No, this piece isn’t about Barrens chat or unmoderated toxicity! This is about the chat experience and interface itself. MOP’s Justin recently joked that he logged back into New World and was disappointed by the fact that Amazon hasn’t actually improved the chat interface. “Oh, that’s still there,” was his reaction. And frankly I have to agree.
New World’s chat is sort of the opposite of what you’d want out of a chat interface if you actually plan on reading the chat. You’d expect to see a channel designation or color, character name, and maybe a timestamp and then the text, all on the same line, as that’s standard in most MMOs and chat clients; instead, New World’s chat shows the text, and then in the following line, it shows the character name and channel name. In other words, a single one-word line takes up two lines and repeats unnecessary information, backwards, cluttering the screen.
This drove me absolutely bonkers when playing New World, to be honest, and I’m someone who started MMOs when chat was even worse than this (strictly overtop character heads) and there was no global chat at all save what you could cobble together in mIRC and ICQ. Seeing the speaker after the text makes my brain hurt, and having to see all the wasted text (from the channel) and unnecessary whitespace in something that, were it more compact, would actually provide more information just makes me super twitchy.
Maybe you’d argue that an MMO without chat is even worse than this – I dunno. But dang, even World of Warcraft lets us modify chat to our liking! Which MMO has the worst chat interface?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
