We start off the show with a hearty congratulations to Tam who will likely be out for a few weeks because he is in dad mode with a very “smol hume”. From there we talk a bit about the Fall of Babylon… or at least Babylon’s Fall and the game we never understood why it was a thing officially shuttering in February. It has been a very Not-E3 week as all major players had a significant presence at the Tokyo Game Show. More specifically we talk a lot about everything that came out of the Nintendo Direct. It is time for the Nightmare Tower in Guild Wars 2 as Season 1 Episode 4 drops, leaving we believe only one more episode to go before the story hole has officially been patched. Bel talks at length about his adventures on the New World PTR and more specifically some of the massive changes to how crafting works. From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how it isn’t really a “chill” game. When the game is good it is great, but when it is bad it is atrocious. As always though when we complain about games it comes from a place of love, because if we don’t really care… we just don’t talk about it.
Good Morning Friends! I am currently like many in the holding pattern for the Steam Deck, checking my purchase history page to see if it has shipped yet. In my travels, I have found out that this exists, and feel like you all need to know as well. I introduce to you Steam Pal, which is apparently the original name of the Steam Deck when it was in development. Since everything in Japan needs to have a mascot, this comes from the Steam Deck Japan regional Twitter account. I love this mascot so much, and I especially love the fact that there is a tiny valve on top of its head.
It has apparently been seen at the Tokyo Game Show attached to the carrying case on display in the Steam Deck booth. I have to admit I really hope that this is something that crosses the ocean because I think everyone would be better off with a tiny Steam Pal guarding their expensive toy. I think that I have reached peak excitement for the Steam Deck, and I am sure like always you will be flooded with testing information when I get my hands on it. I fully expect to install lots of unsanctioned things on mine so will hopefully be able to report how well things like the Epic Game Store and Xbox Game Pass work on the device. I’ve also been holding off on any more emulation devices because I knew that eventually, the Steam Deck would blow them all out of the water.
In other news, I have been playing quite a bit on the New World PTR and working my way through the story and questing. There are so many small quality-of-life changes coming with this patch. The New World channel on the AggroChat podcast slack has been flooded with random observations that I have made while running around. Some examples are… you now get bonus experience the first time you craft a new item, making it more valuable to just craft a bunch of different things. There is a visual indicator now to denote “named” items that drop with static stat packages so that you can easily differentiate them from random rolled loot. All of the factions have bases now, and they are themed based on the faction. Harvest breakpoints have been lowered a bit so that you can get to higher tiers of materials a bit faster and now those “rare” drop items can be created out of base materials so if you really need Fae Iron to craft something, you can just pour Iron ore into making some.
My biggest takeaway is that I am in love with the Greatsword. If this weapon had existed at launch I would have been a Greatsword main. I believe whoever designed this weapon damage-dealing kit, was absolutely used to playing a Greatsword Warrior in Guild Wars 2. So many of the abilities feel like they were lifted straight from that game. I have a multi-slash attack that feels very much the same and a spinning charge attack that can be used to either get into battle or get out of battle quickly. The only thing that doesn’t really fit is that there is a big jumping hit that starts as an uppercut but has a follow-up downward slash. I need to respec at some point and play around with the tanking abilities to see if I like those as well. I am looking forward to when this game has loadouts, which are apparently coming… because I could absolutely see having a greatsword damage build-out and a greatsword tank build-out.
I finished up my night with a little bit of Cyberpunk. This game is absolutely “comfort gaming” for me and really other than ARPGs… the whole Open World RPG genre is my comfy place. There was a time when I would boot up Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas, but now I tend to gravitate towards Cyberpunk and Witcher 3. I am not terribly far into the game on this playthrough and when I decided to go to bed last night, I was about halfway through the initial braindance sequence. I hope there was a reasonable checkpoint because the game would not let me save… so I ultimately just bailed out. I don’t think I am necessarily done with Path of Exile, and am most definitely not done with Diablo III Season 27… but I needed a break from that style of gameplay for a bit.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post, and after reading through the comments… specifically that of Bhagpuss I realized I did make quite a few assumptions. After playing so many MMORPGs with so many different people over the years, I assumed that most people had a stacked list of acquaintances after spending decades playing these titles. I long ago ran out of space in my Battle.net friends list and am consistently having to delete people to find space to add new ones, but that is in part the side effect of leading a raid for a few expansions. As a result, I decided to test these assumptions to see how true my point of view happened to be. So the easiest means of doing this was to cobble together a Twitter poll and then ask folks to retweet it around a bit to try and get a more diverse smattering of eyeballs on it.
So first off I realize that my methodology is a bit flawed. There are only 144 votes at the time of taking this screenshot, and it is limited to those who are active on twitter and the range that 29 retweets will get you… which according to Twitter analytics is a little over 800 impressions. Folks who are active on social media are probably already self-selected into a group of those who are either more socially active or at least more interested in being socially active. However, if you accept those flaws, the numbers more or less shake out like I thought they would. Some 86.1% of users view starting on the same server as friends as a positive thing, 4.2% considered it neutral, and 9.7% prefer to go it alone. Part of what makes me think these numbers are pretty stable is for the most part yesterday after the first hour of the poll, the percentages stayed mostly unchanged within a margin of error. If you want to chime in or just watch the process of the poll, I believe I have it up for another day.
