When one of the founding legends of MMORPGs spends 360 hours in your game, chances are that he has Opinions about how you did stuff. And so the New World team best be listening to Dr. Richard Bartle, the co-creator of MUD1 and researcher upon whose work the Bartle test was devised, who delivered his opinions on Amazon’s MMO after hundreds of hours in the game.
Bartle said he “rather liked” New World overall, although he dinged it for “truly awful” quests, a sloppy endgame setup, a sparse server population, unforgiving boss fights, a PC-restrictive UI, and poorly designed towns. He also called out the game for weirdly mixing both imperial and metric measurements.
But there’s some praise, too: “What I particularly found refreshing, though, was the way it encouraged players to make their own goals.” He also lauded “exciting action combat” and how the game would never kill you by falling damage.
“All in all, New World was much better than I had been led to believe it was. I preferred it to Lost Ark, which I also quite liked for being a bit different,” Bartle said.
