Top 10 Things That Made Me Quit New World
With New World announcing its expansion earlier this month, and also the announcement of its fresh servers, I decided to look back on what exactly made me quit playing New World in the first place.
I put about 120 hours into New World in the first few weeks before quitting at level 43. The core foundation was there. The graphics and lighting were very well done. The sound of cutting down a tree or fishing were very relaxing to me. The atmosphere of each zone felt different and new.
That said, there were still fundamental issues with the game. As a result, I made a list of what I remember from a year ago, as someone who has not kept up with the game whatsoever since then. So, here are the Top 10 things that need to be improved upon in order to convince me to play New World again.
10. Endgame PVE in New World
End Game PVE in New World is at the bottom of my list because it is the feature I never had any interaction with, therefore I have little to say about it personally. However, it is something that I want to do once I hit max level in any MMO. So, hearing complaints from the community and friends about how lackluster it was put a damper on my spirits and made me question why should I even bother leveling.
I can only go by community perception and what my friends were saying at the time, but it was extremely repetitive. You were farming “rifts” over and over as they spawned all over the world. The gear wasn’t great because it was “watermarked” (more on this system later) to your level, so getting upgrades was unbearably slow.
There also just wasn’t really anything to do expedition or raid wise. It was extremely unpolished—there was nothing there. I think the devs just ran out of time and/or thought the players wouldn’t reach max level as quickly as they did.
9. PVP in New World
PVP is also near the bottom of my list because it is the feature that I interacted with the least out of everything. Having never reached max level, I never took part in an attack or a defense of a territory.
However, I still think it belongs on this list for two reasons:
Abuse of the mass report bug. For example, if you were the attacking faction, you could have your members spam report players on the defensive faction and they would receive a temporary ban. If you did this over and over, the enemy team would be left crippled and victory could easily be assured once the scheduled attack took place. Reported players had no time to log back in to defend.
The invincibility bug. This bug was absolutely game breaking and very easy for anyone to pull off. The first thing you needed to do was have your game running in windowed mode. While you were mid jump, you needed to quickly wiggle around your screen to freeze your character in place on your screen. If done correctly, your character couldn’t be killed as long as you kept wiggling your screen. This was because the game was designed so that your character had a few frames during your roll animation that made them completely immune to any damage.
Many players abused this bug in PVP, making it an absolutely miserable experience. You could sit on top of a capture point and never lose control of it because you couldn’t be killed. YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes made excellent videos depicting this bug.
8. The New World Economy
A stable economy is essential to any MMO. If severe bugs and exploits exist in the infancy of a game, it can potentially ruin it forever. This is my biggest concern for New World—even to this day. The sheer number of people who made massive amounts of gold exploiting the Auction House is a big reason I am re-rolling on a fresh server.
The first bug I can remember wasn’t as egregious. There was a bug with the Auction House where if you posted something for sale and then went offline and it sold while you were offline, the player wouldn’t receive the item and you wouldn’t receive the gold. This is just mind blowing that this could actually happen to begin with. This seems like a bug that would happen in a game 20 years ago, not today. New World eventually fixed this issue, but it took them quite a while to get everyone their items and gold back.
The second bug, however, was a gold duping bug. According to a New World forum post, there was a bug where if you had a certain error and you tried to send gold to someone who didn’t have that particular error, they would receive the gold and you wouldn’t lose funds if you exited the game and logged back in (essentially duplicating the gold).
Not only was the bug easily repeatable and took very little time to achieve, Amazon Games Studios didn’t seem too bothered by it, which was most upsetting. They didn’t take the servers down or fix the bug for quite some time. There is no confirmation on how many people did this. Most of them could have quit the game. But with a resurgence of players, my worry is that these exploiters with their massive accumulations of gold could potentially ruin the economy if they were to ever come back.
7. Expeditions in New World
Expeditions are synonymous with dungeons if you’ve played other MMOs before. My experience with them wasn’t all too bad from what I can recall. They were a nice change of pace from the monotonous and repetitive questing. The layouts were done well. They were relatively easy and the mechanics weren’t too difficult. I thought they were tuned rather well for what they were.
