New World is an mmo by Amazon Games and is currently doing a preview until 9/4/2020. This review is based off that. To start, this is the build that would have released back in may and again in august on the 25th if they had not decided to delay it using covid as an excuse.
The character customization options are horrible. They feel like a 90s rpg in terms of how limited options you have. But hey, atleast females can have facial hair right? From that you get a fun little cutscene and then a basic combat tutorial that takes you to the starter quest person.
The world itself looks beautiful. However, there is no jump. It is 2020 and a 3d mmo has no jump is just a sin and should not be allowed. The combat is wonky and off. It feels like they wanted to make dark souls combat, but then realized it was too hard for them to play so they butchered it to whatever this is. Blocking only works half the time. The moving up on objects does not work half the time, which would be solved with…a jump button.
The quests are so standard and boring. They also take you to the same locations from level 1 up thru end game. You will for the entire time of your pve leveling be going to the same spots over and over. Killing 20 mobs and looting 10 chests. Hardly any variance at all.
The mobs are the same models over and over. There is so little variance that by level 10 you’ve seen 90 percent of the mobs you’ll fight all game already.
The leveling is also horrendous because someone thinks that when you invite 500 million players in a game at once, you need 5 minute timers for one mob spawn. Seriously, who does not understand mob timers? Even uo and eq did not have this mob spawn problem.
The game is not hard. Infact what makes it hard, is having to wait 2 hours to complete a kill 10 mob quest because there are so many trying to kill the 10 mobs and they take 5 plus minutes to spawn.
No mounts exist, and your fast travel is pretty limited. So you will be running alot. For along time. All game.
I feel like they left the mob spawns so slow and all this walking to hide the fact the game lacks content.
The magic staves are cool, but only two exist. Magic almost feels like an after thought added to the game, but magic and ranged combat tends to be the most op in terms of mob killing.
The pvp system is a joke. It is flag pvp and there is zero point to pvp or flag. The end game pvp is 50v50 instanced siege that is basically wow battlegrounds, but with a lottery system that you may not get picked for. So pvp is basically absent from a game that promotes pvp as a core feature.
End game pve is one “boss”. That is it.
Crafting feels like it could be good, but it is missing something. Like a lot of something. It really does not feel important or impactful in the current state of the game.
The housing system where you have houses in the world is pretty cool, but also pointless really and might as well be instanced housing like final fantasy xiv.
This game needs about 2-3 years more of actual work for it to be anywhere near decent.
Here is a video review of it here: https://youtu.be/hZJSOMoKCEg