Brief overview
It has been over 2 months since Amazon Game Studios (AGW) has release New World (NW). The game has a fairly quick start to it. It is one of the prettier MMO style games I have seen released over the past 10 years; the only games that compare are Black Desert Online (BDO) and ELYON (previously A-IR). As far as gameplay goes it is an action RPG so very little targeting. In fact the only targeting that there is in the game two specific healing spells; everything else is AOE.
The Good
The game runs pretty well on my older PC (see below). The Devs are actively engaged with updating the game on a weekly to bi-weekly basis. The server I am on has a thriving community that does activities every night for my faction. These activities start about the same time too.
The Bad
New World is absolutely full of bugs; from duplication bugs, to combat bugs, to strait up hacking. AGS has done there best to combat this and fortunately most of these issue seem to plague the EU regions. With the Devs doing updates regularly they do not seem to keen on taking community driven ideas. They have ignored almost every request by the community to smooth out gameplay and make it less tedious. AGS has increased the time it takes to max crafting skills two-fold. Additionally if AGS goes through with the next set of changes to the Gear Score leveling system there is a good chance that they will lose another wave of players.
The Ugly
Amazon’s New World has some really ugly sides to it. NW had a much stronger launch than Amazon had been ready for. Based on the original amount of servers AGS appears to have been anticipating less than 500k players; they had over 900k in the first few weeks. AGS then added more servers rapidly but that has had a negative effect for some of these after the initial rush of players. There are now New World servers with populations peaking under 100 players daily. Most of the servers have a 2,000 player cap and can only effectively work if there at least 1,000 players during peak hours (5-11PM local times). The worlds were created in sets with the idea that merging the worlds would be easier in the end but, as territory is held by specific Companies (guilds) this has lead to other issues. The main issue is how Server A will be merged into server B. Server A’s players and Companies will be moved to Server B; territory and upgrades from Server A will be lost; Companies from Server A will be compensated with Gold but not territory. AGS will not only have to do this once, but possibly a few hundred times depending on region to get server populations into the healthy category again.
An additional part of the ugly side of this is the reporting system. Players can mass report a single person and get them banned from the game. This would be good if the players were acting in good faith; however all it takes is a few bad actors to rally a Company or Faction and then the system can be abused. There have been several high powered players that have been temp banned only for the ban to be overturned because the opposing faction decided they cannot win a War for territory against them.
Another ugly part to the game is the exploits just seem to keep coming. From being able to farm high level mobs without being able to be damaged to changing Company names to avoid War Declarations. AGS definitely has their work cut out for them; lets just hope that New World does not got the route of Crucible.
Final Thoughts
Although I feel that New World has potential I foresee that it has a high chance of failure in the next several months. I aid the exact same thing about Wildstar when it released. Over the years I have seen this happen to several experienced game studios, which Amazon Game Studios is not. I hope the best while expecting the worst.
Specs
- AMD Ryzen 7 1800x
- Asus Crosshair Hero VI
- MSI Armored GeForce GTX 1080ti (11GB)
- G.Skill Ripjaws V (64GB)