New World: Grindy? Check. Repetitive? Check. Fun? We hate to say it... but check

Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our (sometimes) monthly gaming column. At long last, New World is out and we've been diligently grinding our faces off to answer the question: Can Jeff "mountains of cash" Bezos make a decent MMO? On 28 September, Amazon Games released its first serious, big- …

[ragnar]

"Though the game starts off with NPC quest-givers fully voiced, this declines over time to the point that side quests just have some text."

That seems like a pretty cynical design decision to lure players in with a bait and switch.

The blowing up graphics cards ended up being due to poor manufacturing I believe though.

[martyn.hare]

Just like Persona games

Those start off with fully fleshed out voice acting but then for the majority of the mid-game content the voice acting is minimal or heavily reused. It’s a design choice which is fairly standard in RPGs when dealing with off-story fetch quests and other padding.

Not every game can go full on Yoko Taro or Hideo Kojima; as in excellent voice acting paired with excellent parasocial relationship building, Amazon are noobs to video games, so let them go demi-Atlus… minus the weird factor!

[NoneSuch]

Hardware Issues

The video card hardware failures were due to bad design, but poor programming in New World was the gasoline on the flame.

Not played this particular game. The only way to avoid addiction is to just say no at the start.

[RuffianXion]

Avoid this game like the plague

Visiting Josh Strife Hayes' Youtube channel will show you why you shouldn't touch this game with a bargepole.

Here's one little nugget though: the chatbox isn't sanitised, meaning you can perform code injection to perform such comically broken actions as crashing other players' clients with a single line of code in the chat. God only knows what other nastiness a knowledgeable programmer can do with it.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

Ouch.

I'll wait for that to be patched before I take a gander then.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

I won't.

Real life is not "sanitised". Lovely word that is Why should it be sanitised because of a few gobshites? Surely it is possible to include a sanitised channel as well?

At this point I would like to make it clear that I do understand why people can get upset about some of the stuff in chat channels and would want to avoid it. There is nothing wrong with that at all.

I guess it boils down to, for example, why some people prefer to go to a quiet pub and wouldn't be seen dead in the sort of pubs I go to. That is their choice, but shouldn't I have the same choice? I quite enjoy the rough and tumble of real life and various I.R.C. channels.

[Richard 12]

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

Whoosh as the point flies over your head, crack as it rips your hard drive from it's slot and splat, as it buries it in jelly.

Sanitised means "prevented from running code in other clients".

Given that sending the "wrong" message can crash other people's game, it can probably can also be made to cause everyone else in the chat to run a cryptominer on their lovely fat GPUs until further notice.

Or something more dangerous.

It doesn't mean preventing swearing. Or Scunthorpe.

[Joe W]

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

You are no programmer, I guess, so I don't think you should be downvoted harshly (though many will...) - at elast not for not knowing what the term refers to.

"Sanitised" is not referring to "woke" or "no swearing" or whatever. It is a programming term meaning that certain characters (or combinations thereof) are dropped from the input. If you don't do this, they can be interpreted by programs parsing the text as scripts. A favourite is doing an SQL injection that way, though any scripting language is vulnerable to that.

https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom

About the pub: At the very least I do not want to get mugged (or just beaten up) while having a beer, which is pretty much the possible scenario in OP's post. As long as the beer is at least decent, the place unlikely to make me sick by sheer proximity, and the likelyhood of going home with my teeth in a hanky is low I'll probably go there.

[RuffianXion]

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

You don't need to be a programmer to be able to read. I think I made the context in which I used 'sanitised' quite clear in my comment, I just think 'idiot' didn't read past 'sanitised' and then launched into their rant.

[RuffianXion]

Update

Just to add the one-line-crash problem has been patched (don't know about the sanitising though, but presumably that also). Other bugs persist - including duping items and gold via the auction house (which has been 'fixed' by ....... disabling the auction house).

