It’s been a rough few years at Amazon Games. Seven, to be precise. Despite forming in 2014, the studio has released only one PC game (Crucible), and the company’s production budget is seemingly buoyed by its parent organization’s resources. Now, the time has finally come for the studio’s first full release, a crafting-and PvP-focused MMORPG called New World. As an MMO, the $49.99 New World relies heavily on its map-wide PvP and faction wars to fill out the gaps left by its drab questing structure and uninspired story.
Thankfully, New World’s combat represents some of the best action we’ve seen in the genre, making mundane tasks, such as killing your 500th zombie, all the more engaging and challenging. New World manages to do a few things better than any other MMO before it, but also finds itself bogged down by about a dozen other puzzling design decisions that feel straight out of 2002.
Note that New World saw many changes and improvements between its closed and open betas. There are still many, uncharted map areas, but for this preview we dig into what New World offers in levels 1-25 (out of the expected 60 in the released version).
A Whole New World
As Amazon Games’ (formerly Amazon Game Studios) only game currently announced in development, New World has some major shoes to fill. Coming off Crucible‘s launch (and subsequent critical reaming), and the cancellation of four other games, including a Lord of the Rings MMO, New World isn’t just another MMO; it’s the one game that will either cement or stain Amazon Games’ reputation as a potential contender in the industry.
As a publisher, Amazon Games’ legitimacy has been in doubt since the beginning. It was seen by the wider gaming populace as just another vehicle in a long line that Jeff Bezos thought he could use to buy his way into a profitable segment of the economy. Of course, true innovation isn’t something that can be so easily bought, which is a lesson that Amazon Games learned the hard way with Crucible’s failure. It was derided as a bland, formulaic shooter that added nothing new or exciting to the genre. Now Amazon Games Orange County hopes to change that narrative, developing an MMO with many new ideas on how combat and PvP should work in the genre.
Combat is just one of many aspects that determine success in this type of game, though: It’s the sum of all the different parts working in beautiful concert that creates a once-in-a-generation MMO, such as Everquest or World of Warcraft. Valiant attempts like Wildstar learned that lesson the hard way (RIP, you beautiful supernova of a game).
So, is New World the “WoW-Killer” that everyone has been waiting for? That next-generation, next-dynasty game that picks up the dropped torch? There are many systems to dissect, so let’s jump in.
Craft Your Character
Upon booting up New World, you’re greeted with several familiar MMO staples: the server selection screen, character creation, and region select.
Once you’ve selected a server, it’s time to create your character in what could be one of the least-flexible customization menus I’ve seen in an MMO…and I played Anarchy Online back in 2001. In the character creator, you can choose from a very limited selection of prebuilt faces and add hair, tattoos, or scars that don’t vary all that much in their design. Part of the MMO experience is identifying with your personal character, or toon, and with such a limited number of ways to build one that’s uniquely yours, I can’t help but feel like many of the things I may be missing will somehow, some way, come back as a micro-transaction down the line.
In both betas, I received a warning message that my character’s attribute customization was permanent, and wouldn’t be changeable after I left the menu. This may be a significant issue for the “MMO fashion” community, a well-known fan contingent who could be found spending hundreds of hours grinding out one map area just for the chance at a rare dye. Or dropping $300 on skins on payday because it’s fashion, baby, and you can’t put a price on looking good, right? Point is, they often need things like hair or eye color changes to accent their outfits.
It’s hard to imagine that Amazon didn’t think about adding the ability to customize toons after the fact. Although New World’s beta builds lacked real-money cosmetics, this strangely arbitrary (and industry-eschewing) design choice feels like yet another breadcrumb that will almost assuredly lead down a trail that ends at my credit card. None of the items that could appear in the micro-transaction store have been confirmed by the developer just yet, but we’ll update this preview on launch with a full breakdown of what you can or can’t buy, and how much you should expect to spend.
