New World’s active combat system stands out pleasantly from the MMO monotony. However, it was not thought through to the end for Elena.
New World is like a sugar melon. While the fruit generally counts as a berry, which is absurd in itself, this one kicks it up a notch. It is more closely related to the cucumber than to the watermelon. Similarly … pranked I sometimes feel with the MMO, which has so little in common with its genre colleagues.
It breaks out of clichés in umpteen ways, does without classes, takes inspiration from Dark Souls for its active action combat system, according to the developers, and promotes crafting to a virtual life task. It all sounds so great on paper! Finally, a breath of fresh air for a genre in which WoW has set the tone for many years.
But unfortunately great ideas alone are not enough. Because the two betas have shown me that New World is not ready yet. For every step the combat system takes forward, it trips over its own feet once.
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What makes the combat system great?
Despite that, I want to honour what New World is trying to do. Because the battles are fun and innovative for an online role-playing game Instead of rote routines, they rely on skill and as much freedom as possible
It’s all about skill
Whoever plays WoW and Co. knows it – you level up, learn new skills and study a choreography of skills and attacks that optimally balances time and damage. The trick is to find the optimal tactics and combination for your own build in the respective situation and then reel them off from your skill bar.
New World breaks the pattern. You roll away, parry, counter, vary light and heavy attacks and use your ability at the right moment. Again, you tune into a sequence of steps that sometimes repeats. But you have to react much more, improvise and weigh things up. ESO already established a similar combat system with more skills, but in New World the exchanges are even more powerful and immediate, because skills become a secondary matter.
Freedom is writ large
Normally you decide once whether you want to be a healer, tank or damage dealer. After that, there’s no turning back, so as a DD you’ll have to put up with long waiting times before dungeons. Who wouldn’t reach for the healing staff for a moment? New World allows you to switch on the fly. If you want to be a tank, you can quickly put on heavy armour, use Taunt-Gem to attract aggro and invest more points in your own constitution – at least up to level 20, such respecs are free.
Even solo you can have more fun this way. If you use a sword for many hours, you automatically level it up and unlock the passive and active skills for it, three of which you equip in slots. If you get bored with the weapon, you can switch to another one. With this one, you are not completely at a loss. It hasn’t been upgraded yet, but you know how to fight.
Two weapons – many possibilities
Just the two weapons allow you to do much more than just switch between melee and ranged combat. If you do it cleverly, useful synergies arise that make life easier for you or your team. For example, you can heal allies with the staff of life and then weaken enemies with the ice glove. Or you can roast enemies from a distance with the fire stick and then stun them with a powerful hammer blow.
This works and is fun, even if other MMOs like ESO or GW2 sometimes come up with even more effective combinations. So New World is not breaking any new ground here.
“Powerful and flexible” describes the combat system well overall. However, for me, it doesn’t go deep enough for that to really motivate me in the long run.
Where does the combat system grate?
Everything feels the same
Whether you’re bashing monsters, skeletons or pirates at level 5 or at level 25, the combat feel doesn’t change. Yes, last-second parries make your character’s knees tremble and a heavy spear thrust brutally drills into the centre of your enemies’ bodies. But you don’t notice that you yourself are becoming more and more powerful. Even the abilities usually just deal a little more damage as your character whirls around and strikes a little differently.
The differences between weapon types are also not as great as hoped. A spear is faster and more agile than a warhammer. But New World tempts you to always perform the same actions. You block an attack or dodge and counterattack until your opponent is flattened. Apart from switching between melee and ranged combat, this leaves little actual variety.
It hardly needs tactics
New World thus also lacks the tactical depth that many MMOs offer me with their expansive ability bars and combos. This is especially noticeable with bosses: The Corruption offspring in the Open World can be beaten down just as easily by attack spam as normal enemies. In the end-game expeditions you have to be on your toes, especially as a healer, but apart from the general difficulty, traps and area attacks rarely require a rethink or a targeted strategy. Currently I have little hope that this will be much different in the hardest dungeons.
In PvP it’s a different story, because suddenly I have an equal or even superior opponent in front of me, who uses weapons and skills just as cleverly as I do. Here I finally have to learn new dance steps. It’s all the more annoying that the new PvP scaling then interferes. Since the end of the closed beta, the level is weighted more heavily than the skill.
This means that higher-level players can take out lower-level players more easily and, conversely, they have a harder time with more powerful opponents. In the Open Beta, this led to beginners hardly using PvP at all, which means that one of the most exciting facets of the battles is lost for many until the endgame.
Too little precision
Even in comparison with Dark Souls, New World clearly draws the short straw for me. Both combat systems share an idea, but there’s just more to the Souls feeling than stamina bar and dodge roll. Switching, for example, is completely missing, which makes fights terribly imprecise, especially in groups: I can’t target my opponent properly.
To be fair, Amazon also has a much harder time, as they have to synchronise tens of players in an online world and factor in server problems like lags. They really manage to do that masterfully.
But there is much more to From Software than the mechanics themselves. Every blow and every block is a conscious decision that, when in doubt, costs me dearly because I can no longer reschedule. I have to live with it through the sluggish combat system – no matter how painful it becomes. In New World, battles are much quicker and more dynamic. They are more forgiving, but they also become less important.
No significant decisions
There’s also the hook of great freedom: when I can be anything, what I am no longer matters. And you can see that in New World. The fact that I can switch from tank to healer after 200 hours and replace sword with staff also shows how irrelevant my captured equipment and hard-earned skills are. They have to be interchangeable and similar to master so that I can immediately cope with my new role in the endgame.
Otherwise, the developers’ idea that so many vexing class problems of other MMOs can be leveraged doesn’t work. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that it only postpones them. Because let’s be honest: If everyone can be a healer, why should I of all people give up my role as a damage dealer? And if I can only redistribute skill points for money later on, why should I even bother switching anymore? Especially if everything feels kind of the same?
MMO combat definitely needs a fresh cell cure and New World is going exactly in the right direction for me – but Amazon thinks far too short because it doesn’t want to limit the players. So the combat system remains much shallower than the many possibilities would suggest. You can read more about how we rate the game world, story or PvP in our beta conclusion.
