Just a small post today about something I felt was worth marking but wouldn’t fill a Vitae Aeternum column over at Massively OP.

A few months back, New World revamped player faces, leaving both my characters with new faces I didn’t ask for. While I didn’t mind the new look for my Syndicate main too much, I hated the changes made for my Covenant alt. This left me eagerly awaiting the release of this season’s barbershop feature.

Of course, the barbershop tokens come from the cash shop. I’ve nothing against that on principle, but considering they changed all our faces a few months before, they really should have given every character a free token off the bat. Instead they offered only one for free, at level 90 of the season pass.

I spent a few hours enduring the misery of grinding the current season pass as a PvE player and got the freebie, and my Covie now has a new new face, as you can see above.

To be honest, I’m still not thrilled with it. It’s nowhere near as ugly as the one the update saddled her with, but it doesn’t suit her. She looks mean now. While I imagined her having a fairly rough past, she’s a true believer in the Covenant’s mission now, and “mean” doesn’t fit. Problem is there just aren’t that many faces in this game, fewer that look good, and even fewer with Asian features. Maybe the new one will grow on me with time. One could hope…

That was to be the end of it, but my Syndicate main’s new face wasn’t quite sitting right either. It didn’t look bad, but it wasn’t her, either. Thus, in a moment of weakness, I bought a second barbershop token and changed her up, as well.

This does mean I broke my boycott of Trump-aligned big tech, and I feel genuinely bad about that. It is complicated because I’m pretty confident the California-based developers of a game about a multi-cultural setting that’s featured bisexual and nonbinary NPCs since launch aren’t particularly supportive of Mango Mussolini, but at least some of the money still does get filtered up the chain to Amazon’s orange-scrotum-gobbling boss. I won’t attempt to make excuses. It was, as I said, a moment of weakness.

At least I’m happy with the result. While I struggled with my Covie, for the main I was able to find a nice-looking face that feels like a pretty good match for her original look. While I was there, I also gave her a messier hair style and a nasty facial scar, as I figure a few years on Immortality Is Actually Hell Island would have her looking a bit less prim and proper.

This reflects how my view of the character has evolved over the years. I’ve always pictured her as a magical scholar, but originally I was picturing her as very book smart and civilized, whereas these days I’m seeing her as more of a witchy, druidic type. This can be seen as a natural evolution rather than a retcon. You can read all the books on alchemy you want back in Europe, but once you get to Aeternum, the wild powers of the island don’t follow such clear-cut rules.

With that done, I’ve largely dropped New World, and I imagine that will remain true until season ten launches in fall. Maybe I’ll drop back in for the occasional world boss or something, but I’m pretty burnt out on the game on its current state of content drought. Let’s hope they hit it out of the park with the new zone that is probably Dunwood. I want me a nice spooky zone where I can get a gothic horror mansion for a house.