New World Beta Guide – Everything You Need To Know

With New World’s beta coming next week, I figured now would be an awesome time to put together a massive guide to help anyone interested in the game learn more about it. This MMORPG is shaping up to make a large splash in the genre and you don’t want to be left behind! Read through the sections below to make sure you hit the ground running when the closed beta and launch date arrives.

00:59 – General
03:38 – Questing
06:20 – Gear
09:21 – Character Progression
10:53 – Combat
12:01 – Classes (classless system)
13:59 – Factions
15:28 – Crafting
17:27 – PvP & PvE
23:35 – Summary

00:59 – General

Starting with some general information, the closed beta for New World begins on July 20th on Steam, and it’s only available on PC. The beta will end on August 2nd, which is roughly two weeks of game time. If you would like to get access, then you have two methods:

  • You can sign up for a chance to get in on the official Newworld.com website.
  • You can preorder the game for $40 and get guaranteed access.

If you preorder through Amazon, you will not be charged for the game until launch, so you can take a few weeks to preorder, play the beta, and then decide. If you preorder through Steam, you’ll be charged immediately. If you were someone who pre-ordered for free back in 2016, you’ll get an email with a Steam key from Amazon to download.

No Subscription Model

When it comes to recurring subscriptions, New World decided to buck that trend and simply charge folks a one-time fee for a boxed copy just like Guild Wars 2 does. There will be a cash shop in the game, but after community pushback, New World removed the Experience Boosts and other pay-to-win items. So, it will be just skins and cosmetic items.

Game

So what is New World? Isn’t it a survival PvP Game?

Not exactly. New World is no longer a survival sandbox or PvP-centric MMO, it is now closer to a traditional MMO with a heavy emphasis on crafting, PvP warfare, exploration, and dungeon delving.

It takes place on a supernatural island called Aeternum and it is home to all kinds of weird creatures, beasts, and corruption. The map is divided into 12 zones, each of which can be captured and claimed by factions. When a faction claims a territory, it will receive a special bonus that is faction-wide.

One glaring issue that some people have is that there are no mounts in the game, which has people like Asmongold having a hard time justifying playing. But the devs understand this is a big desire and are working on a solution. So in order to get around quickly, you can use the Fast Travel system. You can either recall to your last Inn, which is on a one-hour cooldown timer, or you can use a currency known as Azoth to fast travel to any settlement you’ve been to.

03:38 – Questing

When it comes to leveling up to 60, you can do it in a combination of ways. There are Faction missions, town projects, side missions, and the main story quests. Now the main story quests are spread out across your journey to 60 and won’t always be right after one another, so you will need to do some leveling in-between them. And to do this, you have a variety of different experience sources to choose from.

Faction Missions

Faction missions are opened up at level 10 when you first choose a faction to join. We’ll dive deeper into factions here in a little bit, but these are quick tasks that will ask the player to do simple tasks and are split into two categories: PvE and PvP. For the PvE Tasks, you’ll need to kill a certain number of enemies, collect a number of trinkets, or clear an area. For PvP, it’s often traveling to another settlement, clearing an area, or gathering something. Most of them are quick to complete but are often spread out around the settlement you picked them up in.

Once you complete these, they’ll reward you with experience as well as a currency that you can use to purchase faction-specific gear. I personally like the look of the Covenant and Syndicate, very plague doctor and witch hunter-looking.

Town Projects

Another source of experience are the town projects found on the bulletin board near the town hall. They’re full of random tasks similar to Faction quests, though these will involve crafting, gathering, and slaying. You can complete these however you like.

If you have the money, you can simply purchase the crafted items or materials from the auction house and quickly turn them in. At the end of the day, all that matters is that you actually have the item. In terms of experience, this is the best way to level up outside of the main story missions. These are quick to complete and give MASSIVE amounts of experience compared to faction missions.

