Short introduction, the PTR Patch notes for March are here and the road map. They are for sure an improvement and at the same time making a brand new game negating their own mechanisms. I for one can not figure out what is the plan here.. do you?
Lets see some of the changes they are planning to release and see at least from my perspective what that means for the game and if this is enough to make us go back and play.
Road Map is a good start, but is it good enough to get us back in and play / grind again?
Spring:
- Tempest Heart Expedition – New Dungeon!
- Blunderbuss – New Weapon!
- 3vs3 Arenas
- PVP Rewards Track
One new dungeon which according to PTR is 1 hour long which in my opinion is too long for a dungeon. This feels like a raid. IF dungeons are 1 hour, how long will maybe future raids last?
New weapon which is cool but from what I have seen in the PTR is Overpowering as every other weapon the brought so far and on top of that i am not sure if this will work as indented. During the March update video they admitted that the Void Gugglet was meant to be a support weapon… somehow it turned out been the best PvP weapon… I wonder why ! I believe the same will happen to this new weapon the Blunderbuss.
3vs3 Arenas while we still have no new maps for OPR and or decent rewards. Also the news say Arenas.. still not sure how many we are talking about 1-2, 4-5 ?
PVP track rewards.. what ever that means!
Spring… nothing interesting to go in atm.
Summer:
- Barnacles & Black Powder Expedition – New Dungeon!
- Expedition Finder
- Summer Event
New dungeon… OK..
A little too late for the Expedition finder? Good addition if it works! I still can bring myself to trust them.
Summer event.. if its anything like he winter event with the Yeti.. no thanks.. got boring too fast and with no impactful rewards to make the time I spend worth it. Not to mention that the gear were broken with max stats.
Summer… Nothing interesting to go back
Autumn:
- Brimstone Sands Territory – New area!
- The Ennead Expedition – New Dungeon!
- Greatsword – New Weapon!
- Leaderboards…
- Nightvale hallow Event
- Turkulon 2022 Event
New area coming.. now that would be interesting to see and explore since one of the things they did well was the open world. New dungeon.. ok it nice to have something to do but as we all know dungeons will be run massively and you can get all gear in 1-2 weeks and i am pushing it a bit. I would say 1 week for the players and 2-3 weeks for casual. So very short lived content.
Leaderboard for what? OPR? Arenas? Open world? Dungeon run timers?
The Nightvale event? IF like the previous ones.. I would not even bother.
Turkulon 2021 was a boring thing. I grand you that the gigantic turkey looked cool but in a group fo4 took too long to kill for 1 food that gives 10% luck which broke our game since every one was after that for sale it for 5K. It put the server on hold plus it was the most boring farm.. are we to expect the same?
From the above road map i can say that IF I was to go back to the game i would see the event to see if they make anything worth trying or did they just go for copy paste once more? and then decide if to give another try on September. September because then it will be 1 year after launch and i said that this game will need 1-2 years to become near launch ready. There is a a lot of bugs been fixed and a lot of quality of life been added however i am not sure if they are enough to remove the bitter taste most of us have from this game.
Moving on to the dev update video and the patch notes which are fixing the game and at the same time breaking and altering every mechanism they made on launch. Lets have a look point by point. We will be looking at the main point I picked because every single item would make this post an encyclopedia size post.
- Inventory While Moving
Great improvement but still half done you still don’t have the ability arrange things the way you want.
- Players can now queue for Wars and Invasions from their map.
Amazing.. but while at it why not the OPR and the new Arenas? Allowing me to Queue for something that I need to queue once a day from anywhere but the things I queue every 25-40 min i have to stay in town? Also Wars and Invasions will have more casual versions? what ever that means!
- Removed the cost associated with moving items between territory storage and your faction no longer needs to own both territories in order to transfer items between your storages
So now you don’t need to use gold for the transfer of goods, so more money in your already limited wallet. Wallet limit is 500K. In addition owning a town is useless since you don’t need to own them to move items. Ruining another market item, the storage containers. Which is great to have(the storage containers) but with 12 banks linked it becomes an optional luxury item. Further more the territories are even more useless after the Azoth travel cost reduction. No need to have them for he travel cost reduction. They still have some use but for the most people that do PVE and Farm, the bonuses are not even noticed. The whole concept of siege is gone out of the window the same way the Open World PVP has.
- Doubled the storage bonus for all tiers of Storage Chests.
Nice but kind of redundant update. Maybe this should of happened earlier?
- New soloable quest options are available for the MSQ
More quests coming off the group game play. Now you can play alone in an MMRPG and have fun.. it look like we are moving towards 2 modes.. Online and Offline RPG. IF you can do most things alone on PVE except Dungeons, and then Queue for PVP.. why bother with companies? This will be the game play in the near future.
Log in…Play solo to max level, farm solo for mats and professions, queue using the dungeon finder alone, queue for OPR or Arena solo, log out. Not sure how that fall under the MMORPG concept. Never the less it is what the people want.
- Cross Region Movement and server merges?
No mention for the lag issues…but use your tokens to move with your fiends! If it doesn’t work out very well then just buy a token from the shop and move again! We called it 5 months ago. No more plans for free mass token give away. “When we see unhealthy populations or the population has gone below a certain threshold we are going to look at that and merge those servers“!!!!!
https://nwdb.info/server-status
There have been servers with 26 people for months now. Half the server are below 300 people in a 24 hour check. How low is their thresh hold? What is an unhealthy population for the dev team? I mean come on! But I suppose that we can merge the empty servers after players buy the tokens from the shop to move. Maybe! just saying!
“The vision of the game hasn’t changed!” (according to the dev video)
Double EXP weekends, and Double weapon EXP… reduced taxes so need to spend gold, reduced EXP for professions, more rewards on every aspect of the game, reduced traveling costs, No damage to inventory, no need to really own a territory, casual wars and invasions, global CD for crafting that makes it even more easy and hard core player don’t have an advantage anymore. The whole concept has changed the whole game has changed. I believe in listening to the players, BUT, if we add all the things people want this will be a mess at the end. Last New World post I did, I mentioned that this was not the game that started on September 28th 2021 and now even more it look like a totally different game as well.
Player rarely know what they want and when they do is mostly for their play style they have or their character, almost never for what is best for the game. A Dev team should stick to their vision with minor adjustments not change the game on what player wants. Wow did this mistake and it burned it down. In addition to this, this dev team has no idea how to make an MMORPG since they “launched” the game is missing 80% of what is considered standard for an MMORPG, therefore they are listening to the player base too much. That is clear when suggested with quest sharing they respond with.. What a great idea I will pass it on to the dev team! Really?
Everything is becoming easier and easier. I really liked the old style grind where things take a while to happen and make you feel special and that you have achieved something. Now everyone is the same, no distinction and no way to distinct your self from the mass. This is becoming from a great unique game to a game like every other one out there. I see another wow direction coming. They are burning the game down by listening to all the things people want and the bad coding they have is a recipe to destruction.
Finally I would like to say two things. First that I still love the game and I just point out what I see from my perspective and two that can we please on the next dev video not say that we are excited for all the changes and how amazing and wonderful all is? I got tired hearing that on the video! Thank you!