After your character is created, you’ll be thrust into the New World’s world, one containing a limited story about pioneers heading through a mysterious portal that transports you and your crew to a land swarming with zombies, ghosts, and skeletons. It’s here that another confounding design decisions appears: You can’t start the game with friends, nor can you quest with them directly.
I started the beta with three friends, but only two of us spawned in areas that were close enough for us to find each other. After running through the tutorial (which you must take on solo, even if you have a friend that can find you), you’re instructed to headed to the first major hub. The hub you’re assigned differs depending on an entirely random algorithm that determines where you first spawn. This means you and your friends could all sign up for the same server, but spawn on opposing sides of the map and not be able to reach each other for at least 15 to 20 minutes—and that’s rushing.
It’s not like there’s much point to finding each other early game anyway, since there is no group questing enabled. Almost universally in the MMO genre, if you’re in a group, a single quest can be completed by everyone in the group. For example, say you must kill 10 boars. If everyone in a group of five kills two boars each, the 10-count is completed for all members, and everyone returns to town to complete the quest at the same time. This keeps groups both playing and leveling together. It’s a mechanic that was first introduced in the 1990s, and hasn’t needed a rework.
Not so in New World. Here every quest chain and every assignment is individual to the player, meaning that if two members of the group kill 10 zombies, the group needs to wait for 20 zombies to spawn for both players to get credit. While the design may seem confusing at first, it all makes sense when you play a bit longer and understand what Amazon Games attempted to do with New World—design a game that absorbs as much of the player’s time as it can, with as few resources put into development as possible.
A Copy of a Copy
First on the cost-cutting chopping block was any semblance of diverse, varied, or even well-written questing. To start off, a preface: Though I played roughly 30 hours in both the closed and open betas (each, 60 total), I only got my character to level 25, since I was attempting to try every system possible on my way up. In all that time, I only completed three mission types, repeated over, and over, and over again: fetch, find, kill.
Whether it was “Search X number of chests” or “Kill X number of enemies,” these quests are haven’t evolved much from what the first 3D MMO Everquest offered—and that game launched 22 years ago. To get around this glaringly obvious content chasm, New World leans more aggressively into the “gathering and crafting” gameplay aspects that are usually reserved as afterthoughts. While most games in the genre integrate a crafting system somewhere in the tertiary gameplay loop (think sidequest to the sidequest), it’s generally considered a side-pursuit to the overall development of your character, something you do after the main questlines have already played out.
Having no real main quest line to speak of (aside from a flimsy, uninspired story about invaders in a new land) New World bucks this trend by making crafting a gameplay pillar. In a way, this almost works to shore up the deficiencies of no group questing or shared story lines. During my time out with friends, we tried to cluster our quests together and complete them around the same area. On many occasions, I found myself idly waiting for a friend to finish their task, and in that time I’d wander over to a tree, boulder, or silver vein, and happily gather resources while they cleaned up the last of their “kill eight zombies” quest.
These kinds of “gather while you’re waiting” moments are incentivized further by the “Town Projects Board”. Every settlement contains a board with mini-quests to complete; these can involve anything from “Cook X Number of Rations” to “Chop X Amount of Lumber”, etc. For every crafting path there are mini-quests to complete that will help you progress down it with added XP bonuses and achievements.
In this way, New World plays closer to Runescape than World of Warcraft, with a healthy amount of disciplines to select. They include options like woodworking, jewelcrafting, cooking, etc, and each profession has its place in the overall economy. Whether you want to become a lumber baron who controls the local settlement’s supply of Wyrdwood or just craft food and get back to bashing bad guys, New World offers up that choice flexibility.
The world map is densely packed with dozens of things to pick, chop, and mine, but even here you can see the corners that were cut down in order to keep the cost-to-return ratio as optimized as possible. For example, though you’ll gather three “different” types of fibers, they all come from the same model of plant that just has a different color texture applied for each tier. This trend continues everywhere you go, from harvesting to jewelcrafting to fishing to blacksmithing. Almost everything you make one tier up is just a re-textured version of the thing before it, meaning that in all the developers only had to make a core group of assets, which were then re-textured, renamed, and passed off as something shinier to work toward.