Side Missions

Side missions can be found within each settlement, often linked to some form of side progression, whether it is leveling up your campsite or unlocking a new gear slot for your character.

Main Missions

These missions are milestones within your leveling journey and will often come with some big unlock that will enhance your character. This can be a new weapon slot or gear slot. Like I mentioned earlier, these will become spread out as you level up, so you’ll need to do some grinding in-between to bridge them.

06:20 – Gear

When it comes to gear within New World, you’re looking at a pretty standard arsenal. You have a slew of weapons to choose from that range in the typical rainbow of rarities from common to legendary. As items become rarer, they gain more affixes and bonuses which make them more powerful. Now, don’t expect anything crazy like you’d find in an isometric action RPG, but still, these will be things like increasing all void damage or causing you to reduce cooldowns whenever you deal damage.

Slots:

  • 2 Weapons slots.
  • 5 Armor slots.
  • Helm, body, legs, gloves, feet.
  • 3 accessory slots.
  • 3 bag slots.
  • A shield slot.

7:03 – Pro tip: Take off your shield if you’re not using a sword. It adds extra weight and pushes you into a heavier category.

Weight

When you wear armor, you have three different types to equip:

  1. Light
  2. Medium
  3. Heavy

Depending on how you mix these up, you’ll settle into a light, medium, or heavy weight category. These will determine your dodge and passive bonuses.

If you manage to stay in the light category, you’ll have a further dodge and deal 20% increased damage, but you’ll take more damage.

If you are in the medium category, you’ll deal 10% increased damage and your debuffs will last 10% longer. But your dodge is only a short side hop.

And if you’re heavy, your dodge is a very slow sidestep, but you have high damage mitigation, and your block stability is increased by 15%, plus debuffs you apply last 20% longer.

So as you can see, depending on what role you want to be you need to adjust your gear to match. This isn’t set in stone and if you want to be a DPS that wears all heavy, go ahead!

Duffel Bags

Outside of your armor weight, you also have inventory weight for crafting materials, inventory weapons, etc. And you’ll quickly fill up that space once you get going in the game. Along the way, you’ll unlock new bag slots for duffel bags and cases that will increase your carry capacity. It’s important to keep an eye on your inventory weight because if you go over, you’ll become encumbered and will move extremely slow, plus it’ll cost more resources to fast travel.

To avoid this, you can take advantage of the storage shed in each settlement. These are essentially your bank. They do have their own capacity, however, so be sure to keep an eye on that as well. Another thing to note is that these are NOT linked and each one is completely separate. So, if you store something in Everfall, it will not be available in Monarch’s Bluff. You’ll need to load up, then fast travel to move things around.

09:21 – Character Progression

When it comes to progressing in New World, we talked about questing and leveling up, but what do you get when you level up? Well, each level will give you three attribute points to spend in a variety of categories to help define your character. These are important because they will directly influence your combat effectiveness with weapon types.

Combat Attributes

These attributes are:

  • Strength, which increases damage of Swords, Axes, Warhammers and slightly increases Dexterity-based weapons.
  • Dexterity, which increases the damage of Rapiers, Muskets, Bows, Spears, and slightly increases Strength-based weapons.
  • Intelligence, which increases the damage of Staves and Gauntlets, but also the effectiveness of any magical perks your weapons might have, like dealing fire damage.
  • Focus, this dictates your mana regeneration rate and increases your Life Staff effectiveness.
  • Constitution, this increases your overall health pool. Want more health? Dump points here.

All of these can be reset freely until level 20, so you can get a good idea of what each one does and how they affect the weapons you like to use. However, after level 20 it will cost gold and it increases each time.

10:53 – Combat

The core of the game revolves around the combat system and the direction they went is different from most other MMOs out there. Combat is an action-based system where you need to manage stamina to block, use light attacks, heavy attacks, and skills. This is not a tab-target game.

