Vitae Aeternum: New World season 7 doubles down on punishing solo and casual players

I'm really getting the 'the devs have been replaced by pod people' vibe again

    
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When New World relaunched as Aeternum, I harshly criticized the changes made to endgame for making life much worse for casual and solo players, a strange choice for a relaunch that used the soloability of the game as a key marketing point. Since then, I’ve been holding out hope that future patches would address these issues.

Now that season seven is here, though, I’m sorry to say that the patch has not improved anything on the core, non-seasonal servers. In fact, it’s made most of the problems worse.

Let’s start with talking about my biggest frustration with the game right now: Goldcursed Coconuts. Yes, really, that’s the name.

Goldcursed Coconuts are a high-end crafting material that is used to upgrade artifacts and some other items to the new gear score cap of 725. You can get only one per week, and they’re only available from treasure chests in Cutlass Keys’ Cursed Mists free-for-all PvP area.

The only alternative is a similar crafting material available from the Hive of the Gorgons raid, but as it’s extremely difficult to run the raid without an established group, most people opt to go for the coconuts instead.

If, like me, you never bothered gearing up for PvP because you never had a reason to, that means you’re basically a free kill for any PvP players who might be in the zone at the time. Collecting coconuts is thus a miserable experience of trying to find a time when not many people are online, constantly looking over your shoulder, and possibly getting ganked and sent back outside the zone a few times before you finally find a chest.

Defenders of this system will argue that it’s quite easy to avoid being ganked, and that’s true. Most of my coconut runs have been deathless; you rarely encounter people, and when you do, a lot of them just run the other way. But I don’t think “no one wants to PvP in the PvP zone” is a ringing endorsement of the status quo, nor is riding around the margins of the zone for 15 minutes until you finally find a chest my idea of riveting endgame content even if it doesn’t involve getting ganked.

As someone who’s played since launch and dealt with all the jank of the early days, I can say this is by far the most frustrated I’ve ever been with New World. Nothing about this is fun.

I was really hoping that the new patch would offer another way to get coconuts, but instead Amazon has now made the hunt for them even more difficult. While the number of chests that can drop coconuts has increased, they’re no longer a guaranteed drop, with anecdotal reports estimating the drop rate at around 20%. This means it will probably take longer to get your weekly coconut, and if RNG is against you, it could potentially take much longer.

Another of my major complaints with the current state of the game is that the only way to get gear above ilevel 700 outside of the Gorgon raid or PvP is by grinding cursed dubloons in Cutlass Keys. I would like to see this currency expanded to other zones so we’re not forced into such a tiny band of content for progression.

Instead, Amazon just made the grind worse. Non-elite chests outside the PvP area in Cutlass Keys no longer drop dubloons, so it will now take longer to get any gear this way.

I’ve also been frustrated that the new repeatable soul trials added with Aeternum offer no meaningful rewards outside of the Power Stone artifact, which you can get almost immediately (and requires grinding the PvP zone to fully unlock its traits). I’d hoped that might change with the patch, but no adjustments were made outside of adding a couple more trials. I don’t see what the point of that is when there’s no reason to run these things in the first place.

One source of hope for this patch was the promise to add some meaningful rewards to mutated dungeons again in the form of a new material for crafting gear above 700. I assumed the devs misspoke when they said this would only be from M3, the hardest dungeon content in the game, but no, it is in fact for M3s only, leaving M1 and M2 still irrelevant.

Not that it really does much for M3s either. It takes 10 gold runs of M3 dungeons to craft a single piece of gear, and the gear is randomized, so there’s no guarantee it will actually be worth using even when you do get it.

Oh, and crafting this single random piece of gear also requires materials from the raid. You’ll need two runs of the raid for each piece, in fact. Thus completely defeating the purpose of trying to make dungeons an alternative to the raid.

I’m really getting that “the devs have been replaced by pod people” vibe again. After years of building New World into one of the best casual PvE MMORPGs on the market, they turned it into a game that seems actively hostile to the very existence of anyone but the top ~10% of players, literally overnight. And instead of fixing their mistakes — something they’ve been very good at doing promptly throughout the history of the game — they’re just digging the hole deeper.

I almost understand the developers’ logic here. New World has put a lot into solo and casual content over the last few years, and fans of PvP and high end PvE have felt neglected. It’s not a bad idea to spend a couple seasons shoring up those aspects of the game.

But you don’t have to make life miserable for everyone else to serve these people. You can give a raid desirable rewards without making virtually all other PvE content irrelevant. You can make a PvP zone without forcing everyone into it for progression.

It truly feels like I’ve stepped into Bizarro World that we now live in a time when World of Warcraft is letting you get heroic raid gear from solo content and New World has made its policy “raid, PvP, or GTFO.”

It truly feels like I’ve stepped into Bizarro World that we now live in a time when World of Warcraft is letting you get heroic raid gear from solo content and New World has made its policy “raid, PvP, or GTFO.”
Yes, it is true that there is no content in the game that currently requires gear above ilevel 700, and I’m fine with not being able to reach the highest tier of gear with my playstyle. But I need some reason to keep playing, some goal to chase. We had a long content drought before Aeternum, and both my characters are already at or near full ilevel 700 gear across multiple gear sets.

Make every endgame zone and dungeon drop dubloons, give the raid and PvP gear some OP perks you can’t get anywhere else, and everything would be fine. The high-end players get some exclusive shinies, and everyone else can slowly work their way up to 725 with whatever content they desire.

I have to be honest: If not for all the time I’ve already invested in the game, the current state of endgame would be a dealbreaker for me. If this had been what the game was like when I first hit level cap back in the day, I would have left and likely never looked back.

As is, I’m barely playing. I mostly haven’t bothered with the dubloon gear because it’s just too tedious grinding that tiny thimble of content for such slow rewards. Once my current stash of coconuts runs out (and I have only a couple), I may stop pursuing new artifacts, as it’s just too painful to upgrade them at this point.

Pretty much the only thing keeping me playing is the season pass, and even that’s feeling more and more like a chore. With no seasonal storylines for an easy boost of journey progress, it feels a lot slower than it used to, and all I can do to progress it is repeat old content that I’ve already done a dozen times and no longer offers any other meaningful rewards for me.

I still hold out some hope that future updates like the promised return of Umbral Shards will restore some fun and variety back to the endgame, but that hope is fading, and even in the best case, it’s going to be a long wait for those things to arrive.

New World’s Aeternum is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers delve those secrets to provide you with in-depth coverage of all things New World through launch and beyond.
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