Crag Boars Discover New World

Before we had begun our assault on Diablo, the decision had been made to try out a new title, and the title being suggested was New World.

Welcome to a New World

New World had the advantage of being a new title that we hadn’t played… I had dabbled a bit, but as things played out it became clear I had learned very little of the game… that was past its initial point of craziness… queues and other initial teething issues seemed mostly in the past… that also wasn’t $60 to purchase and didn’t have a monthly subscription.

So off we went.  The first thing was to pick a server, which basically meant any server in a server group in US West that wasn’t the one I already had a character in.  I wanted to start fresh with everybody else and Amazon only allows you to have one character per server group.  The pick was the Parima server, probably based upon its easy pronunciation.

Parima in US West

With a server designated, it was time to make characters, the hardest part of which was picking names.  As I under stand it, names have to be unique game wide and, while you cannot create a bazillion alts to hold names, the game easily had a million people playing at its concurrent peak, so a lot of names have been claimed.

Ula managed to get Ulalu, one of her alternates.  I went through all of my usual names, through a bunch of likely alternates, and then started trying some random stuff, just to see if anything wasn’t taken yet.

Damn, somebody grabbed “Lmnop” already… “Abcde” as well…

Eventually I found an name while going through alternate spellings of dead Polish nobility, ending up with Stannislav.  It will do.

And then Potshot demonstrated that I was being dumb.  My view on names is always just first names, unless otherwise specified, because of my upbringing in MUDs, where last names were awarded later and first names needed to be short, or at least easily typed.

He showed up in game as Oswald the Patsy, no doubt a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald.  But then his character portrait looks like Oswald Mosely, so maybe I shouldn’t make assumptions.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought about putting in a last name.  I could have probably had Wilhelm Arcturus as a name and been recognizable, but I was happy enough to have a name and be in game.

Bung from the group ended up with the perfectly serviceable name Mudstone.  His son, who played WoW Classic with us as Obama, was also interested in New World and showed up as SnoopDogg420, which I was sure would get reported, but then I got in game and saw what passed for names and decided it was probably not going to be noticed.

When we were all on, we started into the game to do the opening area.

However, the game split us up, with Ulalu and I popping up in Monarch’s while Oswald and Mudstone were dropped into the game over in First Light.

I recalled there being a couple different starter areas, but I hadn’t thought about what to do if we ended up in separate locations.

Ulalu and I on the beach

There was some talk of trying to cross the map to meet up, but that seemed a bit iffy as low level as we were.  Later on I looked it up and apparently the way to solve the different starter area problem is to run to your friend’s area before you have started the first quest.  Once you talk to the quest giver and get the first quest then you are stuck on that path for a bit.

But I had also heard that the main story quest from all of the starter areas join up not too far into the game and that we would all end up in Windsward.

And, sure enough Yonas Alazar, the hermit fisherman, ended up being the meeting point.

When you are that far along it is also time to pick a faction.  The word seemed to be to pick the faction that is dominant at the moment and worry about changing up later, and the Syndicate seemed to own all of the 1-25 zones where we would be playing for a while, so that became the choice.

And once we had that set, we formed a company.  Forming a company was surprisingly easy… and probably necessary, as I started getting unsolicited company invites in Windsward.

When I say easy, I mean nearly frictionless.  No fee, no charter to sign, no minimum membership level.  Hell, I made a typo in the company name on the first try and rather than being locked into that forever you can just edit the name.

What madness is this?  I know New World has had its issues, and continues to stir up the player base, but I think they hit the nail on the head with this.

Our company was named in the theme of our WoW Classic Guild, changed to match the theme of New World.  We were now Crag Boar Corruption.   They even had a nice boar icon for our banner, which is more than Blizzard had for us.

Crag Boars in Aeternum

We managed to do that before we were all assembled in a single location.  Again, pretty nice.

The next task was to actually get together and do something as a company.