So, it’s important to be able to time enemy attacks and not just spam them because you’ll be punished pretty quickly for doing so. Now, get confused. This isn’t Dark Souls or some level of insanity where each fight feels like a boss battle. But it is definitely more interactive than World of Warcraft, where you can jump an enemy and nuke them to oblivion with a quick rotation.

In-between all your light and heavy attacks are your skills, these are determined by your weapon type and what skills you chose to invest in with something called mastery points, which we’ll get into in a moment. But first, let’s talk about classes.

12:01 – Classes (Classless System)

New World features a classless system where your class is defined by what type of armor and weapons you’re using. If you want to play a quick, rogue-like character, then wear light armor and use a hatchet or rapier along with a bow. If you want to be the tank of the party, then wear heavy gear and use a sword and shield along with a great axe. There are tons of different ways to build your characters by equipping different gear for different strengths and weaknesses.

New World offers a mastery system for weapons that give players two skill trees per weapon to invest points into. These trees are typically split into two playstyles, some are split between PvP and PvE, others are split between dealing damage or healing. You can split your points between these two trees or decide to go all-in on one or the other. At the end of the day, these define how your character uses that weapon. One plus here is that each of these weapon trees can be reset until level 20, giving you enough time to experiment and find a pair that you really like.

The weapons you’ll have at your disposal are:

  • Warhammer
  • Great axe
  • Life Staff
  • Fire Staff
  • Sword
  • Rapier
  • Spear
  • Hatchet
  • Bow
  • Musket
  • Ice Gauntlet
  • Shield

All of these can be paired up with another weapon except for the shield. The shield is an off-hand that can only be used with the sword, and unfortunately, there is no dual-wielding in New World at this time. Surprisingly, there are also no daggers, halberds, pistols, or wands, though we do have some screenshots with a few of these seen. So maybe they’ll be coming in a later content update?

13:59 – Factions

Next, I want to talk about Factions, since these are a huge part of the game and will be the first major decision you will make at level 10. Now don’t get anxious, you can switch every 120 days and will be able to move if you need to. However, this is still a huge choice because if you want to play with friends, you need to make sure you all pick the same faction, else you’ll be opponents out in the world and will not be able to enter the same forts and such. There are three factions you get to choose from:

  • Marauders: The military-focused faction looking to dominate and control through strength of arms.
  • Covenant: The religious fanatics who do everything in the name of the light.
  • Syndicate: The secretive, illuminati-style faction that is all about subterfuge and deception.

The choice of faction is huge because it will align you with that faction’s efforts, like being able to take advantage of certain perks depending on what zone you control, or maybe a certain faction has strength in numbers and can easily win wars. These are considerations to weigh when choosing. Heck, maybe you just like the look of a certain one and that’s cool too.

15:28 – Crafting

If you were to ask me what one of the most talked-about features of New World is, I would have Crafting near the top of my list. The crafting system that this game has come up with is just fantastic. It reminds me of Old School Runescape in a way. It’s simple in its design, but deep in its execution with a range of things you can do. For those people like me who just want to chill and work on some trade skills, like logging or mining, you can totally do that. I remember some great times lobbing with some other players around just chatting about stuff. I can totally see New World Fishing hitting that same vibe. Anyway, long story short, the gathering stuff is really laid back and fun to do, but the actual crafting portion is well thought out.

When you’re creating items, you have all your materials but can also add a special resource called “Azoth” to increase your chances of a higher rarity or crafting an item with a gem slot.

So what Trade skills are there?

In terms of Gathering you have:

  • Mining
  • Skinning
  • Logging
  • Fishing
  • Harvesting

For Refining you have:

  • Smelting
  • Stonecutting
  • Woodworking
  • Tanning
  • Weaving

For actual crafting you have:

  • Weaponsmithing
  • Armoring
  • Jewelcrafting
  • Engineering
  • Arcana
  • Cooking
  • Furnishing

As you level up these crafting skills, you’ll gain access to better and more powerful recipes. So, it’s important to at the very least specialize in the ones that benefit your playstyle, but keep in mind, there’s no limit to these and you can work on as many skills as you would like.