Why include them on this list, you might ask?
You needed to have keys if you wanted to do these expeditions.
Every. Single. Time.
This was just another pain in the ass system that did not need to be there. When I want to go and do content, I don’t want some arbitrary barrier to prevent me from doing it just to waste my time. Keys served no purpose other than to waste your time gathering/buying mats and then hoping you could even craft the key itself.
If a game has too many of these time-wasting mechanics—which will become more evident as we delve deeper into this list—it is doomed to fail.
6. New World Territories
The idea of this sounds great. It promotes faction diversity, PVP and wars, and actually gives some reason to even care about the world itself. For the first few weeks of the game, it was fun trying to pool together resources as a faction to claim as many territories as possible. It really helped flesh out that community feeling.
What was my issue with this?
Once you had a territory, defending it was much easier than taking it.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. This would eventually snowball into one dominant faction controlling most of the server. This in turn made players from opposing factions slowly start to lose interest, since playing the game while your faction didn’t control anything made it significantly more annoying.
Traveling
Storage
Questing
Crafting
Gathering
All of the above were made more difficult outside of the dominant faction. At the very least, servers wouldn’t let players re-roll to the more dominant faction, which prevented this from getting even more out of control, but the dwindling player base made that failsafe non-existent.
If you were trying to craft in an area that you didn’t control, you had to pay extra. Owned a home there? Taxes would be increased. Literally any action taken in a settlement that was not your own would charge a premium. This made controlling territories that much more important and made not having one just way too punishing for players.
5. Gathering, Crafting, and Housing in New World
I decided to put all of these in the same category because they all share my common complaint.
Gathering
It took way too long to level. The gathering professions were, like I said above, enjoyable. I loved cutting down trees, mining ore, picking flowers, skinning beasts, etc. The animation of the tree snapping and falling over gave me some sort of dopamine hit for some reason every time.
My only real complaint was that it took just slightly too long to level them up. I understand it was designed to take a while to level, and I agree with that design to a certain extent, but it just felt a little too long once you reached a certain breakpoint.
Crafting
The crafting was fun, but again, it felt like I was crafting 10-20 of the same thing to even get one level. The moment that sticks out to me was trying to level my Housing profession. I needed massive amounts of wood and other materials to even make one piece of furniture, which was fine, but the amount of experience I got for crafting it was so small that I ended up making multiple pieces of the same furniture over and over again.
The auction house was flooded with these pieces of furniture from everyone doing the same thing that I was (vendoring them or just trying to give them away for free to anyone who wanted it). I spent an entire day just doing this and only getting maybe 5 or 6 levels. It was very disheartening and I eventually just gave up even trying.
What made me try so hard in the first place?
The Housing System
I was in love with this system. I took pride in my house once I got the plot I wanted. I loved decorating it. The bigger houses were a decent size so you could make a proper layout if you really wanted to. It was also another means for Fast Travel. You actually felt like you had a home in this settlement, and if you maintained it well enough, your house was prominently displayed to the public over others based on a point system— which I thought was a great idea.
The store ruined housing for me. Eventually I started seeing homes with the same store bought items. This dramatically increased their Housing Score and all it required was just a swipe of your credit card. It was very boring and dull to see the same house with the same store bought items in every single one. This, combined with how long it was taking to create items for my house, was just another thing that made me quit New World.
4. User Interface / Heads Up Display in New World
There is one particular issue with the UI in New World that made it rank this high in the list:
Players couldn’t open up their character panel or inventory while running.
I know this may not be a big deal to a lot of players, but for me, it was absolutely infuriating. I am one of those players in the open world where I am constantly opening/closing bags, looking at my map, looking at my gear/stats, or just doing anything while auto running to where I need to be.
The last thing I want is for my character to stop running every single time I do anything that isn’t watching my character mindlessly running to the next quest. I can’t tell you the number of times I audibly groaned when this happened. In every other MMO I’ve ever played, this is not an issue. It was something I obviously took for granted and it made my leveling experience that much less enjoyable in New World.
