Lines in the Sand
One of the key mechanics that makes New World stand out is its use of Factions to create a constantly warring world for players to explore. Of course, you can choose whether or not you want to partake in player versus player (PVP) combat, but you’ll still need to choose a Faction and start working towards helping your particular group establish its power in this, ahem, new world. The mechanic is very reminiscent of games like Planetside and Planetside 2, which both focus heavily on different factions gaining control of outposts and areas. Throughout the map in New World, Factions can take over cities and forts, allowing them to control the flow of taxes and other mechanics in the area. This additionally translates to player control of how crafting stations are upgraded, allowing for the different cities to thrive in different ways depending on their leadership.
Getting Settled
Much like the rest of the game world, the economy is intended to be player-driven, with the Trading Post acting as the only way to offload unneeded items for some extra gold. The problem with such a system, though, is it often leads to many items being overpriced, as players simply dump anything they don’t want or need onto the market with the highest price they think that they can get. Additionally, because it’s still in beta and many players are still testing things, the market itself doesn’t offer quite the spate of goods you’d expect a thriving trading post to have. This could very well change after release, but it is something I’ll be interested to see more of weeks or even months down the line after New World comes out. The other problem that comes from making a big game, especially one that puts 1,000 players onto a server together, is overall game performance. This is one place that New World struggles immensely, with the game even bricking some higher-end graphics cards during the first week of the beta. Large player group battles can lead to low frames per second (FPS), which can cause the game to turn into a picture book even on more powerful hardware.