I played a bit more of New World on the PTR server yesterday, and if I thought the redone Monarch’s Bluff was cool… Everfall is even cooler. It has a whole gaslit industrial revolution era vibe to it, with considerably more modern housing. This makes me wonder what exactly the rework of the other towns will bring. I am hoping that they keep this going forward with doing each town as though it had been built during a different era on the island. I think I have followed the main story quest as far as I can for right now because it bugged out when I tried to do the latest version of the Soul Warden trial. The leveling is so much faster than when this game went live initially. I’ve only really poked at this game for two days and am already level twenty, and most of that was just from following the story quests. So I do believe then when they say that you will no longer need to do the town boards to gain levels.
In my travels, I came across someone with the name “Dr Demone Kim” so I am not sure if this is actually THE Youtuber or just a fan trying to look like him. I do know that he was recording some videos in Monarch’s Bluff but I have no clue what his new character name is. He got his original character stuck in Brimstone Sands, where anytime he logs in he pretty much instantly dies. It is super cool thought to bump into a name I at least recognize, even if it is not his account. We are still trying to sort out how we are going to approach this game when the patch drops. Right now I am leaning towards picking whatever normal server happens to be the lowest population and rolling there, in the hope that everyone else that is planning on doing the same can as well. This would leave open the option for folks who don’t want to re-roll to just move their characters with one of the free tokens, whereas the fresh start servers will be locked for transfers.
I had one of those weird nights where nothing really felt right gaming-wise, so toward the end of the evening, I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would check out some of the patch changes, and so far I am on board with the wardrobe system. It was always one of the things that bugged me that I could not really control my appearance if I was trying to optimize my gearing. I would try and latch onto the first decent-looking legendary item I could find and then just keep upgrading it, so I could maintain a specific look and feel. I started another femme V as I have yet to play through the game completely on anything other than my original masculine V. I went for the nomad story start, in part because I actually want to see the questline that involves Alanah Pearce. I have no clue if I will stick with this play-through or bounce back into more multiplayer nonsense.
It is a bit of a scattered post this morning, but those sometimes happen.
The post Testing Assumptions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
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.
There legitimately is a ton of things to be excited about when it comes to returning to New World. However, there are some aspects of the game that still concern me. New World had a phenomenal rise and a slow and steady fall. While the game has addressed a large number of the issues that came from the launch of the game, there is one fundamental problem that has yet to be addressed. It is my belief that New World failed, because it did not attract the social PVE-only MMORPG players in droves, and it is these players that make up the majority of the player base that made World of Warcraft succeed and have now caused Final Fantasy XIV to take that throne.
There is one common desire that stands above pretty much any other for that player base, and that is the ability to play with their friends. They form large guilds and move in packs, and even if playing solo… still want to be on the same server as the people they actually know playing the game. Most of us have been gathering a friend network since the moment we set foot in our first MMORPG, and have gathered more friends each time we move games. I know when we started our Elder Scrolls Online guild, it had over 150 players at launch. If you counted the acquaintances of those folks that may not want to be in a guild but want to at least be on the same server… you end up with an extended social network that can number in the thousands.
New World as a game was designed for 1500 players on a specific server and is scaled to be more like a Rust server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. While they have bumped the server caps up to 2500, this is still a core flaw in the design of the game that seemingly cannot be fixed. At launch, they spawned literal hundreds of servers, attempting to soak up the player population and let them play the game, and have since been constantly collapsing server populations trying to fight the impression that the game “felt dead”. If a large influx of players returns to the game… we are about to go through the same problems that we did at launch because their server model is not flexible enough to reliably guarantee the one simple process that the social gamer wants… to be able to reliably play on the same server that their friends are on.
I know this with absolute certainty because right now the server that I play on is experiencing a peak population as players are returning to check out the game. That server is both locked to new player creation and player transfers, and those poor souls who did not already get characters moved to that server will likely never be able to. We’ve yet to even receive the critical mass of returners because the Brimstone Sands patch has not been released. I can guarantee with certainty that we will once again see server queues in the multiple thousands on launch day and in the days proceeding it. MMORPG players come in waves and the “day one” folks will be enough to saturate the available capacity, let alone the “day two”, “day three”, and the “first-weekend” folks.
The improvements that have been made to New World are extremely impressive, and I want more than anything to give this game a full chance to be the success I hoped it would be. However, until they have a more flexible server model… I am questioning if it will ever succeed. Playing with your friends and reliably rolling on the same server they are on… is the fundamental requirement for a social game and this game still cannot promise that. I personally would love to start over from scratch and the AggroChat folks have talked about maybe doing this thing, but I cannot with any certainty guarantee that the server I would pick to start on… could support everyone else that will be coming over the subsequent few days of character creation. Most people do not have the freedom to log in within the first thirty minutes of a patch launch, and as such would be once again locked out in the cold.
I want so much for New World to be the game I know it can be… but fundamentally in order to get there, they are going to have to change the server model to something more akin to the “virtual” servers that Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online use. Most players are never going to engage in the PVP territory conquest of this game, and as such most players won’t care who holds a specific territory. I would love to see some sort of opt-out for the PVP aspects of the game that throws you into a flexible virtual server, that simply allows you to play with your friends. Since guild names and character names are unique across ALL servers… the core framework already exists to let players group freely with each other. There however must be some technical limitation to the core design of the game that is holding it back.
This is the fatal flaw of New World, the inability to promise the most basic of desires… to reliably play with your friends.
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