wow ok the game sounds pretty rubbish
It's not, it's extremely good. Between the preview and the beta I now have 75 hours of game play. I dabbled in popular MMOs over the years but this is something with enough of a paradigm shift to be refreshing enough to play. It borrows from all the good parts of traditional MMOs while radically cutting the fat to focus on fun. I like Mack and have been a subscriber since Mack and Mesh originally did their Doom series. But his first impression video was garbage, it's full of just factually incorrect things for starters such as there's no CC when in fact there's loads. But in general slams the combat system for being bad when he made no effort to learn how it works.
The simple fact is that combat is fundamentally different, it's not tab-target like WoW, it's an action combat system very much like Dark Souls but slightly more forgiving. This means combat requires finesse, you can't just spam attacks like Mack commented in his own comment section. You need to be constantly on the move, dodging and re-positioning yourself, watching for telegraphed enemy attacks so you can dodge out the way and counter attack. You can't just learn patterns of attack like in tab-target MMOs which are just rotations of abilities on global cooldown, you need to look at what the enemy is doing and respond to their actions by making your own decisions. Actions like attacks are a commitment since you're locked into attack animations. Because this makes you vulnerable if you miss, there's consequences for using them badly. When are where to attack from become consideration and that means you need to exercise attacks judiciously. Nor can you just spam dodge to counter, there's stamina management which again means counters, dodges and blocking require timing and judicial use as well.
Mack got seriously addicted to World of Warcraft for years after his Mack and Mesh videos, it's a little bit hard to take this as a balanced first impression when he was talking about how it wasn't WoW with 20 abilities and the combat being different to what he liked.
For a fair MMO review you really need to play to whole game and try some of the end game content, you need to give the systems in New World a fair chance.
The problem is that he's locked into 1 view of what an MMO ought to be, and he's using that lens to judge New World. This is why in the video and the comments he's so focused on the number of abilities. This is all he knows and he can't break free of that mindset. So yes there's less total abilities that can be slotted for use in combat, but the combat also introduces other things that tab-target MMOs do not have, like the importance of position, aim, timing, dodging, stamina management etc. Abilities are only some fraction of the combat, something he focuses on to the exclusion of everything else. That's why his view on this is so myopic.
