Saturday Update 10/15/2022: New World lessons learned and Warhaven Beta

A couple quick items to meet my "post a day" quota for today.  

New World lessons learned

 First, Scot Lane has a guest article posted on Venture Beat: New World: What we’ve learned during our first year.  I will have some more thoughts on this article to post later this coming week, but for now I am really glad to see this quote up front:

There is a saying that live games are owned by the development team until launch, and then at launch they become the players’ game. I couldn’t agree more.

I couldn't agree more myself and feel this is how the New World team has and continues to handle this game.

Warhaven

 Second, I caught wind of a game called Warhaven that is in a free beta period.  Ironically it caught my attention because of New World and the below video posted by Atlas Fishmo on Youtube.  What I like about what I've seen so far, and I hope to play it later today after it downloads, is that the combat has weight to it.  

This isn't the rollie pollies combat of New World; this is medieval combat with some heft and weight to it.  Fights are up close and personal and attacks and abilities are highlighted so the player can understand what is going on without having to rely just on catching an animation or sound clue.  I will share thoughts this week on my experience.

New World: Piecing a build together for Firestaff/Warhammer

  I watched this video (embedded at the end of the post as well) on YouTube for a unique build combining the Warhammer and Firestaff in New World PvP.  It caught my attention because it focuses on the incinerate skill which brought back memories of my first "build" I played at launch to level from 1-60.  At the time I rolled around in heavy armor with a firestaff and sword/shield; incinerate skilled out for life gain.  

  The flow went: run around and get the attention of twenty mobs, pull them all together, and slam down incinerate and regain a bunch of health and watch everything burn to death.  Rinse and repeat.  To be honest had I connected the dots with warhammer's area of effect stun with shockwave back then I would have dropped sword/shield.

  Fast forward to now and I play a heavy melee sword/shield and hammer build, but have been looking for something new to give a whirl because, to be honest, playing heavy melee is just penalizing yourself in the light-armor-dominant PvP meta.  I also don't want to just jump on the flavor of the moment builds or abuse the broken weapons like rapier.  I want something unique and thus I want to piece together the build from this video and got some insight from the related Reddit thread.

Attributes

Based on the video we can estimate

CON: 150 (up to 200)
INT: 300+ (i.e. everything else)
Assuming nothing is added to strength; hammer is just for the stun and not for any damage.

Weapons 

Warhammer with the Sundering Shockwave perk to maximize damage

Firestaff with Stable Incinerate (gives you grit so less likely to be interrupted) and Thwarting Strikes (gives more damage when you have grit.. which you get from the stable perk)

Weapon Skill Trees

Hammer is focused on Shockwave, Wrecking Ball, and Clear Out.  All compliment the main concept of getting in, locking down targets, and dropping the bomb.  Clear Out I think is interesting to send everyone flying with burn stacks.

Firestaff is focused on the left side of the tree for incinerate and the rune to place on the ground to max out damage.  Fireball for some damage and Burnout as well.

Armor

Armor will be light as the light dodge is critical to get in and out to drop the bomb.  Light armor also gets +20% damage.

Armor perks 

• 5x Resilient (required for PvP)
• 2-3x Freedom (assume critical for getting in and out and minimizing effect of CC abilities)
• Shirking Fortification is probably worthwhile here since you are up close and personal
  
• Shirking Energy would be good since its available to light
• As far as weapon perks on armor Empowering Fireball is the only one that jumps out at me
• For fun maybe Repulsing Clear Out to send folks flying even farther after incinerate
  

Amulet/Ring/Earring

Not sure here; don't know whats considered good for mage.  Will have to research this.

Video embed:

Games I'd Play: Battlefield-as-a-service

 Every once and a while I find myself day dreaming about games I'd like to play.  One that recurs to me is a Battlefield-as-a-service game where instead of releasing a new iteration of the Battlefield franchise every year instead we'd have a single Battlefield game where they just release new maps and campaign settings (WWII, modern, future, Vietnam, etc) as part of the service and throw a battle pass on it to tease money out of our wallets.  I honestly wonder why this doesn't already exist.  I'd play it.

My theoretical Battlefield game would also take us back in time to the style of game that Battlefield 2 was.  Battlefield 2 had two amazing features I have missed in every Battlefield game I've played since: commanders and replay.

Battlefield 2 allowed a single player to take on the role of commander and instead of going pew-pew around the battlefield that player had a top-down view directing squads of players to objectives and calling in artillery strikes on areas.  The enhancement I'd make to bring this feature back would be a ranking system for commanders that way its not just luck of the draw on who gets to take on this key role.  Yes, this would gate keep some players but I think its one of those key roles that could make this sort of game that much better.

Battlefield 2 also had a replay system whereby you could go back and replay the entire match.  Many games have this system to a degree, but Battlefield 2 is the only Battlefield I am aware of that has had it.  I spent hours replaying matches, watching epic fights, rewinding them, re-watching them from different angles, and then capturing epic combat footage.  I made a good number of videos (which sadly were lost to the now defunct Google Video platform that Google had before they acquired YouTube).  

Yes, we live in a world of streaming and super simple video capture, but a replay system allows for so much more than just what a single player's view was.  With the content creation tools that exist today a replay system would be an amazing capability and I have no doubt would result in some epic community created content.

I also think graphics engines are at a point where you could use a current state engine for years without a concern about it looking "old" in a couple.  This would be a key element to making Battlefield-as-a-service.  

Of course I mentioned battle pass and I understand that may tilt some players, but I think its the reality of the current market for these types of games.  If it was combined with new maps, weapons, and campaign settings it would be almost no different than buying "Battlefield version 2022/2023/2024/2025" and the improvement is that your investment per pass is building on all previous passes.  Compared to when I started playing Battlefield 3 it didn't matter what I had accomplished in Battlefield 2.  Ideally a battle pass would focus on cosmetic and "battle medals" type awards and not any power increases (i.e. don't tie unlocking access to a weapon behind battle pass).

If this game were made I'd play it.  Would you?  If so, leave a comment.  If not, believe it or not, still leave a comment.