done their jobs.

It took me far, far longer to get rid of all that crap in NWA (Unfortunate acronym, that, isn't it?) than it ought to have done. Far longer than it does in most games and, to my memory, longer than it used to in this one, too. Not everything I wanted to switch off had a toggle and it was a lot harder than it needed to be to find the off button for those that did.

At one point I even tried playing with the HUD off. Great for immersion but hardly practical.

In the end, even after I'd literally checked every single entry on every menu, I couldn't find any way to switch off player names,something that I have long considered to be a basic option in any multiplayer title. In a game with which I felt less investment, this alone would be enough to make me give up and play something else. Now I'm wondering whether New World ever let you switch the names off or if it was always this way and I was just too excited to care at the beginning, while later on there weren't enough other players around to make it feel like a problem.

The problem with names is, of course, always far worse when a game is new and popular. I don't know how popular NWA is going to stay but certainly when I played it was absolutely heaving. There was a huge crowd milling around the starting area and chat was a nest of vipers, spitting venom about platforms.

NWA is Amazon's attempt to launch New World as a console game and the new servers (Standard Servers as they're called.) all facilitate cross-play between console and PC gamers. That sounds very friendly and inclusive, on paper. In practice, not so much. 

I was surprised and irritated to find the acrimonious rivalry between these groups lives on. I thought it died out years ago. It seems no, sadly. A bit of friendly ribbing is one thing but this felt like a the supporters of a couple of rival sports teams taking it outside for a knock-down brawl.

It reminded me of the old days in MMORPGs, when every new game launched to the background of an ill-tempered debate in General on whether it was better than World of Warcraft. Back then it sometimes felt as though Blizzard stans bought new games as they appeared just so they could log in on launch day and tell everyone what suckers they were for playing and how they should all uninstall and go play WoW instead.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice this is the same screenshot I cropped for yesterday's post.

I prefer to have chat on but not when it's nothing but an endless argument between people with fixed opinions and others taking sides for the sake of an argument. That's no more entertaining when the sides are PC vs Playstation vs XBox than when it's game vs game.

It was, once again, a lot harder to work out how to dull that racket than it should have been. AS I say, I prefer to have chat on when possible, so first I tried some milder solutions, like limiting chat to only players on the same platform as me, an option whose very existence seemed like an admission of defeat by the developers, or dropping out of General. 

And that did largely alleviate the platform wars problem but only long enough to reveal a more fundemantal issue. Chat continued to scroll endlessly, filled with various invites and requests to join this or do that. There seemed to be a lot of links people wanted everyone to click.

For some reason I can't quite explain, but which has to relate to the font or the colors or both, even with the chat box safely tucked away in the lower-left corner of the screen, I just could not ignore it. Every time I looked elsewhere on the screen, something would flicker in my peripheral vision, low down on the left and I'd glance at it and lose focus on what I was doing. It was unmanageably distracting so in the end I caved and switched chat off altogether. This is not ideal in an MMORPG and it's something I hardly ever do or feel I need to do but I couldn't figure out any way around it.

It's instructive to compare that with my experience playing Once Human the next night. Even though the server I played on there was listed as "Nearly Full" when I joined it and it was only a few hours since the new Season had become playable, I had absolutely no problems with chat. Not only were people not behaving like nine-year olds in the schoolyard but the chat box itself, even though it was the same size and in the same location on screen, posed no distraction whatsoever, even when plenty of people were talking.

I didn't take any pictures of the horrible UI so here's one from a cut scene instead. Although, come to think of it, if anyone can tell me what that stupid timer thing at the bottom is and how to get rid of it, I'd be vey grateful. I couldn't shift the damn thing and it kept coming back.

This is a design issue more than anything. I notice it in various games. Sometimes chat imposes itself on the game, sometimes it sits back. Usually you can tweak it to push that one way or the other but in NWA it seems determined to be in your face, all the time, no matter what. Or not there at all, which is where it is for me now and where it's likely to stay. Amazon wanted to pretend the game wasn't an MMO so I'm meeting them halfway.

