New World, Amazon’s big and new MMORPG has left me with polarizing opinions on it. Firstly, I absolutely love the aesthetic and style of this game. It allows me to live out my Solomon Kane fantasies, running around with a pointy Puritan hat and a musket and rapier, slicing, dicing, shooting and outright slaying monsters left, right and centre. With it’s Sleepy Hollow inspired forests and frontier towns, to castles and even some Egyptian influences, the world of New World is so much fun to explore. The environments are beautiful and dense. You can hunt, set up camp to cook and spawn at, trade all your wares at the market which is all fixed upon a player based economy, play music for folks with a guitar hero-esque mini-game and fish, adventure and look for loot. I can’t stress how the world design has me salivating at the mouth. But all of this is crippled by the poor quest design.
Compared to games like ESO, the quests in New World are just outright horrible.
Here is an example:
Talk to quest giver.
Go to a place that is quite far away on foot (because mounts aren’t a thing yet) collect X amount of items or kill X amount of foes.
Return to quest giver who is now either still in their spot or further away.
Talk to quest giver only to find out that you need to get or kill an additional X amount of things that is even further away than the last location.
Rinse repeat this process a handful of times
Finish quest only to find out the next quest is exactly the same…
The poor quest design really hinders this game and I hope they manage to shape it up in future so that it can compete with other MMOS. The lore is interesting but needs more attention on it and while the world is fun to explore, the tedious quests just make a person sick of it after a while.
Maybe when they add mounts things will be better… we will have to see.
