Queue World

Like pretty much everyone else in the MMO-sphere, I picked up Amazon's New World and gave it a spin.

The queues are pretty crazy. My guild was initially going to play on Morrow, but that was almost immediately full. So we moved to Nune Chaha, and that filled up to the point where there are long queues in the evenings. I ended up making an alt on a random empty server to play around, but even that has small queues now.

Amusingly though, my work schedule actually matches well to the queues. I'm currently working 12-8, so I can play for a little bit in the mornings when there are no queues.

The queues are annoying, but once you get in game, everything is quite solid.

This time around I'm putting all my points into Constitution and just using whatever the best weapons I currently have. I'm only level 13, so I imagine that eventually I'll have to specialize and respec.

One thing Amazon got mostly right--which a lot of recent games haven't--is chat. It's really nice to see chat hopping. As well, since New World is a faction-based PvP game, there's faction chat, which is really enjoyable. There's people coordinating PvP assaults and defenses for various zones, random guild/personal drama, and lots of complaints about taxation.

Our server looks to be shaping up as a fight between Syndicate (Purple) and Marauders (Green). Covenant (Yellow) seems way behind, and unfortunately lost their only piece of territory last night. Hopefully they can recover.

I'm not really sure if New World does anything amazing, but it does a lot of small things right. As well, it feels like it is missing the "go, go, go" mentality of recently releases like WoW Classic. You can log in, maybe do some quests, go harvesting, do some actual PvP, do PvP quests to bolster your faction's standing for a territory takeover. At this point, there doesn't seem like a optimal path you have to follow or fall behind.

As well, the world does feel like a world that actually takes time to travel from one area to another. There are some people complaining about that, but I think it's probably important for strategic PvP.

On the MMO-Champion forums, someone posted:

when discussing the game with a friend last night it hit me... its fun, but I have no idea why. It just feels laid back and enjoyable and I think that is why but not sure. It was kinda cool last night watching PVP folks doing patrols and PVE folks relaying information/positions to the PVP crews. 

And:

Yeah theres something about NW that just hooks me in, cant pinpoint it 100% though. It may be the open world feel where everything you do contributes in one way or another and that you easily can get distracted without hurting your "progress". Like I may run for a quest area and get sidetracked by collecting stuff, pvp, killing some new mobs for skinning etc etc. So much going on. Then you have the pvp wars happening now and then.

I think it's a good summary of the game. Everything works well enough, and it's fun watching what's going on while doing your own thing. And eventually, maybe join in on the PvP war.