The start was pretty much exactly the same as in the preview, although they had changed the tutorial a bit. There are still four different starting zones and they're random, so you don't have a choice where you end up which makes it pretty hard to do the first few quests alongside friends. Initially, Tio and Squirrel got lucky and ended up in the same starter zone, while I ended up somewhere completely different. So I ended up traversing half the map as a level 2 character to get to them only to realize that the first few quests aren't the exact same and so can only be completed in the area where you start. I had no way back to my starter zone, so I tried to die only to not be able to revive at my starter zone. So I ended up deleting my first character, remade her exactly the same and by some miracle ended up in the same starter zone as my friends. New World is a hassle if you want to play with friends from the very start. Around level 10 you'll have unlocked enough to go to the other three starting zones and do stuff together.
The character creator has also been improved a lot and now not every character looked the same. In the Preview you could only choose between being male or female and then all the character models were the same. The character creator wasn't as detailed as some other MMOs but still a lot better than what it was.
The zones are made for 10-20 levels each. So the starting zones have areas from level 1 to level 25, which makes some areas crazy dangerous to accidentally wander into as a low level, and sometimes a level 24 area can be found right next to a level 3 area. The level scaling is a bit wonky. The first four areas (i.e. the starter zones) allows you to play around with weapons and builds as much as you want, but if you don't have a specific build in mind when you enter the next tier areas you will get spanked by the enemies. The change in difficulty between level 24 enemies and level 26 enemies is pretty steep. Which I got to discover first-hand. I got to level 30 before the beta ended and played around with sword and shield, bow and arrow, musket, life staff, fire staff and ice gauntlet. Finally settling on a build with ice gauntlet as my main weapon during PvE and life staff for dungeons. (Although the life staff did come in handy during PvE as well).
Since the Preview they have added magic and made the combat more MMO-like. I lamented the lack of proper AoE attacks in the Preview, which made it difficult to combat more than one enemy at once, but now that was no trouble. There were some animation issues while in combat, for example the game wouldn't always register when the dodge button was pressed so only half the times a dodge would actually happen.
I didn't encounter a lot of bugs, thankfully. The most frequent bug was the sound bug that usually happened during prolonged combat when the music would turn static and the character movements would just be completely silented. It sounded somewhat as if you had submerged yourself in water. This could be fixed (for some reason) by opening your inventory and then closing it again, which you can't do during combat because opening your inventory makes your character unable to move. Another bug I encountered was the quest Under the Same Stars, where one container just wouldn't spawn the quest item needed to progress. There was one bug that I didn't encounter until the very last day of the beta and that was that my character would suddenly get stuck in their last animated pose. So I couldn't move my character at all. Once I had to use the /unstuck command to be able to move again, but usually it could be solved by dodge-rolling out of it. Also, this happened and I don't know why, but logging off, closing the game and restarting solved it.
They had worked on the PvE a bit too, most of the quests were still go here, kill this many and loot these things, but they were embedded in story now so it didn't feel as grindy. There were a lot of quests that stuck with me this time. I especially liked the pirate ones in First Light and the ones from Megara in Walsham/Marcel's Hamlet in Brightwood. Not because the gameplay of those quests was anything special, but because I enjoyed their stories.
Since I got to play for a lot longer this time around (40½ hours of beta versus 12½ hours of preview) I also got to really appreciate how diverse the zones were. All zones had their own distinct feel to them. From the pirate themed First Light, to the very Bloodborne-inspired Brightwood. From the cliffy and sea-salted Monarch's Bluff, to the swampy Cutlass Keys. Going into Brightwood for the first time was an experience. From the mostly sunny starter zones into the misty, creepy Brightwood where the first thing I encountered was a dilapidated village filled with ghosts.
This time around I also got to a high enough level to do both my first dungeon and my first corruption breach world event. I feel like I did well enough healing my first ever dungeon in New World, but I definitely need some practice.
All three of us were wowed enough by how New World was now that we all decided to buy the game when it comes out. I bought it after the third day of beta. Unfortunately it releases on a Tuesday of my night shift week so I rpobably won't get to play much during the first week after release. Hopefully it won't get delayed again, because now I really feel like I need more New World gameplay in my life.
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