3. The Item Storage System in New World
The storage system in New World is ranked so high because, while the system itself is relatively fine, it is made more annoying when compounded with other gameplay elements.
For example, if I have all my items stored in a territory that I own, I am free to take out as little or as much as I please. However, if you lost that territory, you would then have to pay a fee to take anything out from that point on. So, if I had a full bank of materials, I was charged for every single item I took out. To add insult to injury, if I wanted to take 100 stacks out instead of 1, I would be charged much more.
To avoid this, players could withdraw all of their items and move them to another settlement before a war started. The only setback being that you can only carry so much at a time because of your character’s bag weight feature. If you go over your bag weight limit, your character movement speed is reduced to a crawl and it takes forever to move.
Who on earth would want to continuously move their materials around like that?
I also painfully recall my main settlement not having a certain rank on a gathering station. So I either had to manually move all my stuff out of storage to another settlement that did have what I needed and craft it there, or just wait it out. Sadly, this just made me give up on it entirely instead.
2. Questing in New World
Questing was an absolute blast in the beginning of the New World launch:
I had a great time traversing the new zones, reading some of the lore, and just trying to get an overall feel of this world and what it had to offer.
The monsters were unique and some of the bosses and rare mobs were actually quite difficult.
The main story quests kept moving players through different areas where they could find side quests.
Players could get distracted gathering along the way or just exploring new areas.
New World’s very early game had a great natural flow to it.
This all came crashing down around the level 30 mark for me. I started noticing the level requirements to continue the main story were becoming increasingly out of reach:
I was encouraged to grind more and more in order to keep up.
Side quests were becoming sparse.
Mobs and quests were the same story over and over. Go to a farm, kill infected people. Go here and kill more zombies. Go here and kill more zombies. Rinse and repeat.
At first I thought it was just the zone, that things would change once I got to a new fresh zone.
It wasn’t.
It was the same mobs, over and over. The uniqueness of the game came to a screeching halt and I was becoming very bored seeing the same attack patterns, same enemies, and the same quests repeated verbatim.
Daily quests on the board in the settlements were more of the same.
So, my final and biggest reason I quit New World, which made questing and almost every activity in the game more miserable as a result.
1. Azoth / Traveling in New World
This has to be one of the worst systems I have ever seen. Azoth is a currency in New World that players need in order to fast travel in the game. This was the only way to travel quickly to other locations. Players could also teleport to their house and an Inn, but it had a cooldown timer.
So, if those were both on cooldown and you didn’t have enough Azoth to go where you needed, you either had to run all the way there, or just do something else and wait for your Inn/House cooldowns to come back up—if you were fortunate enough to have them set to your destination in the first place. Depending on where you needed to go, you could be running for 10-20 minutes. Sometimes even longer.
This presented a couple of problems:
Azoth was capped. You could only hold one thousand Azoth at a time. However you did gather items that you could hold onto in your bag that could be used to give you more Azoth on demand.
Traveling costs a fortune. The longer the distance, the more Azoth it would cost. You could spend hundreds of Azoth just traveling one way. It would also cost more for players traveling to areas controlled by an opposing faction.
Both of these issues made traveling that much more of a nuisance.
Finally, it got to a point where I was just playing the game based on the amount of Azoth I had available. I felt like I was constantly farming Azoth just to play the game. In the beginning of the game, this is almost a non issue because everything is so relatively close to each other. At first, the world is new, fresh, and exciting, so you don’t use the travel feature too much. Once you start hitting that level 30 wall, you start to realize just how bad of a system it is.
This feature alone ruined many aspects of the game for me. I know they have removed this feature from the game since last I’ve played it, so I’m hoping everything else on this list has been changed or altered in some way as well.
Conclusion
So there you have it. My top reasons for quitting New World after about a month. I am excited to be giving this game another chance in a Fresh Start realm and seeing just how much—or how little—this game has changed one year on.
I’m sure I may have missed some things from this list but I am curious what other people’s thoughts are.
Will you be giving this game another go, or has New World lost you forever?
Zeek is a streamer on twitch. You can give him your own thoughts on the revamped New World on his stream.
