After participating in the Beta and playing after release, I just can't honestly recommend playing this game. New World, albeit a gorgeous MMO with a refreshing take on combat, suffers from a lack of any genuinely interesting content, exploiters, a dysfunctional economy, and an obtuse perspective on how this game is meant to be played. The developers do not appear to have synchronized grasp of how their systems work as they have broken the game's core functions, economy, and play mechanics multiple times after release through their patches to fix other items. While I can give credit to it's beauty, crafting systems, and harvesting systems, these are overshadowed by the mass amounts of bots. The Factions are rendered almost pointless as you tend to have one heavily populated faction, a runner-up, and a clear underdog. It's not uncommon to have the entire server dominated by a single faction. Recent patches have punished those who have not quite yet hit lvl 60 and, as a result, increased the grind, and deterred any desire of mine to continue trying to reach it. The sheer lack of content up to lvl 60 is mind-blowing to me. I cannot participate in the exciting wars or corruptions quests because I have not reached the highest level yet, but there isn't anything aside from fetch quests and slogging through the same 5-6 enemies over and over to get there. Some of the game's most interesting content only appears in the prologue and that's a bit sad. PvP, while more interesting, doesn't appear to be present all that much. You will not be able to be "flagged" as a solo player will often find you with groups hunting you out, if they're active in the area, though more often you're likely to benefit from the slight increase in XP without seeing a single flagged player.

TL;DR: I found myself far too often just running between harvest nodes and fighting the same enemies without any real content pieces to drive me through the levels. There is no "story" here and the factions don't provide any proper supplement to this complete lack of character to the game. It's a bummer, because the combat is good. P.S. Bots.