That's a lot of talk about the UI but it represents the amount of time and attention I felt I had to give it in the game to make it baseline playable. Once I'd finally managed to get that done, I was able to start enjoying myself. And I did.

New World has given us several cinematic introductions in its short life and now it has another to show off. They're always fun to watch, although I'm not necessarily a huge fan of mini-movies at the beginning of video games. The new one blends some of what was there before with some fresh scenes and does, I think, make more sense overall.

Indeed, the whole introduction, including the short tutorial section, is much tighter and cleaner now although I suspect that may only because someone at Amazon finally decided to sit down and work out what the game was going to be about. Probably about time that happened.

Character creation is still embedded in the introduction, which was always a nice touch. There are some new looks. It's a relatively limited selection by modern standards but that's fine. I know from long experience that if I make a character more than a few degrees outside my established preferences I'll fail to bond with them and not want to play them, so as long as I can make someone who looks there and thereabouts like all my other characters, I'm good.

Come on in! The water's lovely!

The basic tutorial tells you how to move and hit things and is extremely visual. There are lots of very bright colors and plenty of explosions. I think it's supposed to be exciting. Then it ends and you get to see the world where you'll be spending time and it feels slightly odd, as though you've come off a ride, back into the busy, bustling theme park itself, all lines and chatter and milling about.

Part two of the tutorial, the part where some very chatty characters give you simple tasks to do and praise you inordinately when you do them, as though you've somehow outpaced all reasonable expectations, takes place on the same beach it always did. The tasks are much the same, too - kill some boars, kill some corrupted sailors, loot some wrecked ships, recover some lost things, find the source of corruption in a cave and destroy it - but the flow is much better and the reasons for doing what you're doing seem a lot clearer than they used to.

Part of that is the dialog and voice acting delivered by the two new NPCs at the campfire, all of which is well above standard. The third NPC, the pirate captain, seems about as I remember her but she's fine, too. Not as good as the "king" and his long-suffering friend but good enough, even if her accent is a bit on the "Oirish" side.. 

I got as far as the first settlement in the one session I've played so far and there seemed to be a fair amount of new dialog, although it's possible it's the same old stuff and I've just forgotten it. Or indeed that it was added in one of the earlier revamps and I never played through it at the time. Whatever, it feels pretty solid; definitely better than I remember.

Yes! I knew it!

As for the physical feel of the thing, it's the same pleasurable experience it always was. New World has one of the best action combat systems I've tried. It feels fluid and natural and intuitive and they don't seem to have changed anything much that I can sense, which is just as well. 

The world looks great as always, there's lots to see and plenty to loot and there's a constant drip of dopamine as skills upgrade on use and new abilities come in. As has generally been the case, once I started playing I didn't want to stop. 

I didn't even feel annoyed by having to start over. It felt like an opportunity more than an imposition although whether I'll ever have the time to get a new character all the way back to where I left the old one is another matter. I wonder if it's safe to assume this will be the last time we're asked to do it?

Perpetual new beginnings is something of a feature in Once Human, where the need to keep re-starting been a major point of contention since launch. The seasonal structure there has met a certain amount of pushback from players and required numerous official statements and explanations from the developers who, if they ever feel they may have made an error of judgment in insisting on it, certainly haven't let that change their minds as they try to impose their vision on the game. 

Like quite a lot of people, even though I wasn't against the seasonal structure per se, I couldn't find the motivation to engage with it for the first reset, where the options were to do the same thing again at higher difficulty or do it again with other players trying to kill me. This time, with a completely new scenario taking place on an entirely new set of maps in a different part of the region, complete with new questlines and plot, though, this feels almost like the game just got an expansion.

Meet the baddies.

That's not such a leap when you think about it. Although The Way of Winter does require you to start over to some degree, so do most MMORPG expansions. You generally need to begin by replacing all your old gear just to be able to handle the new content and that's not much different from what happens here. The new gear you craft to get started may look like the old stuff you used to have but it isn't the same. The old stuff didn't keep you warm. This does. 

