Warning: Wall of text, TLDR at the end

The last few days have been absolutely devastating for us New World players. Some have uninstalled and moved on, some are still haunting the servers like ghosts in an abandoned town, and others, myself included, are rightfully angry and want to get back at Amazon. My anger comes from a selfish reason, I don't deny that, I’m not saying I’m some kind of injustice fighter or anything, but aren’t we all on the same side here?

I don’t go out of my way to mock those who’ve chosen to move on or stay positive, but seriously, am I crazy, or is this sub full of Amazon shills and bots? Because when I tell people to do something meaningful against Amazon like cancel their Prime sub or stop watching Twitch, I get met with mental gymnastics justifying Amazon’s actions. I'm shocked with how many have gone out of their way to personally attack me, calling me a no-lifer, a game addict, or an extremist... Like, what the actual F? Please tell me those are just Amazon bots, because if real people actually think this way, then I’m genuinely losing hope in humanity.

Isn’t it well established by now that Amazon is a comically evil irl corpo, deserving of protests and scrutiny? I can’t believe I have to explain to some people here that firing 14,000 employees (with more layoffs likely coming), pulling a blatant scam on a small, dedicated community, and killing a game enjoyed by many (mostly due to their poor management and strategies), all right after a RECORD BREAKING profit year, is downright evil.

If you don’t think this is worth calling out and protests, I don’t know what is. We deserve better than corpo greed disguised as "iT's JuSt BuSiNeSs".

Edit: Pretty amazed by how many people didn’t even read my post and just chose to be dicks, so here’s a TLDR for you:

TLDR: I’m selfish and a hypocrite, I knew Amazon was evil, but I didn’t care until they shut down New World. That said, I never mocked people who were affected or opposed Amazon before. Now I’m against Amazon too, but I’m specifically calling out the people who ACTIVELY oppose our cause and shill for Amazon, not those who simply don’t care.

Hey everyone,

Obviously, we are aware of the current situation related to the layoffs within Amazon and specifically Amazon Games Studio as it relates to New World. We will do our best to keep you updated as we get more information. At this time, our communication channels to the development team have been severely impacted but we will continue to pursue getting this news to you as it becomes available.

Please use this thread to discuss your thoughts, feelings, and concerns regarding the information received today. Try to keep things as civil as possible. We are all very hurt and upset by this news.

We appreciate your patience and understanding through this challenging time.

Best,
r/NewWorldGame Mod Team

Update:

As New World recognizes its fourth anniversary since launching on PC, we reflect on an incredible journey shaped by our dedicated player community. Your feedback and passion have been instrumental in evolving Aeternum into the world it is today, and our team is deeply grateful for this shared adventure. After four years of steady content updates and a major new console release, we've reached a point where it is no longer sustainable to continue supporting the game with new content updates.

The recently launched Season 10 and Nighthaven update will serve as the final content release for New World on PC and consoles. It is only after much consideration that we've reached this decision. To thank you, the New World community, for your support over the years, we have made the Nighthaven release available to you for free. To ensure all New World players can experience this content, we also made Rise of the Angry Earth free for all PC players.

In the coming months, we will provide more details on what to expect and other essential information. Rest assured, our intention is to keep servers operating through 2026, allowing our community time to continue their adventures in Aeternum. Additionally, New World: Aeternum will still be downloadable for PlayStation Plus members (Extra and Premium).

Players of Aeternum: Your dedication and enthusiasm have made this New World adventure an unforgettable journey. We're deeply grateful for every moment you've spent helping build this extraordinary world alongside us. It has been an honor to share Aeternum with you, thank you for helping make this game something truly special.

It was never about that.

New World was a showcase product. A live case study to prove that AWS could run large-scale, real-time game worlds. It existed to validate infrastructure, not to become Amazon’s next billion-dollar entertainment business.

The game’s job was to sell confidence in AWS to every studio, publisher and developer and other enterprises. It was the technical proof that AWS could power a modern MMO at global scale.

When you look at Amazon’s balance sheet, the picture is obvious. AWS, Prime and Twitch are the engines that matter. They’re scalable, recurring, and integrated into every part of the company’s ecosystem. Game development will never match that in margin, volume or strategic value.

