New World: Aeternum News

Where to find New World briar branches

Trying to find New World briar branches? The magical island of Aeternum is home to unusual monsters and strange inhabitants. Some of these inhabitants give out quests asking for very specific items; in this case we need to find briar branches. If you aren't careful, you may spend most of your time wandering aimlessly as some resources can only be found in specific locations. Once you know where to look, you'll be swimming in briar branches.

Jumping into a new MMO for the first time is always exciting, though things can start to feel overwhelming as there are a lot of mechanics to take in. Be sure to read our New World beginner's guide which provides helpful advice for the early stages of the game. If you're planning on journeying through New World with friends, you should check out our guide beforehand to ensure you're able to pair up from the very beginning.

The briar plants drop numerous items, including briar branches, thorny vines, buds, and firefly bait. Let's not beat around the briar bush - here's where to find briar branches in New World.

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New World's crafting has a twist, with "random" chances of nifty perks and gem slots

Earlier this week, New World developer Amazon Game Studios shared some nuggets of information about how the upcoming open-world RPG game's character progression system will work. Now, the studio's also posted an in-depth look at crafting in the MMORPG - and there's a twist. Creating equipment has a little luck thrown in, in the form of "random" perks and enhancements, meaning success isn't just about honing your smithing skills.

In a new blog post, Amazon goes into New World's crafting in a lot of detail, explaining that when you arrive in its mysterious land - Aeternum - you'll "immediately face challenges to overcome", and crafting will help you tackle them. "Trading and crafting skills in New World are powerful tools and progress endlessly," the dev says, and the more you level up these, the more you'll be able to spot, harvest, refine, create, and sell awesome goodies, as you'd expect from the RPG.

However, according to the blog, "any time you craft a piece of equipment, it has a small chance of gaining one or more perks during the crafting process. Occasionally, you may even get an item with a socket for a gemstone.

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The New World devs are cracking down on AFKing

You're probably well aware by now that New World, Amazon Games' just-launched fantasy MMORPG, is very popular. Since its September 28 debut, it's seen enormous player counts and some pretty hefty in-game queues as a result, with congestion-easing solutions like server transfers on the way soon. Now, the New World team has announced that it's bringing in some more changes to help address congestion from another angle - this time by cracking down on AFKing.

New World already has a built-in AFK timer which boots players out of the game after a period of inactivity. It's not clear how long this is set at, exactly, though sites like RPS report that it's thought to be around 25 minutes. However, in a new forum post, community manager HardcoreHenry reveals that the team has "seen a lot of frustration around individuals who may be artificially remaining active enough in servers to avoid the automatic AFK mitigation that is built into New World".

The community manager says that the MMO's devs "certainly agree that this is not acceptable behaviour, especially when there are droves of individuals who are waiting patiently to get into a world", and explains that the team has put together a new solution to "identify and action against bad faith AFK players".

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Steam Global Top Sellers for the Week ending 3 October 2021

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What if: Steam reviews actually worked?

Steam's user reviews debuted in 2013, and have since become an important component of Valve's PC games platform. But reviews have also become a big problem - perhaps not for Valve so much as the developers trying to get their games noticed in a catalogue that now includes more than 30,000 titles. Angry users can bombard a game with negative reviews for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the game itself, lowering its discoverability and potentially dooming it to financial failure. So, what if they actually worked?

The first big problem with Steam reviews is the one they share with professional reviews: aggregation. Sure, there's a certain appeal to the idea of looking at a single number that neatly summarises a huge set of opinions about a new game, but crucial information and context is lost when even one review is reduced to just this, let alone many of them. A critic hasn't spent 30 or more hours playing and thinking about a game simply to generate a number between one and ten in their head. There are reasons for each score, and each outlet assigns them in its own way. It's simply not possible to capture those nuances in a number, much less a Metacritic aggregation of dozens of such scores, which may reflect wholly different standards and methods of criticism across sites.

Similarly, while many Steam reviewers also put a lot of time, thought, and effort into the evaluations they post, the only meaningful metric is the one generated by the aggregation of all reviews posted about a game. That can be 'mostly positive', 'overwhelmingly negative', or whichever descriptor Valve has assigned to the particular ratio of positive to negative reviews the game has received.

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