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?

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.

Yet Another New Direction For New World

The big mmorpg news of the moment has to be the much-hyped and even more highly anticipated launch of the Brimstone Sands update for Amazon Games' floundering flagship title, New World. There's already been a flurry of posts in my blog roll from people who haven't yet played it and this is going to be another.

Oh, wait! No, it's not! Because I have played it! Well, some of it. A tiny sliver, a taster, a teaser. The merest trifle. One hour, precisely or, rather, imprecisely. Fifty-seven minutes, timed courtesy of GeForce Now, my preferred portal for playing games that make my PC chug like the little engine that really rather wouldn't, thank-you very much.

In light of the surprising revelation that I have some hands-on experience to work with, I think I'll mothball the post I was going to write, a rather stuffy extrapolation of the kind of huffy, borderline passive-aggressive comments I've been leaving on other people's posts, where I've been making (Entirely justified, in my opinion.) comparisons between the Year One development paths of New World and Guild Wars 2, in favor of some good, old-fashioned Very First Impressions . I took a lot of screenshots; I might as well use some of them. (Oh, no you won't! Ed.)

So, let's begin at the beginning: character creation. Okay, that's not exactly the beginning. There's still the moody cut-scene that dates back to when the game was going to be called Conquistadors and Cutlasses (No really... or was it? No, it wasn't. Should have been, though.). At least, I'm guessing it's the same cut-scene. I hit Escape about three seconds in when I saw it coming. I must have sat through it at least ten times now and while it was impressive enough at the start, I think I've had about as much of it as I can take.

The rest of character creation seems much as I remember although I'm not going to swear nothing's changed. Once again, I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to go through all the options one at a time yet again, so I hit "Randomize" a few times until it kicked up an image I liked. I'm now a green-eyed, raven-haired, somewhat piratical wench with a Veronica Lake 'do. It's a look I'd never have made for myself but it's striking and I like it.

I say "raven-haired"... It depends on the light. It was jet black in character creation but on the deck of the ship in the storm-filled cut scene that followed, it turned electric blue. Since then, my hair's been almost auburn and a weird kind of subdued pinky-purple. Maybe it's the residual magic draining out or maybe I'm a superhero and just don't know it yet. (Not as unlikely as you might imagine, given what's coming later.)

The next part on the beach is about the same as it ever was, although I think it's been beefed up a little to make it feel more dramatic. The tutorial hammers home the basic commands in more merciless fashion than I remember, too. The fight with the Captain who throws fireballs at you has definitely been upgraded to last longer, although it's still scripted to have you lose no matter how well you seem to be doing. 

After that, it's back to the campfire at the beach like always. I didn't get any choice on which settlement to start at, a change I think was made long before the latest update. It's Monarch's Bluffs or bust, now, it seems, because that where the King Arthur stuff happens and you wouldn't want to miss it.

Speaking of choices, I wasn't able to pick the server I wanted, Themyscira, home of Wonder Woman and Belghast, because as Bel's already discovered, the doors have closed. The sign says it's only temporary but I obviously wasn't going to wait. I picked one of the servers that was flagged light blue, Heliopolis. In a moment of madness, I also named my character Sarsparilla Flynn, a decision I'm sure I'll come to regret if I end up wanting to play her for more than a few sessions.

Thanks to New World's annoying one character per server-cluster rule, this is actually the first time I've made a new character since launch, although I made plenty before then. It's been so long since the last time, I really can't say what's changed, if anything, about the opening stages of the main questline, which in any case used to vary slightly depending on which settlement you washed up near.

The parts where you make a skinning knife, kill and skin some boars and make yourself something to eat seem roughly as I remember them, although I think maybe it used to take more than one boar to satisfy the Warden. After that, though, there are significant improvements.

And, yes, I do thnk they're improvements. I was happy enough with the old version, where you went foraging among the wrecked ships along the beach for various supplies, but the new version, which has you meeting a feisty pirate captain (I think she supposed to be Irish although it's not always easy to tell with some of the voice acting in New World, most of which is surprisingly ramshackle for a project of it's size and budget.) and cutting a deal with her to recover items from a ship's manifest as well as her own lost possessions, feels much more urgent and exciting.