In Q2 2025, AWS made 30.9 billion USD in revenue and 10.2 billion USD in operating income, almost half of Amazon’s total profit. Retail brought in more revenue overall but with a fraction of the margin. AWS, Prime, and Twitch are the only divisions that truly move Amazon’s stock and keep shareholders happy.

Even if New World turned a steady profit, it would still be meaningless to them.

So when executives cut teams, they’re cutting what doesn’t reinforce those three pillars.

People keep blaming “poor launch” or “bad updates.” That’s missing the point. Amazon owns the infrastructure. Server hosting costs for New World would have been next to nothing. Running a few dozen high-capacity servers when you literally own AWS is a drop in the ocean.

If this was about cost, they could have pulled other levers to make it profitable. They could have lowered dev costs by shifting it to the offshore team, adjusted monetisation, or even downsized the US team. There are a hundred ways to sustain a game like this if money was the issue. But this decision was never about profit or loss on paper.

Add to that the recent 2.5 billion USD Prime class-action loss, and it’s obvious why the company is cleaning house. The focus now is on high-margin, scalable systems, not side projects have already served their purpose.

New World wasn’t a failure. It showed the world that AWS can run a global MMO. And now Amazon has moved on.

Stop blaming the devs. They built something great. It’s the executives that pulled the plug to line their own pockets.

In a sweeping layoff, Amazon is getting rid of 30k+ people today, and in the future they will remove more and more to replace them with AI.

New World is feeling these layoffs, some people are missing from the discord, and artists are posting on Twitter talking about being laid off. We don't know the full extent of the layoffs yet, as they're going out this morning.

I'm worried for the future of the game.

Edit Update: The Amazon Employees subreddit is saying the entire Irvine AGS studio is gone. That's the one that runs New World.

Edit Update 2: Amazon Games jobs listings do not have the Irvine site listed. Probably confirmation New World is cooked.

Edit Update 3: The AGS LinkedIn page no longer exists. I think we might be cooked cooked.

When New World first launched, it peaked at 913k players. However, the daily peak players has almost dropped almost every single week since the game launched and content updates have done little to prevent the bleed out of players. Yesterday, the daily peak players was just 98k, representing a drop from its peak player count that is slightly 89%. (Source: https://steamdb.info/app/1063730/graphs/)

Now, if these 98k peak payers (or even 48k during off peak hours) were all concentrated in a few servers, this would not be an issue, you would still find people to play with. Except, new world had hundreds of servers at launch with 2k concurrent player caps, with AGS telling players to pick medium/low pop servers to avoid queues. Well, here is an example of a server that was previously "medium" pop: https://newworldstatus.com/worlds/lintukoto. As you can see, during off peak hours you frequently see <100 players (meanly you will barely find anyone in this MMO) and even during peak hours there are barely more than 300 players max.

Back in around 2019-2020, that’s when I heard about the New World and as I love finding out the “upcoming games”, started following it’s dev-log and updates and etc. If I am not mistaken it was about to become summer and they did make an announcement about it’s design.

At first, they were aiming to be a “Hardcore PvP” MMORPG game, which is exciting with such environment and gameplay since it was pretty basic, skill-required, with a learning curve combat mechanism. That’s how they did the marketing. You kill, you get the loot. You die, you lose the loot.

That means you lose everything you own. Everything in your backpack.

However, they were planning something else in the meantime apparently. They decided to delay the game, and the hype was kind of dead, but alive at the same time. It was like, everybody was dying to play the game but also the community was freaking out about the fact that game was delayed. I can tell you that there was also a boosted effect of the COVID, which people were in their homes and the gaming market was increasing, and they were all looking for something to play. That was the literal time of people working from homes. More like %80 gaming and %20 working though.

Long story short, after a while they announced that they are changing their game design and told the community in a crystal clear way that was to aim the mass, rather than the niche.

That was interesting and unexpected as well. Also, it was interesting to me as well, since there were a lot stuff to be changed. Game was not meant to be an MMORPG. There’s a huge gap between becoming an MMORPG and becoming a Hardcore PvP MMORPG. Not only the tags but also the gameplay, unfortunately.

After a while, they started revealing the mechanics and design of the game. People were complaining about them. They were, though, insistent and consistent what they were doing.

