New World Beginner's Guide - How to Play & Tips

Have you ever wanted to play an MMORPG that blends conquistador era and magic, non-target combat and territory wars? Then this New World beginners guide 2024 is for you.

Released in 2021, New World is the MMORPG of the western-school, featuring a more grounded fantasy world inspired by colonial America. The setting and the faction wars makes this game stand out from games set in high fantasy setting. New World is defined by its non-target, skill-based combat and a big emphasis on faction wars, player-based economy and complex crafting professions. There’s no surprise that, originally this game was planned to be a survival game, which was remade into what it is today.

In this guide we’ll give you an overview of the game, how it works, it’s systems and answer questions like how to get better at New World, if you’re a new player. We’re not going to be focusing much on the setting and the story itself, although, it is a big part of the game. Instead, we’ll focus on gameplay system, weapons, activities, progression, etc.

Before we dive into it all, if you want to start the game having a starting capital, great gear and strong character, you can buy New World Expansion Starter Pack at Skycoach. With this bundle you can completely ignore the boring and tedious leveling process, and jump straight into the most exciting part of the game - endgame content. Our professional gamers will complete a set of tasks giving your character everything it needs to enter the endgame. Place the order today, the high-level activities await!

 

New World Gameplay

Normally, we would spend some time describing the character creation process, but for this New World gaming guide, we’re going to jump straight into the gameplay process. The reason for that is, unlike in most other MMORPG games, you don’t need to select the class that you will have to stick to for the rest of your playthrough. New World features a class-less system, where your role is determined by the combination of weapons, skills, and armor you have equipped on your character. Therefore, during the character creation, all you do is decide on the character’s appearance and name.

New World Combat System

One of the most defining features of this game is its skill-based non-target system, which we’ve already mentioned before. If you’re wondering about how to get good at New World, you should look into weapons and their skills.

The way non-target combat works, is you have to use your mouse (and soon the right stick of the controller) to aim at your enemy and keep them in focus as if you were playing a single-player game.

We’ll get to describing some weapons a bit later in our New World new player guide, but what’s important here is that each weapon has skill trees. But you can only have 3 active skills available to you in combat at any given time. Besides the 3 skills, you have your:

• Light attack - the most basic form of attack, can be used in a combo of 3 attacks with various properties like - slash, stab, swirl, etc.
• Heavy attack - by holding the attack button, you’ll charge your next attack, dealing more damage and basic stuff.
• Block / Aim - you can block with any melee weapon which will absorb some amount of damage or aim for more precision if you’re using any ranged weapon.
• Evade - evasion lets you roll to the sides or backward whenever you’re in combat to avoid being hit.

This New World basics setup leads to a simple yet dynamic combat system where you have to think about your actions and react to your enemy’s behavior.

New World Weapons

Want to know how to play New World? Then, you need to understand how weapons work. New World features 15 types of weapons, each with its own skill tree, a set of active skills, and tactical uses. You can equip any two weapons, which will give you a unique set of 6 active skills that will define your combat style and, to some extent, your role in a group setting: BLOG20

1. Blunderbuss - is a heavy-ranged weapon reminiscent of a shotgun
2. Bow - a classic ranged weapon with the ability to shoot arrows quickly or with greater precision
3. Fire Staff - allows you to cast all kinds of fire-based spells or use it as a plain flamethrower!
4. Flail - a melee weapon with attacks that can cover a bigger range.
5. Great Axe - a powerful weapon with AoE and charging attacks
6. Greatsword - a newer addition to the arsenal that scales with strength and dexterity
7. Hatchet - a quick-hitting weapon with the ability to use ranged attacks
8. Ice Gauntlet - a magical ranged weapon with the ability to debuff enemies
9. Life Staff - a mostly utility weapon that allows you to heal targets or yourself
10. Musket - a precision-based ranged weapon
11. Rapier - a melee weapon with fast lunge attacks, often referred to as the strongest weapon in New World in many
12. similar tier lists.
13. Spear - a crowd-control and AoE melee weapon with extended range.
14. Sword and Shield - a classic weapon duo for tanks
15. Void Gauntlets - specializes in DoT magical attacks
16. Warhammer - a melee weapon that specializes in a wide-arc attack as well as stuns, knockbacks, and slows.

All weapons encourage you to create a unique New World strategy and combat style, which is why so many gamers love this game’s combat system.

New World Gearing Explained 

Moving on to the next section of our New World starting guide dedicated to gearing. There are a lot of equipable items that you can have on your character. Those types of items include:

All of these items contribute to the gear score, which is a number that represents your character’s gear overall power. The higher the number, the stronger your character is and the more damage they deal. This, of course, is layered on top of your classic character levels.

