Amazon's New World

[ariesel]

It was a survival game setting way back when and the combat was very much like Conan, but they may have lessened that a bit? We shall see.

[Regolyth]

I liked AoC combat. It was... different.

Decapitations were always fun.

[Rakul]

"Sir. I believe this is yours?"

*hands the villain his head*

"Good day!"

[Morreion]

New World Update (official site)

...As a result, we will be changing our launch date - and correspondingly, our final beta test - to spring 2021. We don't make the decision lightly, and we have urgency about getting the game to you as quickly as possible at the best quality -- with some additions that will make the experience even better.

Hat tip to Arie!

[Regolyth]

Better right and late than flawed and rushed.

... at least it always worked for Blizzard.

*Thinks back to running a Diablo II fansite for three years, waiting on its release*

[Morreion]

Initial impressions of New World (Massively)

Andy McAdams: I’ve really, really enjoyed it so far. Because of the queues, I’ve only been able to get to level 14, but I really like it so far. The combat is engaging and requires you to do more than spam buttons, which I like. The skill trees for weapons felt a little anemic at first, but when I started to play down through I realized there’s actually quite a bit of customization there. I also like the pace of combat – solo training a huge group of mobs and then AOE’ing them down isn’t a thing. I’ve rarely seen people take on more than threeish mobs at a time and die. Timing is just as important as your build. For example, my favorite weapon is a rapier, and one of the abilities, riposte, only works if you get attacked in the next second, meaning you have to use in about the first half-second you see the mob start an attack or else you miss and waste the 15-second cooldown. It’s really satisfying when you get the timing down just right on a baddie and can execute the riposte and then your light strike combo.

I really like the faction system too. It reminds me of a Funcom faction system; I was thinking about Anarchy Online and the Omni-Clan-Neutral dynamic, but in the MOP chat someone mentioned The Secret World factions being the same. I like it – it feels more realistic to me where generally the factions mingle but there’s still some faction pride there. Couple the faction system with territory control and it adds a fun dynamic over just playing the game, where supporting your faction actually brings benefits. It’s not a new concept by any stretch, but it’s nice to see it back here.

Gathering and crafting is fun and engaging and actually feels like part of the game instead of just stapled on the side for once. You probably can’t go full-on crafter (well, I suppose you could, but I’m not sure it would be that rewarding).

I’ve seen lots of complaints about how the game is “meh” because it doesn’t do anything new, but I think that’s actually a good thing. It resurrects a lot of “old style” systems that we haven’t seen lately in the swath of “WoW wannabe #236324226776313″ or the “gankbox that we are super sure is going to go different than the 75 failed gankboxes before it.” The game is fun, engaging, and comfortable to play. The systems are new enough that I feel like I’m learning, but enough like old systems I don’t feel like I’m learning dramatically new things.

I’m curious about what the elder game look likes. I’m all good with the faction-style gameplay driving a lot of the elder-game, but what else is there? What’s the plan for expanding the world? The island looks a little small (though it can take 10 minutes to run between settlements that are close), and I’m curious about Amazon’s plans to expand the world. Are the devs going to add more weapons? Like, why no lightning weapon or earth weapon or combat knives or stealth/sneaky driven play-styles? I have a lot of questions, and I’m excited for the answers.

Overall, it’s not a game that breaks the mold and does something dramatic and new or never-seen-before. It brings back a lot of the older sensibilities in MMOs, and it does it really well. I’m constantly jonesing for my next play session, and that’s awesome. Will it hold my attention long-term? It has the potential to, but I’m not really worried about it. I’m too busy enjoying the game today to worry about whether Andy-in-sox-months will still be engaged.

From an outsider’s perspective, though, and extreme queues aside, I think the launch has been crazy successful. I honestly never would’ve expected it to be popping off this much. Clearly players want something new to play.

Tyler Edwards (blog): Well, to add to the chorus, I haven’t played as much as I’d like to thanks to the queues. So far, my impressions aren’t terribly different than they were when I played the alpha last year. Compared to then, the removal of stagger on hits has made combat a bit less satisfying (but it’s still pretty good), and questing is vastly improved (but that says more about how bad it was then than how good it is now).

For now, I’m having a good time, but I do have some doubts about the game’s longevity. It has a lot of outdated designs — no matchmaking for dungeons, not even open-tapping — and I could see those really getting on my nerves after a while. Also not sure there’s enough story to satisfy me.

New World, Day 4: New servers, long queues, transfers next week, and Jeff Bezos weighs in (Massively)

We’re guessing the engineers at Amazon Games aren’t getting much sleep right about now. Since the launch of New World on Tuesday, the servers have been slammed with the typical big MMO launch problem: not enough room for the huge numbers of people trying to play. And they are indeed huge numbers; the latest record was set yesterday at 758K concurrent, though again that’s folks in-game and waiting in-queue to get into the game. As I type this Friday morning, more than half a million people are in there now, and Steam reviews have recovered from the obvious review-bomb that went on earlier this week.

So where does New World stand right now? Well, over the course of yesterday and last night, Amazon continued releasing new servers in just about every region, in addition to rolling out a client-side patch to make the queue itself more stable. (There was nothing quite as enraging as waiting for hours in a queue only to be booted out of the game right as you were finally logging in. A bit like waiting half a day to ride a new roller coaster, only to have it break while you’re literally at the front of the line. I speak from experience!)


Last last night (EDT), the team admitted that it had actually been “surprised” by the huge influx of players for the game – over a million people total on launch day and growing every day since – which presumably is why a studio whose parent company literally runs AWS was a bit unprepared. The studio now says it has “more than doubled” its server count and is still “working to increase the capacity of all available servers to support a higher population cap.”

Once again, the studio notes that there are many servers in every region – 40% – that have low queues or no queues at all, while those from day one are pretty much universally bogged down in multi-hour waits. Amazon is encouraging players to start up on those servers instead and promising transfers next week.

New World stops people from rolling on full servers, posts capacity list, and hits 800K concurrent (Massively)

Those hoping to get some good playtime in with New World this weekend need all of the strategic aid that they can get, what with the servers literally overflowing with interest and demand.

To help figuring out when and where to play the game, Amazon Game Studio posted a full list of its legion of servers along with helpful icons stating if the shards are online, offline, at full capacity, or undergoing maintenance. It also notified gamers that full servers would refuse any new character creation until they got, um, less full.


The studio repeated its promise to both add to the server count and increase the relatively limited population caps of the existing servers. On Saturday morning, New World continues to sit very comfortably at the number two spot on Steam, with well over a half-million players in the game or sitting in the sometimes hours-long queues. The game set a new concurrency record on Friday at 800,000.

[Regolyth]

I'm impressed. 800,000 users is a lot.

[Regolyth]

Got an email the other day from Amazon inviting me to try this game out. It still looks really impressive, but the ratings are rather low. It seems there's a lot of issues with queue times. I figured that would have been sorted out by now.

[Rakul]

Afraid I've lost my interest in it. Outside of Valheim, and my weekly Back 4 Blood group game, I'm doing Diablo Immortal. Although I was never a huge fan, I like this one. Like an RPG MMO crossover game.

[Morreion]

Funny you bring this up Rego, yesterday I thought about trying New World out just for the heck of it. It was around a 50 GB DL so that discouraged me lol. If you try it let us know what it's like, at one time there was an interest here in this game!