/blog

My wife has been playing New World for a little while and convinced me to join her. I bought it through Steam yesterday and sat down this afternoon to see what it's like.

Visually it's great, the world is well crafted, animation is smooth and everything looks wonderful. The gameplay is relatively simple compared to a lot of other MMORPGs – there seem to be less buttons to press for a start. I'm not yet sure whether that is a blessing or a curse.

I have a tendency to compare any game of this type to World of Warcraft, it's absolutely not fair and I shouldn't, but having played WoW almost exclusively for so long it's unavoidable. That's not, however, the reason I'm unsure about New World.

I don't know if it's having to get used to a new system, or the age old problem of levelling your character, but I found myself getting a bit bored while playing. The game is more fluid than WoW allowing you to choose how you want to play (whether you focus on the main story, help build up the town you make home, or decide to concentrate on your faction) but I seem to be struggling with that aspect. Maybe it's just "different" and that's what is causing me an issue.

I was indecisive about buying it, concerned that I wouldn't be able to devote the time a game of this type typically demands, but my wife said that its flexibility means you don't have to worry about racing to max level in order to complete gated content. You can be more casual than when playing WoW. This flexibility, though, leaves me feeling unfocused, unsure of how best to progress.

I feel a bit lost.

I likely need to spend more time with it to gain a greater affinity for its style. My character is still low level and I seem to be finding combat difficult. I've written in the past about how my brain seems to have mental blocks on using too many controls but those blocks extend to new control sets. I have issues with getting the right fingers to press the right buttons which is why I'm mainly a clicker but the playstyle of New World doesn't allow for that – the mouse buttons are attack and block, nothing more, meaning everything else is keyboard based.

I'm determined to give it a chance as there have been so many games I've dropped because of these types of issues. New World avoids a lot of the traps other games fall into when trying to be "the next WoW" – I just need to give it a fair shot.

I've been watching Dave Winer's work on his new outlining/blogging tool ¹, Drummer, with interest having dived into the oft murky waters of building your own system.

Not having a Twitter account (and not wishing to create one) I can't test it. I don't blame Dave for using Twitter as an authentication/identification system. As he explains:

"I use Twitter for identity because they have a nice API that scales, and they have kept it open for this kind of use for many years. In all that time, they didn't change their mind because of new management, didn't deprecate anything, it just keeps running reliably."

It's just a shame that this is the only way you can use his tools. There's no way I would ever use it long term having switched to, and invested so much in, (b)log-In but having a look would be nice. I'll have to live vicariously through the thoughts of others.

I've never been a user of outliners so am not sure about using one for blogging. It obviously works well as Dave has been writing that way for years but seems, based on the comments of others, a bit of an acquired taste. Still, as Manton says: "It's not going to work for everyone, but we need more experiments. Tool diversity is an open web strength." No blogging system is perfect or right, no tool can be everything to everyone – that's where WordPress has gone wrong. If you build your own you can make it close to perfect for YOU but that's as far as it goes.

One feature of Drummer that I like the sound of (and that Dave has built into each of his outliners since the mid 90's) is the Glossary – a TextExpander style system that "associates terms with text" and auto replaces them. I think that could be a cool thing to have in (b)log-In.

I would need to create a new database table to store the 'trigger/text' pairs, an interface to create/edit/delete them, an a new content filter to render the replacement text at display-time. It would be pretty simple to reuse existing code to achieve this. I just don't know how often I'd use it. 😂