New World’s combat is among a sea of problems the game is facing right now. The new Amazon-developed MMO has been beset by criticism since its release. The issues are many, and have led to more than half of the initial playerbase leaving the MMO. The devs are trying to bring people back by addressing player concerns. One of the core complaints revolves around a lack of polish in PvP.
Finally, in a post on the New World forums, combat lead Dave Hall shared that relief is coming. The design intent seems to be that they want a more dynamic PvP to be central to the gameplay experience. “We are currently working on weapon swap responsiveness and making sure that it is more consistent throughout all of our attacks, as we want swapping weapons to be an integral and fluid part of combat,” said Hall.
So, the ability to swap weapons is coming, much to the relief of players. But there’s more.
“Along with weapon swap, we are looking into our dodge cancel windows and attack input timings during recoveries of all of our attacks,” says the announcement. The devs acknowledge that there are “some inconsistencies that are not intended.” Players have been abusing this design failing by being able to cancel out of healing animations, letting them attack enemies sooner than they should be able to.
The remarks don’t reveal a release date for the overhaul, The only inclination we got was that it will be out when it’s done, with other changes on the way as well. For one thing, reworks of the territory-based PvP are coming “it’s in the works and on its way.”
New World’s combat is far from the only problem the game has had. The game had a very rough launch thanks to the massive spike in interest. But it wasn’t all good news after that either.
The many, many, bugs spotted by gamers enjoying the MMO quickly compounded. The issues ran the gamut from economic exploits to invulnerability bugs. Players could trade items and lose the items, or they could run into players that were unkillable in PvP. Various lesser bugs like animation issues and improper buff stacking were also seen.
A lot of these issues led to users speculating about the cause. Many outlets claimed that the client and server had been improperly coded, using a client-authoritative model. This is a problem in an MMO, as it allows for tons of bugs, as we saw in New World. Amazon devs later responded, rebuking the claims.
