Consolidated my issues with the game from a few different places:
Misc:
If Witcher 3 is the far left of the spectrum for fall damage, New World is the far right. Freefalling for 10s off a cliff to lose 20% of your HP feels weird when a same-level creature does that in a single swing.
Music is OK when you get it, large stretches of the game seemingly have no tracks assigned to them aside from environmental noises and---
Holy fuck the sound disparity between most of the rest of the game and magic spell abilities. I can hear some guy casting spells from the other side of a forest, which would be interesting if this game had forced PvP or if Louder SFX indicated it was a flagged hostile (similar to games like Overwatch where enemy sounds are louder than allies).
Somehow I can max out Witcher 3 and ESO as well as pretty much every other AAA game to come out in recent memory but NW makes my GPU fans rattle and CPU hit 80-100% usage.
PvP Flagged characters should have collision, Unflagged characters should NOT. I bodyblocked 3 people in a building and until I decided to move their only option was to Hearthstone or AFK (I don't know if Speed of Light would have worked).
Gear somehow feels "tacked on"... in an RPG. The difference between the weapon I found at level 1 vs the weapon I found at level 18 was about a 10% difference. Having a magic effect being something that increases durability when repairing gear is effectively free whenever you want is a weird design decision. I haven't touched tradeskilling yet so the answer for this problem might be in there.
Ingame explanations for game systems. Why do I care about my standing with a zone? The area I am in is under conflict... Why do I care? The area has had war declared on it, ok so how do I participate? This fort has my faction symbol on it maybe if I go here there will be some larger PvP quest for me. No? Just an empty fort? Ok well that was a waste of 10 minutes I guess I'll LITERALLY NEVER GO THERE AGAIN EVER.
Enemy telegraphs for attacks. So this game is somewhere between Dark Souls and ESO in terms of how it wants you to approach combat. Getting hit is WRONG and you will be punished for it especially if the enemy is a few levels above you. Most of the time enemy's have decent telegraphs (attack animations) so you can react and either dodge or block the attack. Some animations (specifically mob basic attacks) often have 0 windup and deal essentailly the same damage as a long heavy attack, and usually are combos which can lead to a quick 1-2 death if you aren't grinding at full hp.
3 Ability timers shared between 3 weapons which all have probably 8 active abilities in each makes for really boring M1 spam. A SNES controller almost has enough buttons to individually map this game.
PVP Issues:
The stagger-lock of being M1 spammed by Melee feels real bad both on the giving end and the receiving end.
All of the different weapon skill systems feel like they were developed in a vacuum and weren't aware the other skills existed.
Speed of Light and it's upgrades probably needs to be reworked/scrapped. It would be fine for a PvE-centric game but it just turns open PvP fights into long games of tag where if you don't have it against someone that does you just can never catch them. There's a reason everyone is running around with Life Staff + Insert 1 weapon and its not just for the heal.
I haven't had the opportunity to test out all the snare-based skill talents but at a glance they all seem to have the same issue: If you stop to use the ability/attack that reduces a players movement speed, they have already used that time to offset whatever snare you would have applied.
PvP Missions:
"Delivery Quest" XP Reward definitely seems out of balance for the time investment (depending on delivery location RNG). Sometimes its a 900m trip down a straight road for 12k exp, sometimes its 5km and the straight path is blocked by sea/mountains/killplanes. Dropping PvP tasks probably needs to have a longer penalty cooldown because at a certain point you are better off just accepting and abandoning them all to hope for better RNG on a refresh.
The “Patrol” missions seem kind of poorly thought out, I get what you were going for by having players go to 2-3 highly trafficked area and wait there, but most of the time I just end up in some spot with creatures 5-6+ levels above me waiting in the tall grass for a countdown to finish. Having the player go to 3 different areas which can be very spread out is often extremely time-inefficient from a leveling perspective. I don’t know how to prevent people from exploiting it with friends, but Patrol should probably involve actually killing another player in -A- area in order to complete.
Loot 5 chests in X area over and over and over the middle ground. The xp isn’t very good but the mission is quick, just braindead and extremely repetitive. Maybe if you are lucky someone from the opposing faction will show up. Bonus: When the mission says “Enemy level: None” but again takes place in an area that is 7+ levels above you.
All of this is still better than running back and forth across the map for “Main Story” missions that are all “Kill X enemies and Loot Y Chests in Z Area”, sometimes the same area back the back…
Overall Opinion:
The bones of this game are there, but the core mechanics for PvE reminds me of FFXIV when it first launched with its Leves system. PvP seems like an extremely awkward game of Tag where the winner is whoever lands the first melee hit and/or predicts the first dodge roll movement.