Recent reviews by Thief

Paragon is reborn!
Game feels good and the devs are doing a good job so far. Game is almost feeling complete.
Highly recommend you give this Action MOBA a try.

Game fixed the main issues I was having it seems. It's fun to spread democracy with friends

I wouldn't purchase this Souls-like unless its on sale and you're bored. It feels less 'heavy' than the original release, but it still has similar problems. The whole time I can't help, but feel like it wants to be Dark Souls so badly instead of its own creation. You become animation locked all the time, as well, which doesn't really suit a 2023 release game like this imo and my god do the graphics and UI look outdated. Graphics isn't everything for a game to be successful, but I can't hardly see a difference between the remake and the original.

From what I did play, the mechanics didn't feel too bad. It was mostly the animation locking that bothered me.

As you can tell from plenty of other reviews, their "seamless co-op" they boast about is not very seamless nor does it provide hardly any benefit to the guest of a world.

3/10, buy if its $20 or less, but only if you REALLY want to play a different souls-like

Game is awesome! Embodies the idea that you can do whatever you want that a D&D session offers. Nearly finished with my first playthrough, and already looking forward to the second, and third, and fourth.

Biggest advice I can give is take your time and explore. No need to rush this story with how interesting the lore and side quests can be.

Only gripe I have is Act 3 with the several bugs, broken terrain, and broken dialogue I've encountered (so definitely take your time) it's caused me to say "i'm not having fun anymore" out loud more than once. Needs some more hotfixes and game is 11/10.

EDIT: The hotfixes came! Game is outstanding with everything they've done post launch.

I have finished the game and completed 87% of the challenge page so far (probably close to 78% full completion of collectables) with about 42 hours in my first playthrough. My short review would have to be: Fun for your first playthrough 7.5/10 with a 2 point drop off per follow up playthrough due to lack of replay-ability. Makes a good first step to future games in the Harry Potter universe. I'm hard pressed to give a thumbs up solely because of the performance issues, but if you're one of the lucky ones without issues or can press on and power through its pretty solid.

The long of it is that although I had a good deal of fun in game, there's no lack of issues that the PC community is experiencing while playing on launch. My setup is 32gb DDR4 ram, Ryzen 5 2600 CPU and RTX 2060 GPU. I meet the minimum or better in all regards that matter, but even on globally low settings and frames locked to 60fps I get lots and lots of frame drops in all areas of the world, enclosed, completely open, cutscene, and free camera. I also get lots of graphical tearing, muted audio cues, and sometimes (I imagine low particle settings didnt help) the counter icon cues and enemy magical shields just wont appear. Making what is usually pretty fluid combat fairly annoying.

My only other complaint outside performance issues is that the talent tree and armor stats feel lack luster. There's the appearance of optimizing your character in the talent tree, but once you're halfway to max you'll have every talent point you need for a play-style and then you can pump the rest where ever to just make your wizard/witch good at everything. Armor is just Offense, Defense, and an added trait to each piece that gives you a false feeling of optimization again.

The good stuff I liked the most was just how much you can customize your Room and you can spend potentially dozens of hours once you find enough items to put in there. It's not the greatest building/customizing system with certain small things not available like putting things on tables to fill them up uniquely, but good enough that it was exciting for a while.

Character customization with the transmog system is pretty great. The outfit combinations you can get are almost Elden Ring levels, but about a third or maybe close to half of the options are various color combinations of the same 5 school outfits. The ones that aren't school attire are really good however.

Lastly, the combat feels pretty smooth if previously mentioned performance issues aren't happening. The devs described it being like ranged fencing and that's about the right description. The combat system is similar to Assassin's Creed or any other game with a counter attack system. It's nothing crazy innovative, but doesn't feel boring, even after 42 hours. Biggest issue with combat is enemy variety is small. There's only 6 different enemy types with a couple subclasses in three of them to change how you fight them a little.

So, again, 7.5/10. Great first step in making modern Harry Potter games. Hoping to see more and for the devs to listen to the actual constructive feedback so future games can be better and maybe a bigger, multiplayer one comes down the pipeline in a few years.