New World is a game funded by Amazon Games. Basically, they had to profit and revenue, more than anything, apparently, just as the other games in the industry. They were, of course, not aiming to kill the World of Warcraft, which I believe is impossible, but compete with the rest, including the WoW.

Anyways, while testing the game in it’s closed phases, I noticed that they did not even have stories in the quests. Some of them were literally “lorem ipsum”, and they were telling that they are about to launch the game.

They launched the game after a while. There were a lot of bugs and game breaking features with some unbalanced mechanics. New World, however, was good in itself. You know, it was intuitive. Character movement was good despite the rubber banding and lagging. You start your journey in a beach, which is so UNIQUE lol, and you start gathering some materials to craft your first stone tools. This is literally Rust and Albion at the same. Also in three dimension. Yet, it was not an MMORPG.

I am a day one player who quit playing the game after a few days. As a competition lover, my dream was to follow the lore, level up as quick as possible, do the dungeons, fight the enemy faction, earn experience, earn rewards and basically everything you’d expect from an MMORPG. However, the game was not the meant to be an MMORPG. It was an “empty” product, whether it was a Hardcore PvP game or not, it was empty. Immersion was great, but throughout your leveling process, you start noticing the game is offering nothing but the same thing from the first level.

Monsters / Enemies were same. Cities were same. Quests were demanding you to run from a point to another point and teleporting around was costly at first. As ı said quests were all same. ”Go to A. Kill B x15 times.” Now go back to the quest giver, take the next one, run to the C, and you can repeat this process till you become 60.

If I am not mistaken, there was also faction quests, which your main focus is PvP and there was a repeatable quest of skinning a few sheep in a zone. Sheep. Yeah, sheep. This was meant to be a player killing game. We were skinning sheep to earn PvP items. Comparing to WoW? Arena grinding and etc.? No. You skin sheep.

Finally I decided out to try the game once again. Started searching about the game. Thanks to the various social platforms such as Twitter and Reddit, I have decided to play the game again. A new season, bunch of updates through the years, hot fixes and even more. I didn't keep my expectations high. However, the current state of the game literally blowed up my mind.

It was all different.

First of all, whether I play a game or not, once I am into it, I like following it’s updates. It’s a fun hobby to me. New World was all changed.

Now it has a proper and fun, immersive main story to play. Things are happening. Cutscenes means something even though I don’t follow the lore. Locations are updated. You are still running through the map slightly, which I believe a must to showcase the places and push players to the next zones, but it’s “lesser boring.” Because you see some new stuff. You see new places. New enemies and even interacting with a door to getting inside is creating a good feeling for the players. I started doing quests, decided on a “main city”, which is Everfall, and started gathering stuff at the same time while I am running around. Oh, hold on a second… Speaking of the craft…

I don’t want to get into the details, however, please, for gods sake, this game requires a better UI and UX. Especially in the crafting window. It’s all mess. Check the image below. It’s from the Dragonflight expansion of World of Warcraft. It’s apparent how I am going to level up. There are grays, yellows, oranges, reds and I am feeling that I am going to fill the bar above. It’s minimalistic and not complex at all.

New World not in it’s full potential at all. I can see that. The game has still a potential and they are aiming for ten years at least to stay in the market. Thinking about the LTV, they’ll succeed, no doubts.

But the game itself can do way better than this and make people forget about it’s first form. It’s not a coincidence that the game peaked in the launch with almost 1 million concurrent players and now it can’t even reach 20 thousand concurrent players. First of all, if you ask me, marketing of the game is not enough though there are really great elements in the game currently. I am pretty sure, many MMORPG players did not even see this video on the internet at all. I am sure that my “gaming” friends don’t even know this yet. If you have sandworm in your game, you need to advertise it. Make a competition of killing it first in the world. Glorify it. Especially if it’s movement is just like this.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oa0WN3_t_u4

As I said before, the game itself improved well though. Also, I started doing the fishing questline once again. Even the fishing quest were like a running simulator in the first launch of the game. Though, they even changed the way it works! Also the balance was way better comparing to the past. I’d change the “minigame” of the fishing though. Actually, wish there were minigames for all the professions such as Mining, Gathering and etc. It’s another topic though.