 

There are two important things to know about all gear if you want to know how to start New World like a pro. All items have rarities from the most common to Legendary:

1. Common - item has no perks
2. Uncommon - item has 1 perk
3. Rare - item has 2 perk
4. Epic - item has 3 perk
5. Legendary and Named - set of curated perks

Obviously, you have to look for rarer items with higher gear scores. It’s a bit more complicated than that because you have to take into account your stats and choose weapons and armor that benefit from your core attributes, but more on that later.

 

The second important thing to keep in mind about gear is the fact that gear has weight, even ammo and all the miscellaneous trash that you accumulate during your adventures. You have a maximum load a few thresholds, exceeding which will make your evasions slower. So, one of the New World tips that’s unique to this game is - make sure free your inventory regularly in order to avoid over encumbrance. BLOG20

New World Character Progression 

This part of the New World beginner guide is dedicated to character progression, which is the cornerstone of your experience in the game. Like most things in New World, the character progression is simple and streamlined, making it easy to understand. There are only 3 systems here:

1. Core Attributes- 5 attributes that represent your character’s proficiency in different areas.
2. Trade Skills - a combination of gathering, refining, and crafting skills that are upgraded passively
3. Weapon mastery - weapon leveling system where you unlock skills on the skill tree by using chosen weapon in combat.

These systems combined represent the character progression. Now, let’s take a look at each of these a bit closer.

Core Attributes

These attributes influence your weapon damage, defense, and even the type of armor you can wear effectively. Here’s one bit of New World tips for beginners - you can specialize in one attribute for a focused build or distribute points among several to create a hybrid character. Let’s see what each of them means:

1. Strength - increase the damage of most melee weapons
2. Dexterity - increases the damage of all ranged weapons and some melee weapons
3. Intelligence - increases the damage of magical attacks
4. Focus - increases mana regeneration and reduces ability cooldown
5. Constitution - increases maximum health

Every time you level up, you get one point that you can invest into one of these 5 attributes. Be mindful that different weapons scale with different attributes.

Trade Skills

This isn’t the New World complete guide, so we won’t be going into too much detail regarding the trade skills. We’ll just give you a quick summary. Gathering Skills encompass Mining, Skinning, Logging, Fishing, and Harvesting, allowing players to gather various resources like stone, ore, hides, wood, fish, fibers, fruits, and vegetables. As skill levels increase, players can detect valuable resources and find special modifiers for crafting.

Refining Skills include Smelting, Stonecutting, Woodworking, Tanning, and Weaving. These skills refine gathered resources into higher-level crafting materials such as ingots, blocks, lumber, leather, and cloth. Higher skill levels increase resource efficiency, granting a chance for extra refined materials.  BLOG20

Crafting Skills comprise Weaponsmithing, Armoring, Jewelcrafting, Engineering, Arcana, Cooking, and Furnishing. Each skill specializes in crafting specific items like melee weapons, armor, trinkets, ranged weapons, potions, meals, furniture, and decorations. Advancing crafting skills unlock more recipes and enhanced versions thereof.

Weapon Mastery

Your character is not the only one who gets XP. Your weapons also have levels (20 is the max lvl). Each time you level up a weapon, you can invest 1 skill point into one of two skill trees and unlock a skill. The weapon skill trees represent two distinct playstyles, and they include both passive and active skills. Here’s the list of weapons and their weapon skill trees:

Remember, you can't unlock everything at once. There are more perks (38) than skill points (19) available per weapon. So, plan your build and strategically invest points to fit your combat role (tank, damage dealer, support).

In-game Activities

With such a dynamic combat system and complex gear and progression systems, what is there to do in the game? With the release of Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, the new player experience has been revamped. There are a lot of game activities in which you can participate in both PvE and PvP game modes. Let’s have a look:

• PvE:
  
  • Revamped Story - questing and zone progression have been updated to provide a cohesive and fun experience for new and returning players. Completing main quests is, arguably, the best way to level up.
  • Expeditions - these are your classic 5-player dungeons where you enter an instance and go through a set of encounters and challenges.
  • Mutations - are dungeons with random affixes that provide an extra layer of challenge.
  • Events - the game features a bunch of seasonal events, each with its own activities and reward tracks.
• PvP:
  
  • Open World PvP - when you join one of 3 factions in the game, you open the doors to the neverending conflict that lets you challenge any player of the opposition faction to the duel. Or you can turn on the pvp flag and have at it!
  • Wars - massive castle sieges with attacking and defending sides who fight to dominate a territory on the map
  • Influence Race - a precursor to wars, these races are medium-scale battles over key points called the Influence Towers.
  • Outpost Rush - is another type of faction war skirmish for 40 players.
  • 3v3 arenas - a more condensed and competitive form of PvP battles.

