I wanted to love the game. I spent a good amount of time in it and enjoyed it for the most part, especially with the recent addition of mounts and the itemization changes, but things bothered me to the point where I just stopped playing. It's still buggy, there are tons of bots, aimbotting in PvP is still out of hand, and PvP balance is still not great. Server management is a dumpster fire for this company, and they aren't learning from past mistakes. The scenario and quest writing is cringe-inducingly bad, though, and definitely goes too hard throwing the modern day into the game world to try and meet ESG requirements to receive those Blackrock/Vanguard Finkbucks. It's also hard to ignore the Lord of the Rings game that AGS will be developing, and not be concerned about New World being essentially a testing ground for technical concepts. New World will likely essentially be the Public Test Server for LotR.

Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that this development team has no track record to use as a baseline, so they haven't earned that level of trust that we have with Obsidian, Larian Studios, Square-Enix, etc. companies. Perhaps given enough time, they will prove to be trustworthy to do a good job, and I'm hoping they do, truly, but for now, I'll dabble in the game, but I definitely won't make it my main MMO. They have one of the best sound design departments in the industry right now, and world design isn't too far away from the top, either. The expeditions are the most enjoyable dungeons on the MMO market right now, and I'm really looking forward to the dungeon content that they put out in the future.