[Mike 137]

Alternatively

I was delighted over the Summer to see kids playing in the sunshine on an old fallen tree in our public green. They were role playing just like we did before the flood in 'cowboys and Indians' and 'war games'. From that distant time I'll never forget a game of 'battle of Britain', and a kid of around nine rushing about with his arms outstretched and huge smile on his face yelling " Ahhhhhhhhh! I'm a messyspit...I'm a messyspit!". Those games were both fun and good exercise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Alternatively

@Mike 137

I wish I could give you multiple upvotes if only because I took me yonks to twig what a "messyspit" was.

Obviously not enough booze last night. Will make up for that this evening...

[Plest]

Re: Alternatively

"OK Boomer!" as the kids say.

I used to do that too, many a long Summer holiday spent re-enacting Star Wars, Star Trek and the odd WW2 made up battle in the early 80s. Best one was when we dicovered a huge pile of dirt they'd dug out from somehere, it had baked in the sun and we used it as a space freighter complete with gun turrets to fight off an alien horde and trade in space stations we landed in all taken from....a computer game we'd been playing on one mate's BBC Micro called? Anyone? Yep, ELITE! We spent about 3-4 weeks enacting stories we'd made up based on the game ELITE!

I let my daughter play Skyrim when she was about 11 years old. 2 days later she and her cousin where running around our garden screaming at pretend dragons, waving foam noodles as swords and swearing loyalty to the Stormcloaks! My wife was not amused when they started screaming, "You will DIE!!!" and started beating up the trees in the garden! Ha ha!

[LenG]

Another plotless hack'n'slash?

I've played many MMOs, starting with Everquest, but I really prefer games with an overarching storyline. The classic example is SW:TOR, which provided 8 different storylines for the classes. It becomes more linear after the endpoint of the original game but even then there is a storyline to justify the actions required of the character. This one looks to fall into the pit of "get better loot so you are strong enough to get even better loot" school of game design(?) which can be fun for a while but can find it hard to maintain enthusiasm. However, many people seem to like them and so they make money and keep coming out.

Perhaps the best storyline game was The Secret World (TSW), which also had an innovative and complex character build/weapon system. Unfortunately to keep such a game going you need to generate more story content which proved too much for Funcom. The game was dumbed down and re-released as Secret World Legends (SWL) with the promise that more story would be added. This never materialised (with the exception of a trivial subzone which added absoultely nothing of interest). Despite being unsupported and bug ridden the game limps on as a cash-cow for the current owner and a tribute to the quality of the original game.

[dwodmots]

Re: Another plotless hack'n'slash?

If you're looking for a story driven MMORPG, you might want to give Final Fantasy XIV a try. The free trial lets you play though the base game and the first exansion which are several hundred hours of main story content and even more mostly well written side content to do.

[Down not across]

Re: Another plotless hack'n'slash?

And FF XIV also has "jobs" where your "class" is based on the weapon you wield. So you can do everything with one character if you really want.

It is also possibly the most bug free MMO I have ever played (I am referring to the relaunched version after they pulled the oirignal and rewrote it)

[Pascal Monett]

Re: "get better loot so you are strong enough to get even better loot"

So, you're talking about Diablo III I take it ?

[J. Cook]

Re: Another plotless hack'n'slash?

You get an upvote simply for the EverCrack mention, which I was waiting for in the article, but never made an appearance.

[Binraider]

Linux native, or Proton compatibility? If it does those I'd consider giving it a go.

Otherwise,.I see no reason to treat bezos outfit on the same level as any other publisher. No compatibility, no purchase.

[Falmari]

PC only

@Binraider From the official game website FAQ "New World is only available on PC." So I assume that means Windows only. :(

[Henry Wertz 1]

Re: PC only

"@Binraider From the official game website FAQ "New World is only available on PC." So I assume that means Windows only. :( "

Don't know; I have VERY good luck running under wine on my Linux boxes* . A high percentage of Windows games run under it just fine. Steam on Ubuntu, I've had 1 game not run under Proton and several dozen successes, I would not be at all surprised to find out New World runs just fine under it. There's a checkbox that says something like "Use Proton for all games", and instead of only listing games Valve or whoever have specifically tested with Proton, it lists all of them. Both wine and Proton provide (up to the limits of your video card) DX 9, 10, 11, 12, OpenGL 4.x, and Vulkan support.

