One of my biggest frustrations with the current state of New World is that the open world has lost most of the challenge that originally made the game special in my eyes. I had hoped this month’s hardcore seasonal world might be an opportunity to get some of that back, but now that I’ve played it, that didn’t pan out at all.
That doesn’t mean the server is a failure or that it hasn’t offered some fun experiences. But it’s certainly been severely mismarketed. For most players, this server will be anything but “hardcore;” it’s the easiest and most casual version of New World yet.
First, let’s take a look at the pseudo-permadeath mechanic from which the server derives its name. There are a set of exclusive rewards you can get only while in an “unfallen” state, meaning your character has never died.
Dying doesn’t delete your character as in traditional hardcore rulesets, though. It just gives them the “fallen” label, which has its own set of objectives to pursue. Being fallen even gives you a stacking permanent stat boost that can get your character to some pretty absurd levels of power.
Both fallen and unfallen objectives give you a nice boost of season pass XP and some packages of rewards that can be redeemed on the main servers. The big draw here is the Raw Orichalcite Stone, which allows you to craft any artifact of your choice, including those usually exclusive to the Hive of the Gorgons raid or the PvP reward track.
There’s also a third, easier set of objectives that doesn’t care whether you’re fallen or unfallen. This is important because both the fallen and unfallen rewards are exclusive to buyers of the premium season pass.
Frustratingly, nothing says this going in. There is a message that some rewards are exclusive to premium pass owners, but it doesn’t clarify that the entire gimmick that gives the server its hardcore name is paywalled.
I’d also like to note that the unfallen objectives are all for completing raids or M3 dungeons, and the wording implies everyone in the group needs to be unfallen for it to count, so the actual “hardcore” part really only applies to a minority of a minority here. The large majority of people on this server will likely be experiencing this server as a fallen character.
Mind you, that’s not the end of the world. It’s just weird that the server was sold as a hardcore experience when most people probably won’t even be participating in that part of it. For the rest of us, this server is anything but hardcore: It’s an effortless speedrun to OP builds and easy rewards.
Having already gone through it at least half a dozen times across various betas and alts, I was distressed to find the seasonal server still uses the usual tutorial sequence, but once you get spit out onto the newb beach, things take quite a different turn. Instead of the usual main story, Aelstrom (of Secret Level fame) sets you forth on a challenge to prove your strength.
Narratively, it’s basically a training montage for your character. Mechanically, it’s an extended tutorial of the server’s unique mechanics as you’re catapulted toward level cap, with each quest giving you ~15 levels’ worth of XP. It’s so fast I question its purpose; kind of feels like the game should have just boosted you straight to 65, but either way, it’s not a hard journey.
The only minor hiccup is that there are two mandatory dungeon runs during the story, and matchmaking is disabled for this server (somewhat understandably given how game-breaking it would be let the OP seasonal characters into the main pool). That said, the server was very highly populated when I played, and I didn’t have too much trouble finding groups the old-fashioned way. It helps I built my character as a tank.
On that note, though, one issue with the server — albeit one that largely isn’t Amazon‘s fault — is that players have been severely price-gouging on the trading post. Gems that would normally cost around 50-70 gold were being priced as high as 2,000 gold. This is especially frustrating if you’re trying to tank and need carnelian gems to enable your taunts.
I’m no stranger to bad player behaviour, but price-gouging on a server where your character and all their gold will be deleted in a few weeks takes a special level of spite. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
The core gimmick of the server is to gather azerite tailings, a new currency that comes in several different colour-coded flavours. Each type drops from a different form of PvE content, from gathering to dungeons, and you can combine any two types to create caches that shower you with gear. Once you hit max level, there’s even a cache that gives you three fully upgraded 725 artifacts every time you open it.
Basically, you can wander around doing pretty much anything you like and be rewarded with a firehose of the best loot in the game.
Anything you like with one notable caveat, anyway; tailings are available only from PvE. Wars and influence races are enabled on the server, and required for the fallen objectives, but PvE is clearly the focus of this particular seasonal server.
To allow you to fully enjoy this avalanche of artifacts you’re given, the usual limitations on equipping artifacts have been removed on this server. It is possible and in fact quite easy to reach a point where you have an artifact equipped in every slot.
I actually haven’t found this to be quite as game-breaking as you’d expect, although to be fair I also haven’t worked too hard on min/maxing my set-up. There are probably some pretty broken builds you could make if you really put your mind to it. Even unoptimized, my seasonal character is definitely already more powerful than the main I’ve sunk a good few hundred hours into.
This server will last only a couple weeks, and then it and all its characters will be deleted, so it’s kind of just a quick, fun vacation away from the regular game. Personally I’ve already nearly completed every goal I had for the server after just two days as of this writing. It’s no replacement for the actual new content we’ve been so starved for lately, but it’s not been a total waste, either.
It is odd that it’s such a different experience from the hardcore challenge ruleset it was sold as. I wonder if the concept evolved during development; perhaps it was originally intended to be more difficult and then changed into the speedrun it is now, but the devs neglected to adjust the messaging around it.
Personally I still wish they had done something to increase the game’s difficulty. This kind of speedrun to absurd power coupled with some genuinely difficult challenges in the open world could have been something really special. But I’m not going to be too angry about what we got.
New World’s Aeternum is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers delve those secrets to provide you with in-depth coverage of all things New World through launch and beyond.
