Yeah thats the part I'm mostly talking about. There are certainly times where the particle effects were either similar between classes (lots of black swirls) or just very anime with a lot going on. But in terms of the action combat, the control, the responsiveness (when you werent lagging with 100 vs 100) its been so far ahead of MMOs since it came out.
Btw when I have said New World borrows from other games, and borrows from survival games I didnt say it was a bad thing. World of Warcraft wasnt all that original either, it borrowed heavily from other games. And New World borrowing from Survival games like Rust or Ark etc is different for an MMO anyway, so thats still kinda new. You can really see it in the interface, menus and crafting systems. And they look nice as far as I'm concerned.
Overall I'm very interested to see where New World is in a month or two. I made my prediction that there will be lots of refunds, but making a prediction is fun to see if you get it right or not. I may not. But from my personal experience of the game, before they made some improvements, just not enough to make me interested was that it was kinda pretty but lacked the depth I'd want from an MMO and there are alternatives that have that. I did watch plenty of streams with the updates, for me the biggest problems were the PVE content and AI needing a huge amount of work, and the boring combat style