Personally, I'm not sold on the New Order series. Although general Lone Wolf nostalgia casts them in a positive light for me, they do have severe flaws:
• Horrible linearity, to the point of being novels in disguise. This also makes any playthrough very time-consuming in the real world, since you'll be reading like 80% of the text of each book.
• Frequent arbitrary situations you cannot avoid through any combination of strategy or foresight (that gladiator still sticks in my craw, as does the goon who steals your Kai Weapon).
• Fake difficulty (oh, you're travelling through hills? Mudslide. Through plains? Wild animal stampede. At sea? Storm sinks your ship… etc). I wouldn't mind so much if those were random events along the way, but they're scripted, they happen every time you replay the book, and you can't take a different path.
• The ceaseless, increasingly annoying, constant EP losses at every turn. I swear, half the sections in Book 26 contain either the phrase "Pick a number from the RNT" or "Lose x Endurance points" or BOTH. You're not the hero at that point, you're the author's punching bag.
• Add to that the relentless loss of Backpack Items that basically renders your Backpack storage pointless, as you cannot keep anything worthwhile for any length of time, unless you meta-game and fill your BP with crap items which you may then elect to lose when you take that inevitable tumble down the grassy knoll.
• Ever-increasing game balance issues. Right out of the gate, the first books cannot be won with low stats (courtesy of a few unavoidable boss-level combats, such as that gladiator). Then the power gap between a novice player and a veteran just widens and widens, with no corrective in sight. The result is that books 25, 26, 27… are increasingly impossible as stand-alone adventures, and increasingly a joke if you've played every book before them. This culminates in Book 29, where they really should have reset the character, given 18 years have passed anyway. I mean, hell, the newbie will lack 8 Grand Disciplines, 12 points of CS (possibly 14 if you allow the Ang'Sei to stack with the Korlinium Chainmail), 16 EP, and a ton of bonus items compared to the vet. Can you imagine how bad this will get in books 30, 31 and 32 ??
• Very bad Discipline balance. You basically have no choice but to select the CS-boosting Disciplines (Kai Surge and Weapon Mastery) as they account for 13 points of CS; Deliverance is a must for any standalone attempt, and Kai Alchemy is ridiculously OP, so out of four starting Disciplines, well, you can't really choose at all, can you? At the other end of the spectrum, Astrology and Bardsmanship are utterly Shi'ite, Elementalism and Magi-Magic are just pale copies of Kai Alchemy, Intuition never actually helps you or gets you out of trouble (that gladiator), Herbmastery is borderline junk since it is required so seldomly… The end result is by the time you're up to Book 25 or 26, you have all the Kai Disciplines you'll ever really need.
On the other hand, Joe Dever does seem to have stopped his reliance on "falling masts" to increase difficulty (except with that gladiator again), it's fun to explore Southern Magnamund, and there's a refreshing absence of Shadow Gates and parallel worlds. Plus, it's still Lone Wolf. But I can understand why the New Order series is not considered the best. It's too bad, there were some fun ideas there.