I'm not entirely sure Mack is being fair to the game honestly. I do like Mack's content and usually he has something interesting to say. But some of the points he raised in this video were pretty off the mark.
For example, he said:
- There's no way to buff/debuff: wrong, there are plenty of abilities that buff/debuff
- No way to parry the enemy: there are blocks?
- You can't kite: there are several abilities which kite, stun, snare, etc
- You can't interrupt: there are abilities which interrupt.
Also:
- Tab-targeting is 'tried, tested and works': tab-targeting is boring as fuck, I can't stand it. One of the most appealing things about this game is the way it is moving away from many traditional MMO mechanics such as tab-targeting. So for him to bring it up as a negative, that's just weird.
- Bad animations: I don't know what he is talking about. The animations are great in this game. It's one of its strengths.
- Attacks are committed to once initiated, which is bad: I don't see this as a bad thing at all.
- Quests are 'kill 10 turkeys': so no different from WoW then? Which he adores?
- You have to walk everywhere: this ties into the PvP system, there's no mounts for a reason.
He makes a broad point about there being limited abilities in the game, which I agree at first is surprising and seems like a negative thing. In WoW you used have 20 abilities or more, as he points out. What I think he's missing, though, is that this game requires you to do a lot more than simply hit your abilities correctly. There's active movement, blocking, dodging, thinking about damage types (more on that in a second), use of consumables mid-combat, and so on. All of this stuff rarely happens in your traditional MMO, usually you just stand in front of mobs and use your abilities in sequence.
I feel like NW is moving away from 'rotation'-style MMO gameplay towards something more action-oriented. Traditional WoW players aren't going to like that idea, and that's what Mack is, he's a hardcore WoW player.
Note I'm not saying that what NW is doing is, or is going to be, better than what WoW does (i.e. rotations). I'm simply pointing out that NW has different concepts in mind for gameplay. So dissing it because it 'only' has three-to-six active abilities seems to miss the mark. A game isn't automatically
better just because it has 20+ abilities.
Here's a combat video which goes into detail on some mechanics that NW has which I think are quite interesting:
Anyway personally I'm still a little on the fence about this game, I think it could be good but there's also some things which bother me about it. I don't think it's as bad as Mack makes it out to be.