No, New World doesn’t need a restart like Final Fantasy XIV did back then
New World was at the start and is still full of mistakes now. Again and again, players therefore demand a “New World: A Realm Reborn” – based on the restart that Final Fantasy XIV went through. However, MeinMMO editor Alexander Leitsch thinks this is stupid. Because New World isn’t that broken and a new version would hardly change anything.
What are the problems with New World? The list of problems in the new MMO from Amazon is quite long:
- There were server problems and queues to get started. In the meantime there are the first ghost servers, so that mergers are now required.
- There were quite a few gold dupes.
- There were bugs that prevented the main quest from progressing.
- There were glitches that made players invulnerable.
- There are still a number of balance issues in the classes.
- Some mobs are also poorly balanced.
- There was a long time Problems with special game modes.
- Players can still intentionally trigger lag spikes.
- New World is full of gold sellers and bots.
In addition, new bugs creep in with almost every update, like last time when the developers simply wanted to give the players a little gold as compensation. However, some players accidentally got up to 300,000 thalers, bought the trading post empty and thus caused a server rollback.
How do the players react? Especially because of the bots and the gold dupes, some players are demanding that there should be a complete server reset. This would delete all progress and all would start again at 0, then hopefully without bugs.
Others even wish that New World would be shut down completely and only be released again later with a major rework. MeinMMO reader AlexMK recently called for a “New World: A Realm Reborn”. You read this sentence again and again in reddit.
But in my opinion this requirement is utter nonsense. Because on the one hand New World is not broken enough for a complete rework and on the other hand I would hardly change anything with a re-release.
Who is speaking here? Alexander Leitsch is the MMORPG expert on MeinMMO. He has spent thousands of hours in games like Guild Wars 2, ESO and Black Desert. He’s spent over 200 hours in New World since its release and he’s not unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV either.
New World isn’t nearly as broken as FFXIV
Is New World Really That Broken? New World came out with a lot of bugs, but it has a working gameplay loop. You can level up, you can farm equipment and you can keep yourself busy for hundreds of hours.
Even after more than 200 hours I still have enough ahead of me and even streamers like shroud are still impressed by the game.
It was completely different with Final Fantasy XIV in version 1.0. I haven’t played it myself, but a good friend and my colleague Irina Moritz have often reported on it.
And Final Fantasy 1.0 was missing almost everything, as these examples show:
- There was no in-game quest log.
- The maps were structured almost identically and also looked similar in terms of the assets.
- There were no dungeons or raids – or an endgame in general.
- Quests apart from the main story have been omitted.
- Opponents left no equipment or generally valuable loot.
- There was no way to adjust the key assignment.
- Jumping was not possible and you could not fall off ledges.
- The hotbars were reset when you changed jobs.
- There were no official forums or community managers.
- There were no shortcuts for important menu windows such as equipment, inventory, etc.
- Each interaction was first registered on the server side and was thus sometimes delayed by several seconds.
- There was criticism of the old engine, which resulted in massive FPS drops and graphics problems.
There were also several design decisions that many viewed as critical.
The fatigue system, for example, made sure that you get fewer experience points the longer you play. After 8 hours within a week, the XP was reduced. Anyone who was online for more than 15 hours got no experience at all. The timer was then reset weekly.
In addition, you could only complete all 8 quests every 36 hours. After that there were no more edicts and the rest of the level consisted of you grind mobs.
By the way, you can read about the complete problems of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 in this column by Irina Moritz:
No, your games that start bad don’t need a reboot like Final Fantasy XIV.
As much as the criticism of New World is, the developers have bypassed many of these drastic problems. There is a lack of endgame content, but you can patch it later without taking the server offline permanently.
A rework would hardly change anything and would annoy the players now
Why is the requirement for a rework nonsense? New World has a very unique style that not everyone likes, but that makes the game special. But exactly this style would hardly change in a rework.
The focus is still on exploring the world, crafting and wars for territories. The MMO doesn’t suddenly become a story game like SWTOR, the combat system isn’t suddenly adapted and tab-targeting like in WoW, and the world doesn’t suddenly become colorful like in GW2.
Because everything that would change in New World, the developers have already changed:
- You have created a main quest
- You have introduced dubbing
- You brought dungeons into play
- They made PvP in the open world optional and at the same time created new incentives for it
Those were the big changes New World was supposed to bring to the masses.
All the MMO would adjust in a downtime or restart would be fixing bugs, adjusting the distribution of dollars and more of all the content we already have. More dungeons, more quests, more weapons, more PvP modes, more areas.
But these are all things that I would see as “hotfixes” or “content patches” rather than “rework”. The servers would not have to go offline for months or years for any of this content.
And starting over for the sake of the economy is like shooting at sparrows with cannons. Nobody is currently completely left behind in the economy and Amazon has at least largely been able to isolate and remove the gold. In return, the frustration of the current players would be huge.
How many players does New World have? Now, 2 months after the release, 177,572 were still online in Peak (Sunday, November 28th).
With that, the MMO made it to number 4 in the charts on Steam. So the game still has a community and that would be destroyed if Amazon really brought an “A Realm Reborn”.
How do you see New World at the moment? And what do you miss most about the game?
How the developers imagine the endgame of New World exactly in the future, they have explained here:
There is a lot of criticism of the endgame at New World right now – developers explain their master plan
Reference-mein-mmo.de