I enjoyed most of the time spent on this game since launch, but for anyone not too far gone yet I can't recommend enough that you avoid putting your time into this MMO. It is a beautiful game and is quite fun in the beginning. That's where it stops. By the time you reach level 60 you will have experienced all the game has to offer aside from the 50v50 wars and instanced battleground called Outpost Rush (OPR for short).

TL;DR - The endgame grind is boring and uninspired. PvP is a part time job that can be fun but can easily exhaust you. Economy is inflated and RMT based. Crafting needs more than a dash of luck. Developers have little to no prior experience working on an MMO and it shows.

1. The endgame gear grind is a nightmare that starts with gaining 'expertise' in each armor piece, jewelry piece, and weapon separately. you start at 500 gear score and work to get 600 and then 625 after that.It will take the average person probably 16 days of playing 4 hours each day to finish it if you do it as efficiently. Hardcore players can finish it faster, but that's not the issue. The issue is it's a boring content loop of looting the same chests in the same zones every day, running the same 3 dungeons, or crafting 600 gs items. 600gs to 625gs is running all the same dungeons but with "mutations" that are just modifiers to the enemies to become harder and not always more fun.

2. If you're here to pvp I hope you aced your political science class because you'll be playing politics simulator to get a slot. It's not always as simple as be good in the battlegrounds and you'll be noticed. You gotta know the people who are making the roster for each war. Just warring for your company wont be enough even if you war every day/every other day because its only one 30 minute fight. That's not enough! So you'll have to either be so good that people can't refuse to slot you or good enough and know enough people that you can wiggle your way into other wars. Also have fun "bar pushing" to even start the war declaration. It's another loop of the same 4 quests over and over and OVER until you've reached 100% influence in the territory. .

3. The economy and crafting system is rough to say the least. Crafting armor and weapons relies mostly on luck since between the attribute points and 2 (3 if it rolls as a legendary i.e. 600gs piece) they are rolled randomly from the over 100 perks. The best you can do is use an item to lock the attribute points and one perk you want, but the item has to be looted from dungeons or bought from the market. Leveling your crafting to 200 and getting all the max trophies and crafting armor is either a lot of gold or a pain to farm. You'll either have to work hard to earn enough gold to buy "BIS" gear pieces or swipe your credit card of a third party site. RMT is typically frowned upon in MMO's right?? Not in New World! If you're not swiping you're wasting time grinding gold that should be used for pvping! Literally every pvp company has several if not most of its members swiping for gold to afford the 400k-1 million gold armor pieces (yea one piece of gear) and weapons. That's a lot considering the gold cap on a single person is 500k and a company treasury can have 5 million gold. Where there used to be a fear of deflation at launch there has now been an extreme inflation of prices for pvp gear because everyone swipes so freely to compete with Companies holding territories that making 3 million+ gold a week from the taxes.

4. The devs don't have a clue how to develop an MMO. Watch nerdSlayer Studios' Death of a Game: New World video on youtube and you'll see just how inexperienced and inconsistent the dev team has been. Amazon had such a large budget they could have used to pull some of the greatest minds and talent to their studio, but either couldn't or didn't know who they were. None of the lead devs have prior experience in MMO development as far I could tell.

Thanks for reading all of this. You've been warned.

Dedicated servers are the way to go if you're gonna play with friends, otherwise no one can join the host's world unless they're online.
I recommend just making a second character for corpse runs to avoid skill reduction from repeat deaths when getting gear back.

One moment you're having fun with your friends getting supplies, a base built, and fight other people at loot spots. Then the next thing you know you're being raided and steam rolled right after a wipe from people with more blueprints than you.
10/10

Disregard the barely over 100 hours of play, I put in well over 3,000 hours before it was on steam or free to play. I mained a Mage and was a Chloromancer for most of my raid parties.

This game in the beginning, with a new and populated community, was fantastic and still is in some ways. It struggled behind the scenes financially and was poorly managed as a WoW killer instead of what it should have been. A great stand alone MMORPG launched at the peak of MMORPG popularity. Instead we're left with the broken pieces to riffle through as consumers. I leave it a positive review because It's still a decent MMO if you've never played one yet or just getting into them. This game did questing right! This game did world events right! It had some really good raids in it as well. Point is to play around and put a few hours in this game and if you like it then go play better and more populated MMOs like WoW, ESO, etc..

Hands down, one of the best open world RPGs I've ever played