Popular Twitch streamer Asmongold has shared his thoughts on Amazon’s upcoming MMO New World in an in-depth review uploaded to his YouTube channel yesterday.
New World is an MMORPG created by Amazon Game Studios that was released in beta earlier this year and is planned to see a full release early in 2021.
After spending many hours playing the beta, Asmongold praised the developers for choosing to pivot from the PvP base they were initially creating in favor of a better PvE experience.
One of the streamer’s major points is that the world inside the game is visually beautiful, but he believes the game lacks variety in almost all aspects, beginning with its setting. “If you go to one of the ancient runes that are filled by skeletons, you’ve been to all of them.” Asmongold said. “There’s like five or six of these different sites in each area, maybe even more in some areas, and they are exactly the same.”
The streamer was also critical of the talents inside the game as much as the locations and diversity of enemies. Asmongold felt the talents were too similar. “What really separates Morningdale from First light, really nothing,” Asmongold said. “The only thing that separates it is the name. All of the different talents look pretty much the same because they using all the same assets. There’s not a bunch of unique special assets for each separate talent and every talent basically feels the same minus a few.”
Asmongold also shared his opinion on the gear system within the game. “The gear progression and gear progression curve in the game is not very good,” Asmongold said. “There’s a lack of in-game rewards that are unique, and I think also just a lack of rewards in general that correlate to any sort of skill in the game.”
Asmongold believes the boss mechanics in the game were underdeveloped, comparing them to “Trash mobs in a mythic dungeon” from World of Warcraft. Regarding the missions within the game, the streamer felt the same, calling them boring and repetitive. “After you’ve done one or two of these and you’ve hit level 30 it’s like, oh my god, I’m only halfway there,” Asmongold said. He suggested that more quest variety is something especially important that the game will need to address before going live.
The streamer then provided his biggest criticism of the game: the combat. Asmongold believes the Dark Souls combat style doesn’t work in an online game. “If you’ve ever played Dark Souls online, it’s so bad that people have phrases for it like phantom range and whenever you’re watching one of these experienced Dark Souls three PVP players, they’re gonna be making their swing halfway through somebodies roll because they’re having to predict their latency,” Asmongold said. “That is the most dog shit mechanic that I can possibly imagine.”
Asmongold said he thinks it’s unfair that the game’s mechanics encourage the player to use the dodge mechanic so often given the latency. The streamer also wasn’t a fan of the stagger mechanic during melee combat, claiming that players will spend more time without control of their character while fighting than they will with control.
Asmongold gave praise to the gathering mechanic in the game, though, sharing that it’s a rewarding feeling to see the animations as the player cuts down trees to gather wood. But the streamer felt that giving alternative ways to obtain supplies from high-level gathering skills through other means delegitimized leveling up the gathering skills in the first place.
Overall, Asmongold said he enjoyed the experience of playing the game and while he thinks there are some problems with the game, there’s absolutely potential if the right changes are made.
