Choose My Adventure: Swamps, spicy fights, story, and technical issues in New World

Just in case anyone was worried, no, I didn’t abandon Choose My Adventure; I was just busied by reporting on a space game and an extremely important thought experiment about cartoons. Sprinkled through it all, I kept on with my New World adventuring, and if that headline wasn’t already a clue, there was a lot going on over the past several days.

Seriously, my experience in the game has a little bit of everything: swamp locations, snowy locations, extremely tight fights, developing opinions on the story and its NPCs, and either Steam or my PC being such an absolute jackass that nearly killed everything.

I’ll start with the story stuff since that’s foremost on my mind: Honestly I am beginning to not give a damn. Whoever is this voice in my head is beginning to make me roll my eyes whenever she speaks. Yonas is boring. Galahad is an entire laundry basket full of wet blankets. Grace O’Malley is… OK I guess? Really, by the time I was done with whatever the Corpse Crone was ordering me to do, I found myself blitzing past the story dialogue when before I let these goofballs talk.

Part of that is probably because I spent a lot of time in Weaver’s Fen, a swamp area that decided to use pea soup green and sepia as its entire damn color palette. I guess I have to admit that my disinterest stemmed from my general distaste with swamp areas in video games overall, but even then I still think that the narrative driving New World is just OK. I will admit that it’s at least better than it was, but that’s not a particularly high bar to clear, let’s be real.

What’s keeping my interest, then, is the weapons combination once more. The voters’ decision to have me stick to flail and void gauntlet did kind of make me sad in terms of my long-term goals – I would really like to be welcomed in to playing this game with others, and this build is way too solo-focused – but in the end it’s still a smart decision, especially in the fights I was taking on in the Fen. At this point in the game, I started to run in to a lot of poison-based debuffs, enemies casting weakening effects, and jackasses with spear attacks that seemed to constantly be able to make me stagger like a tourist stumbling my way through Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras.

It was at this point that I started to remember an old lesson when I first played New World: respect the speed limit of combat. It was at this point that I wasn’t really able to just smash all of my buttons and fling my flail about willy-nilly; I was actually going to have to wait for certain enemies to swing their skills. I would have to time my ability presses. I was actually going to have to raise my shield and block things.

Once I began reminding myself these lessons and breaking the bad habits that saw me through the lower levels, it all culminated into a playstyle that once again saw me win out against some pretty harsh fights by pure resilience and attrition. I don’t know that my healing is working super hard, but I am at a point where I’m just strong enough to face down big creatures while being able to make those critters just soft enough to whittle away. I even was mostly able to handle being overwhelmed, though sometimes my brain would seize up and I’d forget what buttons swapped my weapons back and forth (1 and 2, incidentally, which seems pretty easy to remember, but that’s what happens when heat-of-combat brain rot occurs).

It’s because of this learning and growth that I managed to push my way past some technical SNAFUs that decided to spring forth from New World. I was getting disconnected because the game assumed I either had corrupt files or was using some unwelcome program (I’m not; this game isn’t worth my time to mod). Then the drive it was on decided to have a conniption fit. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled Steam, which wasn’t a huge deal except it wiped out all of the pretty screenshots I took prior and that made me much madder than anything else.

Still, I’ve got it all back up and running, and I am honestly looking forward to what’s next in this game. There’s just something about New World that draws me in that I can’t quite put my finger on. I guess there’s this desperate adoration of those little whiffs of a great game hiding beneath the mediocrity that things like the story or gathering or crafting mire it in. Or perhaps I’ve got enough prior experience to appreciate that things in this MMO really are better than they were when it first released. And yes, Amazon is hardly a company that qualifies, but I have to also admit that I root for the little guy, which is more a reference of the MMO’s overall dev team and not its corporate master.

Basically, I’m having a good time. I kind of want to see this through to the end, even if on a casual basis. I’d actually like to check out what Rise of the Angry Earth actually has to offer beyond a new weapon and horse riding. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find people to play with and do some group stuff. Actually fun group stuff and not some leash-tugged dungeon delving because this game is incapable of making a balanced party finder.

I’m never alting, though. Even though I’m having fun, I refuse to do this all over again on another character. Hell no.

As that wrap-up suggests, this is the end of the New World journey, with the rest of November being dedicated to yet another new game. Which game will that be? That, my dear friends, is up to you to decide. Obviously. But as you’ll notice, there’s yet another little theme going on with these selections…

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Polling for this Oops! All OARPG edition will wrap up at the usual time of 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, November 10th. Why am I using this theme? I don’t know, I just have this random hunger to feed. Probably because one game disappointed me and another I’ll never touch with a 10-foot pole.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.