Although I was unable to join the New World crew at launch, I may have more time for gaming in general now. But I have noticed a number of big changes in the game and it looks like in the OTG contingent. How is New World now compared to launch? And, how much reduction in OTG player base?
it really will depend a great deal on what you want to get out of a game.
The peak population has dropped from over 1 million concurrent players at launch to under 100k concurrent players. There really hasn’t been a patch that has seen a huge boost to players returning to the game. To the contrary it’s really hard to tell from Steam data alone how significant the decline actually is. There were a lot of exploits early on that allowed nefarious parties to dupe game keys and play with family share artificially inflating those numbers. AGS has put a number of things in place to combat pots including preventing the game from launching on virtual machines which has results in a large step down in active population in the last week or so.
As a game itself - each patch has seen some really good changes and some really bad new bugs introduced. Personally I feel like each one has been more good than bad but different personalities will tell you differently based on their interests.
My wife and I are still playing daily. Though we’ve seen fewer and fewer of our friends logging in to play. OTG has probably had it’s active population cut to around 20-30% of what it was at launch. Thought this isn’t too inconsistent with OTG in most games. There are a lot of our number that like to hop around and try new games and there were a number of players that found NW not to be consistent with their interests.
As with all games I always encourage people to give it a shot if their interested an not let anyone’s reviews influence there decision too much. Some of the worst thing’s ive experienced came highly recommended and some of the best things were highly disregarded.
The only dissuasive warning I feel compelled to offer is that right now if you don’t enjoy leveling solo you will probably have a hard time finding players to group with at low levels. The game has gotten a lot of poor press from bugs, AGS isn’t really pushing it from a marketing standpoint and you can’t create alts on a server where you already have characters - so the lower end of the level demographic is sparce. That said most people talk about how much fun the leveling experience itself was/is.
Much thanks for the reply. Pretty much what I had thought based on reading OTG forum posts and NW current reviews. I don’t mind solo leveling, in fact sometimes prefer it (as it is a little less constraining and I don’t do well at zoom-zoom leveling), but possibly not being able to run low level group content would be a bummer. Again, thx for the time and reply, cheers!
There are plenty of OTG that will run you through if you jump in discord and ask.
Several dungeons require a minimum of 3 players regardless of level to run due to door mechanics.