Recent reviews by Fanta

Let's start with this. With 450 hours logged at this point I can tell you at the very least this is an addictive game, that ticks a lot of the right boxes for me personally--also bear in mind that I am primarily speaking from a PvP point of view, as that is my primary focus in the game.

Let's also get this out of the way now--the game's a bug fest. There are a ton of bugs ranging from a minor inconvenience, to game breaking. That said:

Combat: Feels great, ability to mix and match kits allows for a decent amount of counter play and play style preference choices. Yes there is a meta, and yes people will naturally gravitate towards certain pairings, but the options exist, and there is no one weapon that is completely useless in any PvP matchup. Yes Great Axes will be everywhere. Yes Firestaff/Ice Gauntlet users will consistently sit at the top of every leaderboard post War. Yes Lifestaff users are damned near impossible to 1v1 in any meaningful amount of time short of an ergregious misplay on their part, or a brilliant series of combos on your part.

BUT, with all that said, the ebb and flow of group combat in this game does not feel stale at all. Roles are well represented, and those who excel with their given weapon choices stand out easily at the end of the day.

This however, leads me to one of my first and most prominent criticisms of the game:

It is not particularly friendly to solo/small group players. When I say small group I mean people playing in companies that are incapable of representing in a faction war. I was lucky enough to find a company during the closed/open Betas who I stuck with at launch with a PvP focused mindset. As a result I'm a core member of our company's 50 man war roster constantly. On our server, some smaller companies *do* hold territories, but it is only due to the fact that they are able to leverage members from larger companies such as ourselves to help defend those territories on a regular basis. This will not be the case on every server, so your mileage may vary.

The gating of content to the general populace is not even a symptom of elitism, or malice (in most cases). In general, this is due to the way the territory system is simply designed. AGS has an incredibly punishing system in place, where losing a war, or losing an invasion, can be disastrous for the company holding that territory. To protect their investments, these companies have to slot their best, to protect their interests. If the number of participants were increased, this could help alleviate some of the problem a little bit, but the game servers (shockingly, despite Amazon owning the single largest and most powerful server farm on the planet) already struggle severely to keep up with the 50v50 engagements as it stands.

Aside from the fact that instanced combat events are effectively closed to a large portion of the community, my next point of criticism is open world PvP:

In a nutshell, when it happens, it is great. Problem is, it often doesn't. There is, plain and simply, not enough of an incentive for players at 60 to even flag up out of town. The only bonus provided currently for being PvP flagged in the open world is a 10% Exp bonus, which for obvious reasons, is irrelevant at max level.

This meant that while leveling interestingly enough, spontaneous 1v1, or small group clashes were a regular occurrence, and it added a sense of danger and excitement to everything you did while exploring the world. This was great. Yes there would be the occasional 5v1 gank, but for the most part, these weren't overly common, and could be easily avoided once you knew where the group was hanging around. Even high level vs low level ganking which is endemic in other games isn't much of an issue in New World. Due to the way PvP scaling works, it is entirely feasible to beat or at least escape, a player even 20 levels above yourself. The biggest gap at this point is the disparity between weapon levels, which opens up more options in your combat kit for the higher leveled player--damage and armor resistances are largely normalized.

The problem however, becomes exacerbated at the higher level. With a fair few areas of interest for high level players to actually spend time in in the open world, this leads to a tendency of zergs forming to complete PvE objectives, which causes one of two things to happen:

1. Nobody flags
2. One group flags, and a solo player walks unawares into a deathball.

Further, when 2 large groups do eventually clash, it can be *a lot* of fun. However, there is a bit of criticism there as well. Namely, the way the camp/respawn system works in this game.

Currently, the game allows you to bind a respawn point to any camp placed by any player on the field, whether friendly, or otherwise. This means that open world contests between two large groups typically devolves into a cycle of kill, die, res, repeat around these camps until the first group decides the repair costs they're incurring is too great to continue. An option to burn/destroy enemy camps such as existed in Alpha, or at the very least, the *inability* to bind to enemy camps created by a flagged player would be an exceptionally welcome change.

As a whole I do recommend anyone who is interested by the genre to give the game a try. The end-game PvE loop is frankly, a bit shallow at the moment, being more or less just a grind to increase the RNG heavy high watermark gear score system from drops, or achieve greater combat effectiveness through the even *more* RNG heavy crafting system. That said, everything until then is still worth dipping your toes into, and the game being where it is in its life cycle, I have full confidence these issues will be remediated as AGS rolls out additional content patches.

If I can give a word of advice to any prospective buyer: manage your expectations.
The game has an incredible amount of potential, but what you make of it, and what you get out of it, will depend largely on many factors, such as server choice, access to a support group/network, and the time you can personally put in.

Cheers.

Simple space sandbox with satisfying broadside combat mechanics featuring pilotable capital class ships