Copying new world is going to ruin this game

Yes, the game will be niche and more hardcore than your currently trendy casual single player mmos. Intrepid know this and designed it in this way because they wanted to make a game like this.

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AoC's design has been the same before NW was even announced afaik. It's on you to make well-researched and weighed purchases.

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From what I've seen of NW's gearing, crafting and storage system, the main problem seemed to be the overabundance of pretty much any and all resources in the game. You had a ton of mats to collect because you could collect everything around you. You had different gear drops (iirc), so your inventory would get filled up with random shit. And if you wanted to craft something, you needed a ton of resources on you or in your location. The map was also relatively small and made you move around it, instead of giving you an anchor in one place.

And from what Intrepid have said and designed so far, pretty much none of those seem to be a problem here. You won't be able to just gather everything, unless you specced into being a particular gatherer. You won't have shitton of dropped gear on you because gear is valued way higher in Ashes. You'll be anchored to your freehold/node, so even when you need a lot of stuff for crafting - you'll just be using the node's bank. And the only way for you to get your crafting resources is either other people bringing them to you or you going out to other nodes and buying them. And in order to add even more value to gear, transfer of resources is a risky thing, so you gotta ask other people to defend your stuff, which will also increase social ties between people.

In other words, AoC just seems to be designed better than NW (I know, shocker). It's ok if you dislike this kind of design, but quite a lot of people are excited for the game exactly because it has this design.