- Lowered travel costs to a cap of 20 Azoth and removed the inventory weight component.
- Significantly more fast travel points spread throughout the world making traversal much easier.
- Unifying all of the storage sheds so that you can access them free from any town.
- Removing the keystone system from dungeons, letting players run them for free.
- Flattened the crafting reagents so that there is only one tier for each profession and it can be gained from level 1 all the way up to the endgame.
- Added Out of Combat regeneration so you no longer have to spam food to regain health.
- An expertise system was introduced to give a visible number of the previous invisible “watermark” system for per slot gear score.
- The gypsum system was introduced to give you several ways to get a predictable expertise bump every single day by crafting items of a specific type.
- Structured PVP modes of Outpost Rush and 3v3 Arenas were added and then given the ability to queue for them from anywhere in the world rather than having to keep going back to a faction vendor.
- A PVP rewards track was added to give a predictable method for gaining rewards from participating in any Player Vs Player activity or just leveling out in the world while flagged. We still desperately need some version of this for PVE however.
- Reworked all of the main story quests so that you can complete them solo and that dungeons are no longer roadblocks to progress and are instead optional.
- More than doubled the number of high-end harvest nodes in the world so that those end game materials are much easier to come by.
- Introduced aptitude chests that you start receiving after 200 in a profession which rewards rare materials that were otherwise only gained through very lucky harvests.
- Ammunition is no longer required to use a projectile weapon and instead gives your weapon a buff meaning it is still desirable but can be skipped while open-world grinding.
- Housing taxes have been capped so that a Tier 4 house is roughly 150g per week and a Tier 1 house is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40g per week.
- Coin drops are significantly more plentiful and you regularly get them from killing mobs and opening chests. You also reliably get them from salvaging gear.
- Mutated Expeditions have been added to the game which give you WoW Mythic+ style affixes that modify the difficulty of the dungeon while scaling up the rewards.
- With the launch of the Brimstone Sands patch there will have been three new weapons added to the game:
- Void Gauntlet
- Blunderbuss
- Greatsword
- Leveling has been sped up significantly both for combat and for professions, and they have standardized the XP curve for crafting so that 20,000 level 1 item is no longer the correct way to level.
- Respec costs have been significantly lowered so it is no longer onerous to change your character build around, and this I believe is leading to a “loadout” type system that will allow you to swap things more quickly.
- With the Brimstone Sands release, the entire new player experience has been reworked with an improved layout of the starter areas and actually letting the player engage with some of the later story themes immediately.
- Similarly, with Brimstone Sands there have been significant improvements to the layout and design of the starter towns.
The Fatal Flaw of New World
Good Morning Friends. There are times as a blogger when it pains me a bit to write the words that I write. There are times when I write negatively about things that I deeply love. This morning’s blog post is going to be one of those times because I deeply care about New World. I’ve loved this game since the moment I set foot in the game’s second major phase of external alpha testing. There is just something about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay that I enjoy greatly. I’ve also been deeply disappointed in this game at times, namely the first several patches and the developers not seeming to “grok” what was wrong with the game. However, things have improved greatly and as a result, you are getting bombarded with the good news of New World right now.
At the moment YouTube is filled with videos like this one talking about how now is the perfect time to rejoin New World and how best to get started again. There are think pieces talking about the concept of a “fresh start” server and rallying a large number of players to poke their head back into the title and explore it. I am not saying these things are wrong. Once the Brimstone Sands update releases, New World is going to be in the best state it has ever been in period. It would be a great time to come back and check out the game, but at the tail end of this post, I am going to talk about my fears. However, for the moment let’s just revel in the things that are going right. I’ve written about significant improvements in the game before, but here is a bullet point list in no particular order of some of the major changes since we played at launch.