Expansions come with new features and that's the expansionesque feature of the new Season in OH. Now you can die of frostbite or heatstroke! What a thrill! In practice, it's just another stat to manage but I quite like it all the same.

I also like the new plot, which involves a really sinister new villain, the head of the Vultures, a criminal gang we've been slaughtering from the get-go. Nice to find out who they are at last and what it is they're up to. 

Their leader, Igna, is written and played with suitable arrogance and snark and I found him genuinely scary. So did Matsuko, the girl with the butterfly stuck to her face, who really doesn't like it when the he projects his image into her supposedly secret pocket-dimensional lair. That's how the new Season begins and I found it engaging and immersive. Once Human has consistently strong writing and voice acting and this is right up to par.

That's not threatening at all...

Things continue to go well after the introduction. There's a choice of starting points - a double choice in fact. You can opt to go into the scenario at a lower level, suitable for newcomers, or enter at a more difficult point, appropriate for experienced players. Obviously I chose the easier one, a choice which then  split into three possible locations on the same map.

I picked the one with the name I liked best and off we went. Once again I had to glide down from a hundred meters in the air, hanging on to the feet of a large hawk. It's a weird way to begin any game but it seems to happen a lot these days. Did it start in Fortnite, this falling from the sky routine? I think that's the first time I saw it. Hard to remember now, it's happened so often since.

Once I reached the ground I started to notice the cold right away. That, I think, was just bad luck. It happened to be just coming on nighttime when I arrived (Didn't I say it's always night when I log in to any game?) and the temperature naturally fell when the sun went down. Since this is an MMORPG, I don't think that time of arrival can have been set for me specifically. I was just unlucky not to get there in the daytime, when it would have been pleasantly warm.

It gave me an introduction to the new temperatue mechanic, anyway. And hypothermia. It gave me that, too. Luckly, hypothermia is just a debuff. It's freezing that kills you. 

I don't know, V. Why don't you tell me? I'm sure you're dying to.

I went straight into survival mode, built myself a camp, killed some deer (Reindeer!), striped their hides and made myself a whole new outfit with a bonus to cold resistance. I would probably have done just that anyway but as it happened it was what V, my glowing bird pal, told me to do because I was still in a sort of extended tutorial. Not surprising, since I had picked the newbie option, after all.

Naturally, by the time I'd gotten myself dressed and protected myself from the cold, the sun came up and it got warm and I didn't need protecting any more. Ho hum. So it was off to the nearest town to see what they had for me to do.

My welcome there wasn't the warmest (Hah!). There was some shouting and gun-pointing until the guard spotted my Mayfly backpack, which as usual worked like some kind of not-so-secret masonic handshake and I was in. Once again, the dialog and the voice acting was strong. It's always a good sign when I find myself wanting to listen to the end even though I've already read ahead and now what they're going to say.

And, also once again, that's where I left it; safely ensconced in the starting town, ready to move on to whatever comes next. I find myself in the happy position of wanting to carry on playing both of these new-old games, my enthusiasm for both seemingly refreshed by the forced re-starts rather than, as it could easily have been, set back.

Maybe because every time someone like you sees them you imagine we're your best mates and you give us the keys your house? Cos that's what keeps happening...

I suspect it's likely I'll get further with Once Human, which has actual new content, than with New World Aeternum, which is only offering a revised version of what was already there. Then again, The Way of Winter is only good for six weeks or so and then I'll have to start again, again, whereas this, hopefully, ought to be the last time I need to start over in New World.

As for which is going to be the more successful overall, at the moment, the clear leader in the relaunch stakes, as far as Steam is concerned, is Once Human. It has almost twice as many people playing as NWA, although there Amazon will be mostly be looking at the console numbers, I'm sure. Still, the PC game has taken a bump, too, so we'll see how that lasts. 

As for which of the approaches will have the greatest success in the longer term, I have no idea how well NWA might do on consoles but on PC I'd back Once Human, whichseems tohave burned fewer bridges and made a better job of hanging on to the players it already has so far.

I plan on playing both, on and off. I don't even mind if I have start over again at some point. Just let's leave it a while, now, eh?