So, what brought me back to the game for the open beta after I’d already felt so burned by the closed beta period before it? I’ll answer those questions in the remainder of this preview.
Can My PC Run New World?
Though New World’s design philosophy contains many flaws, it manages to do three things better than most: combat, graphics, and sound.
First up, the graphics. The game’s minimum system requirements demand that your gaming PC contains at least a 3GHz Intel Core i5-2400 or AMD CPU with 4 physical cores, 8GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2GB or AMD Radeon R9 280 GPU, and 50GB of available hard drive space. While testing the game on a high-end PC housing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition card, I enjoyed high frame rates out of town (generally never dipping below 130 frames per second), while in-town performance was also stable (around 50 to 75fps), depending on the number of logged-in players.
New World is easily the most densely packed MMO I’ve played, with nearly every inch of screen filled with flora, fauna, terrain, mobs, and buildings (with Ultra settings turned on). Not only that, but the art direction feels heads above that of competing MMOs, with detailed textures and a clear, consistent medieval theme threaded through all of it.
Next is the sound. Again Amazon sets a new industry-leading standard for MMOs, whether it’s the slow creaking of a chopped tree falling in the distance or the eerily accurate “crack” you hear ricocheting off the mountains as you mine a boulder in the valley. In combat, every heavy hit makes a chunky, impactful sound, while heals from a life staff are layered with an ethereal and wispy quality. Every sound fills the world with another immersion layer, and when combined with the top-notch graphics, it’s easy to spend hours just taking in the wilderness’ sights and sounds.
Of course, you won’t be able to walk for long before you run into an enemy, and it’s here that New World shines at its brightest—the combat.
Combat Keeps It Current
Ripped straight out of games like Dark Souls, New World’s combat is the title’s saving grace. At a certain point, you stop minding that it’s the 300th time you’ve killed a slightly different variation of the same zombie, because every combat encounter feels fresh, as long as you’re leveling up different weapons along the way.
Rather than sticking to the tried, traditional, and tired “tab targeting” combat that popular MMOs, such as Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft, are known for, Amazon Games instead went for action-oriented engagement. You’re given two weapon slots, and 13 weapons. These range from grounded weapons like a great axe to more fantastical options like ice gauntlets and fire staffs.
Instead of assigning abilities to your 1-10 keys, and ultimately just pressing them in a different order depending on your class (looking at you, Final Fantasy), every New World weapon carries its own combat style. This creates a need for specialization, as the combat is so deep that just mastering one (both in player-skill and in-game skill points), could take hundreds of hours per weapon.
New World’s replay factor wears out fast in its mob variety, questing depth, dungeon crawling, and raiding, but all of these tasks are made new again every time you switch your weapon discipline. Combat is the primary magic ingredient that Amazon built into New World’s foundation, and its versatility makes for constantly engaging gameplay whether you’re dodging moves from a scripted AI, or going toe-to-toe with other people in PvP.
Amazon Lets the Players Make the Game
Speaking of PvP, here’s a well-known secret of game development: If you don’t have money to create your own content, let the players do it for you. This can be something as simple as opening up your game to the modding scene (Valheim is a recent success in this regard), or in a more genre-specific example, creating an MMO from scratch as a PvP-first experience (Crowfall comes to mind).
What Amazon hopes will keep players busy up to, and past, level 60 doesn’t come down to its PvE dungeons—there will be a total of six at launch—or its raids. In New World, every bit of the map is up for grabs, warred over by three independent factions: the Marauders, the Covenant, and the Syndicate. During your early questing, you’re given the option to join one of these three companies (New World’s version of guilds), and various land clusters and cities are divided into territories that are fought over by the factions during predetermined war events a few times per week. These are 50-versus-50, all-out PvP battles, waged by two companies randomly chosen in a lottery before each event. The winning side takes the territory.
