New World First Impressions – Is the Upcoming MMORPG Worth Playing?

I’ve been playing through New World on and off over the last couple days, and honestly.. I can see why the game was delayed until Spring 2021.
Now before you rally your pitchforks – hear me out. New World is a very aesthetically attractive game. When I first logged in, I wasn’t expecting the cutscenes to look as good as they did, the introductory area to feel so full, so mysterious, so dark. I was very, very impressed. I was really excited at that point.
You’ll see that excitement in a couple minutes when I show the stream highlights – but that excitement slowly, but gradually continued to decline the more I played through the game.

Now before we go any further, I do want to preface that this iteration of what I played may not be the final version of the game that we get next year. This is, however, the version of the game we would have gotten if they’d released when they wanted to, and I am glad they opted against that.
So my impressions, my thoughts on New World, are solely based off of an unfinished product, that has the potential to improve substantially between now and release. Or they won’t, and we’ll get.. this, and see what happens.

From my experience, New World doesn’t feel much like an MMO. I know I’ll get some hate for saying this, but it’s the truth. There are a ton of players out playing in the same world as you, but it feels like your typical survival game.. with some side-quests.
Which, let me tell you, if you ask anyone, consists of more or less the following:
Go kill some drowned zombies. Go loot some supply caches. Go kill some discolored drowned zombies. Go loot some supply caches. Go kill some breathing zombies. Go loot some supply caches. Go kill some zombies with jackets on. Go loot some supply caches. Now go craft a knife. Skin a boar. Make a campfire. Now go kill some village zombies.
After 5 hours, I’d encountered some boars, some wolves, and 17 different types of zombies, all with the same model, albeit with slightly different names.
I’m not sure if they were just lazy or that was legit what they’d envisioned the early game to consist of. But this felt so empty. So unrewarding, especially with 100 people all running around trying to kill the same spawn of 6 zombies. And when you’re required to kill 15? 20? And you can tag maybe 2 per several minute spawn-window?
Yeah, that didn’t feel all that fun for me.

Speaking of killing zombies, the combat felt very slow, very clunky and very unintuitive – both as a melee, and a caster. Being locked to utilizing 3 abilities per weapon feels very, very restrictive.
I know you can have several weapons equipped at a time, but I don’t see how they thought this would provide any sense of depth to combat, especially when abilities share cooldowns between weapons, something I learned the hard way when I was in dire need of healing from my staff but couldn’t cast the spell I needed due to it being in cooldown.. for using my melee axe ability.
This leads me to believe that they have no intention of making combat require weapon swapping like is done in Guild Wars 2 or The Elder Scrolls Online, so how is this supposed to retain any type of interest?

Other than the poor combat, and the general lack of content present in-game, I found the game can be kinda fun. It was a very good looking game to run around exploring.
The crafting system seems pretty well thought out and has some depth to it meaning crafters will definitely have a lot to play around with and enjoy. The UI looks very clean.
There is a ton of gear to be found around the world, and to also be crafted, with your physical appearance being altered depending on what gear you have equipped.
There are world bosses to engage that definitely require larger groups, there is a PvP system.. albeit using certain weapon types in PvP is pointless.

There’s a lot to do in New World. There’s just not a lot in New World that makes it feel like an MMORPG. But maybe this will change by the time the game launches next year. Who knows. Maybe you guys will have more fun than I did.
Again, this might not be the final product we get so don’t judge it too harshly, and this is just my opinion based off of what I experienced in this version of the game.