Someone is going to pop into the comments to tell me none of this is new, I just know it. Even as I type, I'm getting flashbacks of doing all this stuff before. I think what they've done is keep the bones of the previous tutorial and zhoosh it up a bit but exactly how much is new I couldn't say with any authority. Whatever the truth of it, the current version is slick and satisfying and just like the early stages of every other mmorpg, so job well done there, guys!

There's also been some thought put into the rest of what you see and do in the opening minutes. One of the quests rewards you with a blunderbuss, the newish weapon that featured in another major update not too long ago, and there was a greatsword lying right in my path as I followed the quest marker to one of the shipwrecks. The greatsword, in case you haven't been reading the memos, is the featured weapon of the moment, introduced in this very update.

Naturally, I picked it up and started using it. Even though we never made it to Thermascyra, my character nust have the strength of an Amazon, judging by the ludicrous size of the thing. It's an ultra-low-level, grey item but it's still one of those crazy ironing-board shaped planks so popular in just about every fantasy game for the last twenty years or so.

It's fun to use, hitting slowly but hard, as you'd expect. I would love to train it up and see what tricks you can do with it, which I imagine is the idea. Even so, I was much more excited with the drop I got from a Drowned Sailor, a sword with a wicked curved blade that glows green!

There were a few other interesting bits and pieces lying around, all of which I scooped up. It made for a good opening impression but whther any of it was new with the update I couldn't say for sure. I definitely don't remember getting a green sword before, though.

One thing that absolutely, unequivocally is new is the voice that talks to you incesantly inside your head. Every time you do anything of even the most trivial import, some disembodied supervillain starts yammering away about how you've spoiled their nefarious plans and, man, you are so going to get it. 

 

Given they're talking to a bedraggled, confused survivor, who's barely been able to drag herself out of the waves and is now desperately trying to dress herself in rotting rags stolen from walking corpses even worse off than herself, it doesn't say an awful lot for the supposed authority of the speaker, who I take to be the mysterious "Isabella" from the before-times.

Nevertheless, it does certainly give the whole experience a more gamelike tone, as do the new static cut scenes done in the style of a superhero comic. I rather like those. I took a whole load of screenshots to show here but of course I forgot I was playing on GeForce Now so none of them saved anywhere I can find them. They're probably on a server in some in Nvidia bunker by now. I'll never see them again, that's for sure.

Fortunately, someone's already uploaded the whole thing to YouTube so here it is. And I can filch a couple of stills from it forto replace the ones I lost, too! Thanks Flex!

I also took a lot of shots of new quest dialog (All lost now, naturally.) some of which archly pokes fun at a few of New World's long-standing problems, such as what the hell Aeternum is supposed to be and how the whole eternal life thing is meant to work. I found them quite amusing but then I like a bit of metafiction in my mmorpgs. I imagine it will class as immersion-breaking for others.

Experience is supposed to have been ramped up to make the journey to cap faster but I think that probably kicks in later. The first ten levels always seemed to whip by and they did today but I can't say it felt faster than last time. That said, I was level 8 when I logged out and as I said at the top, I only played for just under an hour. That does seem quite speedy, now I come to think of it.

Overall, I was moderately impressed. The stuff I'm sure was new all seemed fine, even if tonally much of it felt completely out of kilter with the game as it used to be. The new version seems to be aimed far more squarely at a typical - maybe I should say younger - gamer audience. Back at launch, as I said many times, New World really had much of the feeling of old school EverQuest about it but i don't think that comparison would come readily to mind now.

And that, I imagine, is something Amazon Games would be very pleased to hear. They started out making a survival game, switched to some kind of hybrid and now they appear to have ended up with a full-blown, mass-market mmorpg. It's not exactly a WoW Clone but if it had tab-targetting it wouldn't be that far off, particularly when it comes to the questing.

I hope to start over for real when the Fresh Start servers come up in a few weeks, so I don't want to burn myself out before then, but I really enjoyed my hour today. Maybe I'll carry on and see where the plot takes me next. Or perhaps I should take my Level 60 into the new, high-level zone, Brimstone Sands itself. 

Hmm. That sounds like a better idea. I'll do that. I'll be sure to let you know how it all turns out.