New World is currently enjoying an influx of new players following the Aeternum update, but historically New World‘s struggle has not been attracting players – it’s keeping them. In my last Vitae Aeternum column, I expressed concern that the recent changes to endgame will make this problem worse, not better.
But I try to be constructive with my feedback, so today I want to talk about solutions. What can New World do to make its endgame feel more fun and rewarding and keep players engaged over the long term? This is going to be a thorough deep dive, so this will be split over two columns.
Offer incremental rewards
Rewards are very binary in New World right now. You get a gear drop, and either it’s better than what you currently have in that slot, or it’s trash. Loot biasing made the latter scenario less common when first gearing up, but it doesn’t take too long to reach a point where you’re effectively capped out, or close enough that upgrades become increasingly rare.
What the game needs is more incremental rewards that allow you to make steady progress over time. It’s happened before; in the game’s early days, you could use gypsum orbs to increase your expertise and slowly but steadily up the ceiling on what kind of gear you could get. Since pretty much everything dropped gypsum, you could feel like you were making progress no matter how much or how little you played or what type of content you did. Gypsum still drops, but its uses are much more niche now, so it’s not fulfilling the same role.
Expertise wasn’t a great system, and I don’t want to see it come back, but that general philosophy of being able to make steady progress with any content is something I’d like to see return.
There are several ways Amazon could do this. One option is to have a currency that can be spent on gear. This already exists in some forms, but they’re too limited. The cursed coins from Cutlass Keys can be exchanged for high end gear, but the fact they can be acquired from only one zone makes a lot of the game feel irrelevant. Faction shops sell gear, but it’s pretty weak at item level 675 and very over-priced in terms of gold costs.
I could see the faction shops updated with higher-level gear. If you don’t want to let people get best-in-slot gear too easily, the shops could sell randomized boxes with a chance, but not a guarantee, of dropping gear with the highest item level.
Another possibility is a gear upgrade system. Again, this has been done before. Prior to Rise of the Angry Earth, umbral shards could be used to upgrade any endgame piece to the maximum item level. It was a good system, and honestly I don’t understand why it was removed.
A third option is to make XP relevant at max level. You could implement a PvE equivalent of the PvP reward track with random rewards every time you earn a certain amount of XP, or something like Diablo III‘s paragon levels or Elder Scrolls Online‘s champion points (though those might lead to too much power creep).
Whatever form of incremental reward is chosen, it needs to meet the following criteria: It needs to be available from all endgame content, from faction missions to raids and everything in between, and it needs to have some form of diminishing returns such that less-engaged players can still make progress and high-end players immediately aren’t capping out their gear and running out of things do.
MMO endgame is as much about feeling as anything, and a lot of my suggestions in this series will reflect that. The goal here is not necessarily to make it easier to gear up, but just to give people the feeling that they’ve made progress after every session. It feels bad to play for two hours and get nothing for that, and that happens often when your only progress comes from drops. If those two hours yielded some currency that could eventually add up to a reward, it would feel much less disappointing.
Keep all content relevant
One of the big problems New World‘s had since the start is that it’s trying to deliver a World of Warcraft-style endgame where new content is straight up more rewarding and effectively replaces the old content, but that works only if you can churn out as much content as WoW does, and like nearly every MMORPG on the market, New World has not been able to do that.
I believe the only path forward is for New World to adopt a policy of keeping all endgame content relevant at all times. Right now things do to get updated, but only piecemeal and haphazardly. For example, after Rise of the Angry Earth, group trials stayed capped at item level 625 rewards, and now they’ve finally been updated to 700… but the ilevel cap is now 725.
This is frustrating for players, and I have to imagine manually updating those all those drop tables is very labour-intensive for the developers. There needs to a formal system to keep everything scaling up whenever there’s an increase to the character or item level caps.
I have said from the start that New World would benefit immensely from a global level scaling system like that seen in Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online, and I think it’s time to start seriously considering that.
Amazon Games has built such an incredibly rich and beautiful game world in Aeternum, but the vast majority of it has no real relevance to endgame players outside of farming crafting materials, and that seems like a terrible waste. I’d love it if I could run faction missions in Everfall with both a level of challenge and rewards that are relevant to my endgame characters.
The scaling tech can also be used to keep dungeons and raids relevant and rewarding at all times, and without the need to manually update the drop tables each time. When all content automatically drops rewards scaled to the player, all you need to update when there’s a new content drop is how high they can scale.
There are other benefits, as well. Robust scaling tech could allow people of any level to participate in PvP, whereas now it’s mainly limited to max level players, something that drove Massively OP’s PvP columnist from the game. It could encourage world PvP by creating a more level playing field. Scaling would also address the problem of massively overleveling zones as you play through the main story quest, something that is now bound to happen if you do any side content. And it would keep people running leveling dungeons, instead of making early dungeons an abandoned feature as they have been for most of the game’s history.
Global level scaling does have its detractors, and if you simply don’t like it, I can’t say your opinion is wrong, but a lot of the more tangible arguments I’ve seen against it aren’t really supported by the facts. I usually hear people say it makes improving your character meaningless, but in every game I’ve ever played with scaling, out-leveling, or out-gearing content still provided a sizable advantage, just not to the point of being able to kill everything with a single click.
I’m open to compromise, though. Amazon could use a system like Star Wars: The Old Republic, where players are scaled down to slightly above the intended level of zones, allowing them to maintain an even stronger advantage in old content.
Another option is to apply scaling only to endgame content. I’d say this should include all instanced content and all open world zones with a minimum level of 50 or higher.
Finally, scaling in the open world could be an optional toggle – that way players don’t have to experience it unless they want to. If the team went this route, I’d rather the scaling be a bit harsher; treat it more as an optional hard mode for the open world, with increased rewards to match.
Scaling would be a big change, though, and it would necessitate other changes. Skinning would need to be redesigned, as hide drops are currently based on mob level. That wouldn’t work if everything scales to your level. I think scaling is still the right choice, but it’s probably not something that could be added quickly, so in the short term they need to implement more basic changes to keep the current endgame offerings relevant.
Simply tuning all existing endgame rewards up to the new 725 cap would be enough for now, and that should be standard practice for any item level cap increases in future.
Personally I feel the lure of new stuff should be enough incentive to run new content, but if the developers feel more is needed, new content could offer things like new perks, new combinations of perks, new artifacts, and new transmog appearances.
You could even keep the idea of new content dropping higher item level rewards if other content offered a slower path to the new gear cap via the incremental systems pitched above. Not my first choice, but it would be good enough.
Stay tuned
That’s it for now, but in my next column I’ll talk about some other improvements for New World‘s endgame, including more desirable rare drops and how to keep the main demographic New World has been courting with its relaunch.
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.
