Amazon Game Studios' New World is still among the top five most played games on Steam, despite its player numbers dwindling quite a bit over the past two weeks. It's not an easy task to assess the state of New World post-launch because of how many improvements and bug fixes Amazon worked on since the game's release, but players are still experiencing issues that have an impact on gameplay and quality of life. Among them, some players lament the fact that New World's Dexterity weapons are not as good as Strength-based ones in most activities, making them subpar choices in a meta dominated by the Hatchet, the Great Axe, and Life Staves.
Another problem is often highlighted in the way Faction Wars work, with objectives requiring players to stand in a small area, which calls for opposing Factions spamming AoE abilities to defeat multiple targets at once. Much like Elder Scrolls Online, New World features three Factions to choose from that wage war against one another in PvP, and players can also flag themselves for PvP in order to fight players who belong to opposing Factions in the open world as well. This aspect, especially when combined with the way territories and Companies work, makes for a rather problematic interaction between design choices for New World and player behavior.
Why Factions, Territories, and Companies Can be Problematic in New World
New World players can pick any of the three factions — Marauders, Syndicate, or Covenant — and this choice is not something to be taken lightly. In fact, players who pick a specific faction out of the three available cannot switch to any other unless some conditions are met. For starters, players normally have the ability to change faction only once by paying Azoth, and then this cannot be done again for the next 120 days. Also, by changing faction, players lose their rank and tokens for their current faction and have to start back from scratch with their new one.
Finally, players cannot pick the faction that owns the most territories at any given moment. This forces those who want to switch to that specific faction, for whatever reason, to either wait until any other Faction overtakes more territories, or they have to use the free server transfer. Either way, this is not an optimal solution, and players shouldn't be forced to commit to a specific Faction for four months when there are many more reasons other than cool gear or lore why this choice matters a lot. That's where territories and companies come into play.
The main problem with Companies is that they are created by players for a specific faction, but they are also managed by the same people they made it in the first place. Companies can rule territories in New World by occupying the main settlement in the area, and then they can apply taxes as they please — which can either benefit everyone with a little percentage going to the company itself, or they can be very high to the detriment of players in the area. Furthermore, when any faction other than that chosen by players rules over a territory, travel taxes will be drastically increased, making it difficult to handle the amount of Azoth players can spend on anything else.
As such, factions are still a very interesting feature in New World, but they were designed in a way that is a bit unfriendly to all players. Having to wait 120 days to change factions is still too punishing for a game where server transfers exist, especially because any faction — even dominating ones — might be reduced in numbers in a way that makes it unpleasant to stick with them. Ultimately, New World should change the way factions and companies work, as their current interaction is potentially detrimental to other systems in place.
New World is out now for PC.