We’re back with the second part of the Vitae Aeternum column’s series on improving New World: Aeternum‘s endgame, with a special eye towards long term replay value and player retention. In the first piece, I suggested adding more incremental rewards and talked about ways to keep content relevant with each new update.
This time, I want to talk about adding rare rewards for players to chase, and how to engage the main demographic Amazon Games has been courting with the Aeternum relaunch: solo players.
Introduce chase items
Something New World currently lacks is “chase” items, rare and highly desirable drops that keep people running content even if they need nothing else from it. Artifacts were meant to fill this role, but most of them are quite easy to acquire, so there’s not much chasing to be done. Artifacts are fun, so I think it’s for the best they’re easy to get, but it does leave the niche of a chase item unfilled.
To avoid power creep and imbalance, I think chase items should primarily be cosmetic. Transmog tokens sort of filled this role, and for that reason I think they need to be added back to the drop tables for elite chests ASAP, but Amazon shouldn’t stop there.
I even have an idea for where Amazon can get a lot of cosmetic rewards without the need to spend a lot of resources creating new art assets: Reuse old season pass rewards and Twitch drops. Right now, there’s no way to obtain these things if you missed out on them, and the new players who just joined never had a chance to get them at all.
You could even sweeten the pot by adding some older cash shop items or lower value cash shop items like dyes. There’s a lot of stuff that’s been added to the shop over the years that I didn’t feel was worth it at the asking price, but which I’d be happy to see as a drop from a soul trial or mutation boss.
Ideally they would also add a few all new cosmetics to attract people who do already have everything. People have been asking for some cool rare drop mount skins since mounts were added, but so far all the flashy mount skins have been exclusive to the cash shop.
I don’t begrudge Amazon trying to make money this way, but it is true that rare mounts are a great way to keep people engaged in the long term. There are World of Warcraft players who have spent a decade or more trying to get ultra rare mounts like the Ashes of Al’ar and the Time-Lost Proto-Drake.
Keep the drop rates for these things fairly low. The goal is not to let anyone easily farm every old seasonal reward in a few days. It’s to make sure there’s always a chance, however small, of getting something cool whenever you run endgame content, even if it’s something you’ve done many times before.
Keep solo players in mind
Throughout the Aeternum relaunch, Amazon has tried to emphasize the solo friendly nature of the game, but I would argue endgame is now in many ways less satisfying for a solo player now than it was back in the early days of the game.
Back then, I could buy gear at or near the item level cap from the trading post. It would scale based on my expertise cap, but I could raise its effective item level by increasing my expertise with gypsum orbs, which I could easily get doing open world solo content. It was slow, but it allowed me to make meaningful progress every session. As I said in the first column, I don’t want expertise back, but I do want to regain that ability to make steady progress doing my preferred content.
Right now soul trials and faction shop gear cap out at ilevel 675, and then you’re just praying for the occasional open world drop that might be higher. There’s no solo path to 725 other than buying crafted gear from the trading post, which is expensive and not particularly exciting. You can’t even craft your own 725 gear as a solo player because the materials require multiplayer content.
Adding insult to injury, the one high-end reward you can get from soul trials, the new artifact flail, requires you to grind the new free for all PvP area in order to finish its quest. It’s disappointing that after trumpeting the (very positive) change of making the whole MSQ soloable that they would force PvP to complete a solo quest once more.
Open world mobs have also been repeatedly nerfed into the ground, so not only are things like factions missions or grinding mobs now unrewarding, they’re also kind of boring.
The other endgame updates I’ve proposed throughout this series could make life a lot better for solo players. Mob scaling could make the open world challenging and rewarding again. Incremental rewards are a great way to keep group content more rewarding without making solo content irrelevant. Faction missions and soul trials could drop the same currency as PvP and group PvE, just at a lesser quantity.
As someone who primarily engages with solo and casual content, I’m fine with progressing more slowly than people who do harder and more involved activities, but I still need a way to progress. It doesn’t matter to me if the character next to mine is more powerful, but it does matter to me if my character is more powerful today than it was yesterday.
As I said in the first piece, it’s about feelings. It’s about perception. You want to be able to feel that you’ve made progress after every play session, even if it’s small. The surety of that is what New World is missing right now, and it’s especially bad for solo players, but it does affect everyone.
I’m supposed to be the target audience for the Aeternum revamp. I’m someone who dabbles in group content, but I play solo more often than not. According to the Amazon marketing, this update should make things better for players like me, but I’m feeling the opposite. In the game’s early days, the open world felt challenging and exciting, and I had a path to reach the maximum possible level of gear on my own, albeit slowly.
Now the open world feels stale and unthreatening, and I have no realistic solo path to the gear cap short of mindlessly farming gold for a few dozen hours so I can buy it off the trading post. This game needs to go back to its roots as a title that embraces a challenging and rewarding open world. Then it will truly be the solo friendly open world RPG it’s being sold as.
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.
