New World character progression has been revealed in a new blog post, detailing a myriad of ways that you'll be able to customize your experience in Amazon's upcoming MMORPG.
A few months back, the New World developers revealed a "classless" combat system where any one character could learn to use pretty much any weapon given enough time. Now, it looks like that "Learn by Doing" philosophy is going to apply to other areas, too — but not everywhere.
How Does New World Character Progression Work?
Your character in New World is going to have four parts of their character page: their Bio, Core Attributes, Weapon Mastery, and Trade Skills. The Bio will probably just be fluff (and wasn't really detailed in today's new information); the real meat of New World character progression is in the other three areas.
New World Core Attributes
Core Attributes are your standard "stats" that are in pretty much every role-playing game. Players will be able to respec them for free early on in the game; more experienced players will have to pay a fee.
Here are the stats:
- Strength - Enhances your damage with melee weapons; heavier weapons are heavily reliant on Strength.
- Dexterity - Enhances your effectiveness with ranged weapons. Lighter melee weapons require a mix of Strength and Dexterity.
- Intelligence - Governs your power with magical weapons and any magical perks they might have. Purely magical weapons like staves (and physical weapons with a magical perk) grow in power directly in relation to your Intelligence stat.
- Focus - Determines your Mana recovery rate and Skill Cooldowns.
- Constitution - Determines your overall health pool.
Using certain weapons will naturally entail aiming for the correct stats. That said, this seems like a pretty free-form system that lets players pick whatever path they'd like to without too much hassle.
New World Trade Skills
Trade Skills are used for making items (and subsequently earning money); these are further subdivided into three categories of their own.
Gathering Skills
Gathering Skills are exactly what they sound like: skills that let you collect a variety of materials in the game.
- Harvesting - Gather Fibers, Fruits, and Vegetables.
- Logging - Gather Wood.
- Mining - Gather Stone and Ore.
- Skinning - Gather Animal Hides.
As with many other MMOs, you'll be able to gather more valuable materials as you increased these skills.
Refining Skills
Refining skills let you make resources into crafting materials.
- Smelting - Refine Ore into Ingots.
- Stonecutting - Refine Stone into Blocks.
- Tanning - Refine Rawhide into Leather.
- Weaving - Refine Fibers into Cloth.
- Woodworking - Refine Wood into Lumber.
Crafting Skills
Finally, the last subset of New World Trade Skills is Crafting Skills; these take the items you've gathered and refined and let you make them into more complex things.
- Arcana - Arcanists craft potions, tinctures, and magical weapons.
- Armoring - Armorers craft soft and hard armors.
- Cooking - Cooks craft meals and drinks.
- Engineering - Engineers craft ranged weapons and ammunition.
- Furnishing - Furnishers craft furniture, storage, and trophies for houses.
- Jewelcrafting - Jewelcrafters craft trinkets.
- Weaponsmithing - Weaponsmiths craft melee weapons.
Weapon Mastery
Finally, Weapon Mastery is the mechanic that was detailed nearly three months ago and it looks like it works more or less how we expected. Using a weapon in combat will gain XP for that combat once the enemy is defeated. Each category of Weapon Mastery has two Skill Trees, each of which provides its own active abilities, passive abilities, and exclusive weapon bonuses.
You won't be able to unlock everything in both trees, but you will be able to respec however you like to fine-tune things just right. More details about Weapon Mastery will be revealed in the future.
Now that you know more about New World character progression, you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect when the game launches in just a few months. If this seems like your kind of jam, you can pre-purchase New World: Aeternum Awaits on Steam for $39.99 or your regional equivalent.
What do you think of New World character progression? Do you think Amazon's new MMO will be a success? Let us know in the comments below!