*Well, my old notebook had an Intel HD4000, DX9-era so that limited gaming quite a bit with newer Unity engine lifting minimum requirement to DX10.1. Linux & Wine cannot perform miracles. My desktop and new notebook support Vulkan though. My friends Sandy Bridge supports DX 11 feature level 10.1 under Wine and Proton.. which is funny since in Windows they only shipped DX10 drivers for Sandy Bridge... but at pretty questionable framerates and lower graphics settings since it's not a fast GPU at all.

[Falmari]

Re: PC only

@Henry Wertz 1 Cheers for the info I did not know that Wine and Proton were that good at running windows games. +1 :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I just checked on Steam - no mention of availability for anything other than Windows. Hope that helps!

[WonkoTheSane]

It would run via Proton, if it wasn't for "Easy Anti-Cheat".

[Henry Wertz 1]

"

"Though the game starts off with NPC quest-givers fully voiced, this declines over time to the point that side quests just have some text."

That seems like a pretty cynical design decision to lure players in with a bait and switch."

Oh yeah, I played Age of Conan and it was just like that. Funcom had fully voice acted everything up through like level 20, and several cities with unique architecture; then apparently ran low on cash (enough to finish and launch the game but....) so the rest has little to no voice acting, and loads of "cookie cutter" towns all about (exact same buildings in the same order with the same NPCs, as opposed to at least randomizing the layout a bit even if they're the same buildings.)

"The blowing up graphics cards ended up being due to poor manufacturing I believe though."

Yup 100% certain, running a CPU or GPU 100% should never result in it burning out; it should be adequately cooled... but barring that the thermal throttling should kick in and protect the hardware. However, with modern CPUs and GPUs there's usually several adjustments for some temperature and voltage cutoffs (it'll throttle the CPU or GPU when these are hit). Gaming motherboards and GPUs love to tweak these thresholds up a bit. Do it with some care, and you end up with a CPU or GPU that runs a bit hotter before it starts throttling, it gets better benchmark scores but stays below critical temp. You may argue about reducing chip life but it won't go up in smoke. Don't be careful with these adjustments, and you've disabled the "critical temperature" cutoffs, demand exceeds cooling capacity for too long and the chip goes up in smoke (... or you keep the GPU or CPU itself below critical, but the nearby components get too hot and fail.)

[Grunchy]

“ Let me start off by saying that MMORPGs are not typically good games.”

No doubt. But then you may not have ever tried out LORD (Legend Of Red Dragon). Not ‘massively’ multiplayer, more like adequately multiplayer.

[Plest]

They're what you make of them, I've played some good ones and some bad ones. My wife plays hours of Fallout76, she loves the social aspects of the game, helping people, making new kit, finding stuff but personally I found it boring.

I loved playing EvE Online, very steep learning curve but people are so good at helping newbies out with advice on construction and the in-game mechanics, plus EvE Online, arseholes quickly get beaten out of the game due to the very harsh nature. Even people are appear to act like psychotics are geninely nice people when you talk with them after they've robbed and slaughtered you, even offering you lots of tips about how to stay out of trouble in future.

[Joe W]

Interesting...

I read a critique of the factions and their abilities on 20sided (Shamous Young), who found it pretty stupid, as one faction is useless and one overpowered (extremely simplified by me, his analysis is more in depth). He did not hate the game, and in fact is experimenting with it (try to play without joining a faction).

[AlexRethink]

Almost needed an EVE trigger warning. Winter is always a testing time, with those long nights tempting a relapse.

[Plest]

Those Triglavians won't slaughter themselves my friend!

[Excellentsword]

I am *very* close to trying it out, but keep putting it off. I normally don't mind games with "steep learning curves" – Elite: Dangerous, Sea of Thieves are some of my faves – but something about EVE intimidates me.