When AGS nerfed elite areas in New World, the players asked to see the devs actually play these zones and now they have actually obliged the request.
New World has been bleeding players ever since the release but arguably the biggest storm of problems arose when the devs introduced a bunch of changes that increased the grind and made the endgame more of a snoozefest around the time of Into the Void update. This was the tipping point for many players in the community and they genuinely started wondering whether the devs actually played the game because some of the changes felt extremely out of touch.
One set of such changes was to the elite zones when the enemies became extremely spongy on top of suddenly hitting like a convoy of trucks while the loot was massively nerfed and the watermark grind became even worse. At this point, the players were requesting to see the devs actually play Myrkgard, one of the most popular elite zones in New World.
Roughly one month later, they released a video of 10 developers going through Myrkgard and while a large part of the community was amazed the developers went through with the request, it's important to remember their run proved how terrible those changes to elite zones were in the first place.
To sum the almost-hour-long video in a few bullet points, the AGS team:
- Went into Myrkgard with Gear Score of around 508
- Skipped a portal
- Wiped on another portal
- Spent almost an hour in the area
- Spent a pile of consumables that made the returns questionable
- Didn't fully finish the run
- Played on a PTR build
These are some of the most important details of the run, encapsulating the experience a max level New Player can expect when attempting to push their Gear Score up.
A zone whose tooltip on the map recommends bringing a team of five was kind of done by 10 of them. Portals, the most problematic part of the run proved too hard for the developers too and they skipped one altogether, all while spending several hundred gold worth of consumables with the only payoff being moving an arbitrary ceiling of the maximum gear level that can drop for the character.
Granted, the devs went in there with Gear Score lower than you would normally see in this zone but keep in mind that the tier five consumables they used are not the standard for regular players. If you spend all that money for the honing stones, coatings and attribute food, it gets really hard to justify the worth of the run in the first place.
In other words, the whole ordeal is quite excruciating for the players because you would need to do this type of run hundreds of times in order to max out the watermark, or rather expertise as they call it now, and it's hard to argue there is fun to be had in such design.
More importantly, the video features gameplay from the PTR build where the enemies are toned back down. They are at a fraction of the power they were at when players started complaining and asking whether AGS even knew what is going on in their own game.
Credit where credit's due - it is really cool to see the devs actually went with it and did the run but the difficulty they faced while fighting weakened mobs confirmed what the players saw all the way back in November 2021 - the Myrkgard mob buff back then missed the mark by a mile and the recorded run by AGS only serves to confirm it.