Let’s move into the last two categories, PvP and PvE game modes.

17:27 – PvP Modes

When New World was first announced, it was touted as a survival PvP sandbox. Then it moved to a PvP-centric MMO, now it’s just a normal MMO with completely opt-in PvP, meaning that if you have PvP turned off, you CANNOT fight other players and cannot be ganked. Some like this, some don’t. But they did implement some PvP modes to make up for it.

Duel

First up is Duels. These are your classic 1v1 showdown that can be declared at any time between two players, even on the same faction.

Outpost Rush

Outpost Rush is the most recent mode that was announced. This sends 40 players to an island to take part in a 20 vs 20 match to control three outposts, gather resources, craft siege weapons, and kill bosses on the map for special buffs. It looks fun, but we’ll have to see more once the beta is here.

War

When a Faction loses control over a territory, it’s pushed into a contested state. At this point, other factions can declare War for that territory. This is a 100 vs 100 battle that will have the faction that controls the territory defending their fort, while the opposing faction tries to take it from them. If they can take it, then they will own that zone and reap its benefits. If the losing faction wants to retake it, then they’ll need to push the territory into a contested state and declare war themselves. This will be a regular thing for guilds and factions vying over the best zone buffs.

Open World PvP (Opt In)

Lastly, we have good old-fashioned open world PvP that simply requires two players from opposing factions to both opt into PvP and then run into each other out in the world.

PvE Modes

When it comes to PvE offerings, New World was incredibly scarce during its last open beta. So much so that it went back into alpha status to correct this. Luckily, what they have come up with looks much better than what they had a year ago.

Expeditions

The most recent addition is their version of dungeons called Expeditions. These are 5-man instances where you tackle traditional dungeon content, complete with trash mobs, bosses, and loot to collect. Right now there are 6 of these available:

  • Amrine Temple
  • Garden of Genesis
  • Lazarus Instrumentality
  • Dynasty Shipyard
  • Shattered Obelisk
  • The Depths

Arenas

The single offering they had last year is still there, which is the arena where players faced off against a single high-level boss called the Spriggan. And while this was a neat idea, the fight was boring and devolved into a simple kite and dps encounter.

These arenas are hidden battlegrounds where players need to find a key that allows them to enter. Once they do, the key is consumed and the battle begins. These are balanced towards 5 players.

Corrupted Breaches

The next PvE event takes place in the open world. Corrupted breaches will open up all across the zones over time and these will be guarded by corrupted enemies who are stronger than your normal wolf or drowned. These enemies are also shrouded in a mist that will slowly decrease your corruption resistance, which means you need to either have a resistance potion or be able to kite them out of the mist to avoid taking extra damage.

Invasions

The last PvE mode is one that we heard a lot about and then suddenly nothing.

Invasions are scheduled events that take place with 50 players defending a fort from corrupted enemies. Players will need to craft siege weapons, use strategy, and fortify their teammates to hold off the army of creatures trying to break down the doors. If the creatures manage to win, the territory suffers and loses some upgrades, such as crafting stations, and fort protection.

Throughout the invasion, you will be dealing with a variety of enemies who focus on certain tasks:

  • The grunts will swarm and attempt to take down players; they are weak individually but strong in groups.
  • Raiders are the tough infantry who focus on taking down as many players as they can.
  • Snipers will form the back line and deal damage to players from a distance, attempting to soften the defenses so the raiders and grunts can easily pick off wounded players.
  • Bombers are as they sound. They will run at structures and blow themselves up to crumble your fort.
  • Brutes are massive beasts who are purely looking to destroy any structure but will attack players if they pull enough aggro.
  • Bosses will be summoned during these invasions as well, with some focused on structures while others will be focused on killing players

If players survive the time limit, then they win the battle and earn experience, currency, and loot.

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