TYFP

I streamed the first day, but found myself so dedicated to progressing I didn’t bother to stream or write anything for the first 5 days of playing. Sunday I had to get back to work.

After waiting almost two years for release, multiple level grinds and resets in the testing and preview phases, on Tuesday the 28th I finally logged into a permanent server in New World. And the first thing I did, of course, was wait. 

I took five days off work to binge proper and really get into the game, so here’s my very last first week in Aeternum.

Day One: I fired up my stream to one viewer and logged into a 3000+ person queue at about 7:58 am. I was on the beach at about 11:30. Since I’ve already been through the level 1 to 30 line so many times I rushed through this, trying to progress as fast as possible. During previous beta’s my company was able to get into the server on launch, grind fast gold, and take territory pretty early in the game. This time however, the queue times really messed us up. A good number of our players were not able to log in. By the end of day one our server was all claimed except for Mourningdale.

There were a number of bug fixes implemented from the last beta test which was good since some of them were EXP exploits, however new and interesting bugs begin to rear their heads. Joining a party, a duel, or an excavation breaks your UI, resulting in tracking for resources and quests to stop working. Trying to filter your chat, or just playing can result in bugs as well, such as massive delays in chat appearing or feeds not appearing at all.

Some unexpected issues with the market surprised me. In the past, magical items sold at a good price right from the beginning, however by a few hours in almost every single piece of equipment is selling for just a skosh over breaking even, unless its a blue item near the 400 score. 

Open world PvP is largely unchanged, except that the level scaling is back to the closed beta levels, making fights more fair, which is a good thing. I was able to engage in multiple fights across the level 10-30 spectrum and had a great time overall with it. Our server is active, especially in terms of pvp and many people were running around flagged.

By the end of day one I was level 23, had completed amrine several times, and had inched my gathering skills up past 50 (except for fishing).

Maintenance comes early in the morning. I logged in for the next day but ended up crashing or losing my place in the queue. The players begin to afk walk to avoid auto kicks.

The following days really just blend together for me. I’ve always had terrible sleep schedules, but every time I do a full degenerate game release week it gets even worse. Days 2, 3 and 4 are a bizarre fever dream of mining blight crags, chasing bison, and kiting Simon and his adds around the final room of Amrine; all sliced and diced and mixed in with weird hour naps and vivid dreams of zombies and grassbears. 

I remember hitting a savage fatigue on Thursday, mostly due to getting stuck in multiple queues.

Friday and Saturday were more productive and I’m tearing through Weavers and as soon as I hit 40 i’ll be rank 3 in the Covenant, so fairly decent progress all things considered. There were a few other members of my company that also had time off and were able to progress further than I, specifically a pair of absolute grinders that reached 60 on thursday.

Goodbye for now, I’ll see you in the next one.