Between these activities and complex crafting systems with a player-driven economy, you can do and be virtually anyone in this game.

New World Tips and Tricks

For New World tips for new players, we’ve compiled a set of 10 tips that cover mechanics that are unique to the game itself. You can treat this as a list of things you probably didn’t know about:

1. “Repair all” does not repair your inventory; you need to manually repair items in your inventory that are not equipped.
2. Locking items to avoid salvaging them is the way to go, especially with luck and gathering gear.
3. You can't socket certain gems on items that have a chain effect; you can only socket the same damage type.
4. Use the trading post to transfer items without paying high storage shed transfer costs.
5. Loot every supply chest you see, as you'll need the materials later on.
6. Keep all tuning orb materials, as you'll need them to access dungeons.
7. Follow the one-two rule: spend one hour leveling gathering and crafting, and two hours doing town boards and questing.
8. Don't be frugal with gold; spend it on town board items to smooth out the leveling experience.
9. Cooking is an excellent source of experience; crafting rations can provide significant leveling progress.
10. Keep up with your faction missions to unlock the next tier of rewards and gear.
11. Stick with a few weapons and level them up as you go to be more effective in combat.

In this list of New World tips and tricks we tried to cover as many game aspects as possible while naming specifically those that are most omitted by new players.

Conclusion

New World is an exciting MMORPG with super simple mechanics and a fun combat system. It does most things differently from classic games of the same genre, and it tries to balance PvE and PvP content instead of focusing on one and neglecting the other.

For this guide, we’ve covered pretty much everything there’s if you want to know how to start playing New World as a beginner. While we could go deeper on things like crafting and trading, these topics are too big to include in one beginner’s guide. Once you know how the combat and progressions work in this game, you can consider yourself ready to dive into the game and try it out for yourself. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in the next one.

F.A.Q.

Is New World Easy for Beginners?

New World can be challenging for beginners due to its complex mechanics and open-world nature. However, with patience, practice, and guidance from experienced players or resources like tutorials and guides, beginners can gradually improve their skills and become more comfortable navigating the game world.

How Do Beginners Get Better at New World?

• Focus on Fundamental Skills: Prioritize learning basic mechanics such as combat, crafting, and gathering.
• Seek Guidance: Joining a supportive guild or community can provide valuable advice and assistance.
• Experiment and Learn: Don't be afraid to try different playstyles and strategies to discover what works best for you.
• Utilize Resources: Take advantage of in-game tutorials, forums, and online guides to deepen your understanding of game mechanics and strategies.

Is New World Hard for New Players?

New World can present challenges for new players, particularly those unfamiliar with MMORPGs or open-world games. However, with dedication, patience, and a willingness to learn, new players can overcome these challenges and enjoy the rich gameplay experience that New World offers.

What Is the Best Way to Start New World?

• Complete Tutorial: Begin by completing the in-game tutorial to familiarize yourself with basic mechanics.
• Explore: Take your time to explore the game world, complete quests, discover landmarks, and gather resources.
• Join a Faction: Choose a faction to join early on, as faction quests and activities offer valuable rewards and progression opportunities.
• Experiment: Try out different weapons, crafting professions, and playstyles to find what suits your preferences.

Is New World Beginner Friendly?

While New World offers a rich and immersive gaming experience, it may not be immediately accessible to all beginners due to its complexity. However, the game does provide tutorials, tooltips, and other resources to help new players learn the ropes and gradually become more comfortable with its mechanics.

Is New World Hard to Play?

New World's gameplay can be challenging due to its emphasis on player skill, resource management, and strategic decision-making. However, with perseverance and a willingness to learn, players can overcome these challenges and find success in the game.

What Should I Do as a Beginner in New World?

• Complete Quests: Focus on completing quests to earn experience, gold, and gear.
• Gather Resources: Spend time gathering resources like wood, ore, and herbs to support crafting and progression.
• Level Crafting Skills: Invest in crafting professions to create valuable items and equipment.
• Join a Company: Consider joining a player-run company (guild) to socialize, collaborate on objectives, and gain support from experienced players.

Is It Easy to Start New World?

Starting New World is relatively straightforward, as the game provides a tutorial to introduce basic mechanics and controls. However, mastering the game's deeper mechanics and progressing through its content may require time, effort, and dedication.

Is New World Good for New Players?

New World can be an enjoyable experience for new players, offering immersive gameplay, a vibrant game world, and opportunities for exploration and social interaction. While it may present challenges initially, new players can find satisfaction in overcoming obstacles and progressing in the game.