All this time you're helping other players, fulfilling orders that will develop a town, or filling the trading post with your surplus. If you're doing this in a territory controlled by your company, or another company in your faction, you'll receive both buffs and discounts, giving you more reasons to paint the map of Aeternum your colour. You'll also get these for just hanging out and doing stuff in specific territories, increasing your influence with them and getting to pick from a set of bonuses.

Helping hand

There are a few ways to support your faction. You can do town projects—craft this thing, hunt this thing—that contribute towards the growth of a settlement, allowing the company in charge to level up crafting stations and the like, in turn changing how the settlement actually looks. You can also embark on PvP quests that increase your faction's influence in a territory until you can declare war and flip it.

All the stuff these quests get you to do is rote and repetitive, but the reward for this busywork is a real sense that you're involved in something big. You're building up to a war, improving a town, and actually leaving a mark on the world. It's a small mark, sure, but combined with the efforts of your fellow players it can transform things dramatically. And the PvP quests, at least, are elevated whenever other players flagged for PvP show up. Gathering 100 wood isn't much of a quest, but gathering 100 wood while 20 players try to murder you? That's a bit more exciting.


My faction, the Syndicate, is the underdog of the server, with a real grudge against the dominant faction, the Covenant. Our conflicts with them have been so one-sided that there's now a conspiracy—which I'm sadly thoroughly invested in—suggesting that we've got a mole infestation. There's intrigue and paranoia, and it's the closest New World has come to feeling like a living world.

It's a shame, then, that the culmination of these conflicts, wars, are only for the privileged few. See, when your faction has enough influence in a territory, every company in the faction has an opportunity to declare war, with the winner chosen by a lottery system. The company that gets to declare war also gets to take the settlement for themselves, and gets to choose who actually gets to fight in the big siege and when. Since the lottery is weighted towards companies that contribute the most, it's always going to be the biggest and most active companies getting to decide who plays. And if you're not in that company, your chances of participating are greatly diminished. Even if you are picked, you can be kicked at any time, all based on the whims of strangers.

This threatens to turn the compelling faction rivalry into a fight between a few different companies—there are only 11 territories up for grabs, and companies can claim more than one—leaving everyone else on the outside begging for scraps. The other PvP mode, Outpost Rush, doesn't need to be scheduled by a company and anyone can play, but only once they've hit level 60. It's a long time to wait. At the time of writing, the mode has actually been disabled due to a queue bug, and thus has been inaccessible for over a week.


World War

At least the world PvP has almost no restrictions, and it's where the most fun can be had. My most memorable experience in New World was a 5-hour PvP session that saw me jumping all over the world trying to throw territories into conflict, accompanied by hordes of Syndicate pals. It's genuinely a thrill to see a quiet grove thrown into disarray as a murderous train of bloodthirsty players charge into it on a PvP quest. And you can even get a taste of the war mode's sieges. Every territory has a fort with dense fortifications and even some defensive structures for attackers to hide behind as they exchange musket fire.

But even during these large-scale scraps there are frustrations. The fights are an absolute clusterfuck with this many players, so you just jump in and hope for the best, but the game might decide that, actually, there are too many players trying to have fun right now. Half of my attempts to fight in forts have met with failure because there's a limit to the number of players not just inside a fort, but around it. If you charge in, you're given 10 seconds to leave the zone or you'll be unceremoniously teleported all the way back to the nearest settlement.


While reaching the endgame rewards you with some new dungeons and territories to quest in, I'm so tired of New World's half-hearted PvE that I'm only really interested in continuing the conflict between the factions. Unfortunately, even that's not currently enough to make me stick around. It's been fun to be an underdog for a while, but that enjoyment starts to wither when you realise there are so few opportunities to improve your faction's position. With fewer territories and new players not wanting to join the losing side, all you get is a slow decline. There's just a sense of hopelessness, with the main companies now planning on jumping to another server.

New World's attempt to tick all the boxes has left it feeling scattershot and underbaked. The PvE is the main victim, which seems to exist purely out of obligation. But the sandbox, with its competing factions and hypnotic crafting loop, kept me logging back in, at least for a couple of hundred hours. There's still enjoyment to be had, then, and the busy servers make this the best time to experience what New World actually does well, but now that I've seen all it has to offer, I don't feel a compulsion to continue.