New World Beta Unimpresses
855 words.
I’m not going to dwell on this very much, because everyone else seems to be enjoying it, but just for the record, I didn’t care for the New World beta very much. I was ready to give up on it after a half hour, but I recognize that MMOs tend to start slow. So I persevered for a little over two hours and by the end I felt it to be repetitive and unrewarding. I feel like two hours is plenty of time for any game to make their case for why I should continue playing.
I didn’t care for the alpha very much either, but I can’t talk about that. The beta may or may not be the exact same systems, with a thin veneer of a PvE questing experience painted over top of it.
The (new) story of the beta didn’t provide me with much motivation for my character to exist in the game world. (I noted that they had utterly abandoned anything that might even hint at a connection with colonial expansion… I’m baffled that they haven’t changed the name of the game.) So the “role-playing” part of the MMORPG was out the window from the very beginning.
To be honest, I had to re-watch the video I recorded to even remember the story. The entire story is: “Save the world from Corruption.” Thrilling. Actually, that’s not even your story. That’s the story of the other guy. You just happened to be standing next to the guy who was sent to destroy the Corruption. Your story is, “Oops I’m stuck on this island forever, separated from my no-doubt grieving family back home.”
Others have already talked about how limited the character creation is. If you’re one of those people who wants to spend hours in the character creation screen, you’re going to be very disappointed. (I personally like to click “randomize” a couple of times and then click “play,” so it suited me fine.)
There’s been some discussion of whether the combat is good or not. I recognized that the game wanted me to believe it was a rich action combat system of blocking and dodging and tactics, but in actual practice, up through level 10 at least, you can usually just walk up to any monster and brute force button-mash them to death while standing completely still. Watching the enemy’s attack patterns and reacting accordingly felt largely optional (maybe that’s what this game considers “role-playing”). A little strafing and a lot of sword swinging killed everything I encountered. I don’t remember dying, or even feeling the slightest fear of dying, at any point in my two hours of play time. Because of that, I would rate the combat as sub-standard compared to the gold standards of action combat in the gaming industry.
I noticed numerous technical issues I won’t go into, but they left me thinking I was playing an early version of a game where nobody was in charge of polishing little details. Things like texture pop-ins, weird collisions and hit boxes, and puzzling keypress handling. (As one example, when getting my sword out, if I held the X key down just a tiny bit too long, I would get my sword out and then immediately put it away again.)
After my measly two hours of time in the beta, I felt like I had seen everything the game had to offer for the next hundred thousand hours of game time. Every quest was to go to a place and kill some things and/or loot some chests. The stuff in the chests didn’t matter. There were no entertaining NPCs, they were all blank robots who dispensed walls of quest text that didn’t matter, which I took to be the bare minimum of effort required to try to change it from a survival sandbox into a PvE questing experience. The enemies were as generic and uninspired as could possibly be made: Undead and animals. The game seemed to think that I would want to spend most of my time gathering and crafting, as in a survival sandbox, because of the abundance of resources in the world, but it didn’t give me any particular reasons to do those things, in the form of goals or benefits or dangers to avoid.
In the end, I have no idea what this game is trying to be. It’s more of a collection of game systems than a game. It looks to me like it’s just Amazon trying to recreate the games we’ve already played but under an Amazon brand name. Because, like I’ve said before and I’ll keep saying until proven wrong, I’m still 100% sure their main development goal is making a test platform for their Lumberyard game engine.
Just so I put something positive in this post, the game looks fairly nice. However, I’m struggling to keep from adding “for an MMORPG” onto the end of that sentence. Because it doesn’t look that great compared to some other games I’ve played recently, like Death Stranding, or The Last Of Us Part II, or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Here’s a couple of videos I recorded.
Archived Comments
Naithin 2020-09-06T10:14:53Z
Similar boat for me, Ultr. I ended up refunding just shy of 2 hours played a couple of beta sessions ago.
I may yet jump on board again for the release just from the absolute dearth of anything else remotely MMO adjacent, but that will depend heavily on whatever else happens to be out around the time of New World’s eventual launch since I’m certainly not attached to the MMO genre as much as I once was.
Jeromai 2020-09-06T12:53:45Z
I watched multiple streams of it on Twitch and came to a similar conclusion, it’s not for me. The folks having the most fun are those venturing forth with already established friends and/or turning to PvP to beat on others who are also open to PvPing. Best of wishes and all power to them if they like it.
Being neither primarily social or killer inclined, I cannot figure out what I would possibly do with the world and why it would matter to me in the long run.
It’s also probable that I’ve burned out of MMOs as a whole these days - the initial draw has always been the vast potential of a virtual world to explore and plumb for secrets, and the interaction of naturally forming communities of interest. In these recent times, the secrets are all already dug up by crowdsourcing and the communities are either insular and/or span out-of-game too much. It’s hard for unknown elements to join, and too much effort/commitment to belong. So why play an MMO if what it offers on tap doesn’t interest you any longer?
bhagpuss 2020-09-06T16:10:11Z
I think the disconnect here is that almost all of the things you list as cons I would have in my pros.
I dislike narrative in MMORPGs - I believe it’s an inappropriate and unwelcome import from other genres, so the lack of a main storyline in New World is a strong positive for me. I much prefer the eliptical accretion of small nuggets of lore to build up a background.
I much prefer short, simple straightforwad tasks to long, convoluted quest chains. My ideal of the perfect quest is kill ten rats and always has been. My only complaint about the quests I was given was there were some Kill 20s, which is a bit much.
My general impression of combat in allvideo games is that it’s designed for reflexes I never had even in my teens and twenties. Fighting literally can’t be “too easy” for me. If I can stand still and let autoattack quickly do the job, that’s about my personal gold standard. I have to say that I didn’t find that to be the case in New World and I did die quite a few times. And when I didn’t die I was usually at pretty low health. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be any harder and I quite wish I knew what you were doing to make it that easy.
On the topic of what there is to do, well there’s leveling, skilling up and gearing your character. What else does any MMORPG need? Nothing! But New World does also have housing, which is always a long-term occupation. Of course the actual point of the game is the territorial conquest, which also runs itself if done well.
Where I do agree is with the pesonalization of the NPCs. That was one of the things I gave quite a bit of feedback about. They’re bland to the point of self-parody in places, although I did eventually run into one or two that had some kind of side to them. It’s something that could largely be overwritten by voice acting. I haven’t heard whether they’re planning on adding that at some point. Normally I’m not a huge fan of voice in MMORPGs but in this case I think it would be a wise move.
All in all I see the same difference of opinion over New World I often see these days - namely people who like what MMORPGs used to be and people who are over that and want them to be something else. A lot of the criticism of New World has revolved around it being quite unoriginal, ordinary and not adding anything new to the genre, which is precisley what I’m looking for.
I’d strongly prefer that it had tab target and hot key combat, of course, but other than it feels comfortably familiar and that’s its main attraction. I accept it’s also its main drawback for many.
UltrViolet 2020-09-06T17:25:39Z I’m similarly wondering what I ever saw in MMORPGs… I don’t particularly want to go back to any that I’ve already played, and haven’t yet seen any new ones that look particularly compelling. (I also saw Crowfall for the first time recently and I can’t quite find the right way to talk about how disappointed I was in their progress over five years.)
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