Owning territory is important, because it gives companies the privilege of electing local governors to controlled towns. Those governors determine everything from the local trading tax rate to the projects that receive the most crafting resources. By controlling territory, companies give their faction members faster routes to leveling up their characters and crafting skills in those regions, while keeping other factions at a disadvantage.
This interplay of economics and territory will likely lead to interesting long-term server dynamics, akin to the hierarchies seen in EVE Online. I predict that New World’s lasting value won’t be its post-level-60 raiding or PvE content, but rather how the PvP plays out among the three factions on each server, and the endless war for full-map dominance.
Of course, PvP is a decisive issue, but rather than segmenting its population into two server groups as many MMOs do (“PvE servers” and “PvP servers”), Amazon lets players simply turn a PvP flag “on” or “off” whenever they’re in a settlement. Feel like spending a chillout day, just harvesting materials and crafting? Roam the world without a care, as long as the flag is down. And if you feel like fighting off hordes of players for the chance to hunt down some turkey meat, that’s your prerogative too; simply raise the PvP flag before you leave, and your next player-controlled enemy could be waiting around every corner.
By raising your PvP flag, you open a new tier of questing missions centered around PvP goals, whether that be disrupting the enemy’s supply lines or stealing some of their local resources. These quests grant more XP and better gear, but also come with the threat that if your player is killed at any point during the run, progress is reset and you have to start the mission all over again.
It’s a simple, but elegant, solution to a problem that has plagued the MMO community for decades. Through this flagging and level-scaling PvP system (scaling ensures that a level 15 and level 60 remain on relatively even footing if they find each other on the map), New World becomes whatever type of MMO you want.
Putting the “Old” in “New” World
So, did my preview time in Amazon’s New World betas leave me hopeful for what’s to come in the full release? I think a quote from Steven Sharif, CEO and head developer of the upcoming self-funded MMO Ashes of Creation, put it best in his interview with long-time MMO content creator Asmongold:
“MMO players kind of feel like we’re beat dogs, you know? We hear of a new MMO coming out and we approach very shy and timid, and then they just beat the s**t out of us and we keep going back. You see another one, you’re like ‘Oh maybe this one, maybe this one I could finally eat that treat.”
Does New World live up to the game’s name? Are we truly entering a new paradigm of MMOs, modernized and streamlined for a 2021 audience? Will we finally get to “eat that treat,” as it were?
Not yet. But the bones are certainly there.
New World doesn’t innovate in any significant way, instead opting to refine preexisting MMO systems. On the one hand, this “if it ain’t broke” mentality could lead to mainstream success, but on the other it risks alienating an entire population of MMO players who have been there and done that a few dozen times by now.
New World’s core aspects, aside from its combat, feel as though Amazon Games produced this game in a spreadsheet; it’s almost as if Amazon tried to “min-max” New World’s development. The gameplay feels as if it were created by putting the minimum amount of development time into systems that would absorb the maximum amount of your time, without considering whether or not you’d have fun in the process.
That said, Amazon Games couldn’t have timed its numerous delays any better. New World is releasing into possibly one of the biggest MMO gluts of the past two decades. World of Warcraft has been hemorrhaging users for months now, with Shadowlands pushing many of its core fanbase out the door to Final Fantasy XIV and other MMOs. Other than those two titles (and perhaps Guild Wars 2, in a distant third place), there’s not much viable competition that can match Amazon’s ability to toss money at a project.
New World brings MMO combat, sound, and graphics into the 21st century, but if World of Warcraft: Classic’s recent success is any indication, gameplay is what matters most to genre fans. Well, that and being able to share quests with your friends. You know, the “massively“ part of the MMORPG acronym. Jump on it, Amazon Games! Be the WoW killer we know you can be.
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