Good Morning Friends! Today begins either the redemption story for New World or the ultimate demise and the next few weeks will determine which direction it progresses. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the release of the Brimstone Sands content expansions that come along with it a brand-new player experience. As a result, several of us have been amped by the thought of a new start with brand-new characters and seeing this game with fresh eyes. However, this is also going to underline what lessons if any the Amazon Game Studios team has learned over the last year. The server population is going to precipitously increase, and it is important to see how they handle this. Since I am going to be re-rolling today, I am wishing for the best.
Everyone loves a comeback story, and New World is on the cusp of exactly that. You can notice that starting in August the game saw significant increases in player population. We have essentially rolled back the clock to the sort of numbers we saw last around February, and erased a good chunk of damage from the last year. The game really is in a great state right now and the team has made so many correct calls lately in tailoring the game experience to be less punitive to the player. I am still deeply concerned by the fixed server sizes, but I think that is a core design decision of the game and not something that they can easily resolve.
In the lead-up to the launch of this content expansion, they have added a handful of servers. I find it funny that they are recycling names from servers that were originally merged into other servers. I remember Frislandia which just showed up again was the server that Minda got merged into, and was then later merged into Valhalla. Right now we have banked on Themiscyra for re-rolls which will ultimately roll up into Eden more than likely when the next round of mergers happens. I’ve now set the machine in motion and many of us have stubbed out characters on that server. Had I waited just a bit longer to make my decision, I might have banked on Heliopolis instead. I still think the whole one character per server cluster nonsense is a bad idea and is ultimately going to limit how successful countermeasures to overpopulation are.
The patch is currently available in steam and the patch notes have dropped as well so you can read all of the detailed changes. That said this team is notorious for having undocumented changes as well, so you might watch Reddit later today for a thread of those to show up. Here is hoping that the New World team can pull this off. They have been granted a second chance, and I hope they do not squander it. The game is deeply enjoyable and I am hoping that maybe they can start to win back the legion of PVE-only players that they lost during the tumultuous launch. For me, my plan is to largely focus on trade skills at least until I run up Armorcrafting and Weaponsmithing. My hope is this is going to buy time for the rest of my retinue to catch up to me in levels, as just by my nature alone… I am probably going to be putting in way more hours in total.
I guess that begs the question then. Are you planning on returning to New World? Are you planning on doing the nonsense thing we are and rolling a brand new character? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.
on the strength of your recent posts, I re-installed a few weeks ago. Logged in for a bit on a Saturday, bipped around a bit, fought some monsters, did a few quests, harvested some stuff, crafted some stuff.
And then logged back out and uninstalled again. Still just doesn’t have that “spark” for me, and nothing in the new patch notes makes me think it ever will, so…. I hope that it revitalizes for you and you continue to enjoy it, it’s just not for me, I don’t think.
I’m going to re-roll to play through the new starter experience but I haven’t decided yet whether to do it now or wait for the New Start servers. I don’t see this as any kind of last throw of the dice for New World, though. It’s just another step in a journey that will last years if not decades. Unless Amazon decide to get out of the gaming business altogether, they’re probably going to keep going with New World indefinitely, which means it will drift into the background along with countless other mmorpgs.
I would say that Amazon probably wouldn’t have sufficient interest to run a small mmo with maybe 25-50k players but given what’s happened to the rest of their games, it’s pretty much that or give up on having a direct presence in the gaming market altogether, which may indeed be where they’re heading. If they make that choice, a few tens of thousands of players either way won’t mater all that much. I guess a few hundred thousand might, though…
If New World were from a company that was not Amazon, then sure I think it would limp along in this state indefinitely because there are enough players and probably enough spenders to keep the lights on for that development team. However it seems very clear that Amazon wanted a massive success, and pending it falls back into the 15k-20k player doldrums again, they will more than likely pull the plug. Lost Ark is suffering from massive botting problems that they cannot seem to get under control, while the actual playing and by reference paying customers are dwindling. Luna doesn’t seem to be a rousing success either. With Amazon cracking down on trying to make Twitch more profitable currently, I imagine that they are probably going to re-evaluate gaming in general soon.
GREATSWORDS FOR LIFE!