I think the game needs way more weapons just like in Albion Online and even in other games with “have skills thanks to the weapons”. That would mean a lot more combat possibilities along with skills. Combat Designers on duty. There are still lots of elements to be used.

To sum up,

I am a day one player who quit the game within a few days. After coming back after almost 2 years, I am shocked and surprised. The overall improvement is great, quests are not bothering you. Story and atmosphere is hooking you up and the overall experience is good. Leveling up is easy and also you are not struggling as in most MMOs.

Despite the past of the game, I think it is worth trying now in 2023. There are lots of stuff to be added and improved. Still, I don’t think the game deserves the all the zoilism on the internet.

Oh, and also, please insert the swimming into the game. It kills all the immersion.

For example, in the picture below, I am swimming.

Recently at the Summer Game Fest, Amazon Games revealed a new trailer and announced that it was planning to release its MMO New World onto consoles this Fall. If you want to know more about these details, I've written a quick primer on the events at the bottom of the post for anybody who is interested.

The official New World Youtube channel hosted the trailer, and the first couple days after its upload it seemed to achieve reasonable view counts; roughly 3-5 times higher than a typical Developer Update video, which would make sense given the resources they spent promoting the announcement leading up to SGF, along with their marketing efforts that weekend. However, a week and a half later, on June 18th, something weird started happening with the trailer's viewcount. Here is a graph of the video's views since its upload according to viewstats.com:

The video suddenly jumped from a stable ~30,000 views to ~170,000 in a day. The next day it reached 400k, then 850k, and now it's at 1.3 Million. There has been no major ad buy or marketing push that corresponds to June 18th, and there has not seemed to be any organic buzz around the title that would generate a viral growth rate like this.

For example, you would expect that a video that surged in popularity would have some level of engagement to go along with the views. Instead, the video has only received 12 comments since June 18th:

Also, the huge increase in views was specific to that 1 trailer video; it did not result in an increase to the Dev Update video that was released alongside the trailer on June 7th, and it did not seem to generate additional likes/dislikes or subscribers to the channel:

Curious, I decided to open up a real-time view monitor for the video to see what it looked like:

According to the view-tracker web site's description, it polls the official YouTube API every 2 seconds for viewcount updates. I was curious about whether this graph looked normal, and the answer is 'no'. Organically popular videos do not show such sudden, frequent spikes over the course of a 2-second update. More importantly, those view count spikes that appear and then drop back down are a tell-tale sign of Youtube's fight against view-botting; when YouTube bans an account for view-botting, the views it generated get deleted from YouTube's view count.

So yeah, all of this leads me to suspect that Amazon Games has been behind an attempt to artificially inflate the view count of its "New World: Aeternum" trailer. As an added layer of hilarity, the devs were accused of using bots to artificially promote the game on Reddit several years ago, which was widely mocked because of how obvious the attempt was (for some reason, the bots or paid promoters consistently used the phrase, "feels good different"). The devs denied the attempt, releasing this statement:

I am not sure what is going on with these comments but I do want to be super clear, neither Amazon Games or New World would ever use bots or botting services or anything like that to generate fake posts on Reddit or any social media platform. We don't condone that kind of activity. This looks as weird to us as it does to you.

New World Primer:

New World is a PC MMO released by Amazon Games (formerly Amazon Games Studios) in Fall of 2021, after multiple delays and a dramatic shift in the game's design/direction midway through development. The game received a massive amount of interest at launch, managing to reach the 9th-highest concurrent player count in Steam's history. However, the game was plagued with issues at every level, from technical to design to communication, and it quickly developed a reputation for being a disaster that kept getting worse, due to the developers inability to fix serious problems while also seemingly introducing new ones week-to-week. The game lost 90% of its players within 4 months, and currently reaches peaks of .05% of that record high.

Fast forward to now, and on June 7th Amazon Games announced "New World: Aeternum" at the Summer Game Festival. After some initial confusion about what the title was, it eventually became clear that it was an attempt to release New World (bundled with its paid Expansion) on consoles for the full retail price of a AAA game (while also re-branding it in an attempt to distance itself from the game's troubled history).

The announcement was a big disappointment to the game's remaining players, who were frustrated about the lack of updates to the current version of the game on PC, and the lack of content directed towards them for the October 15th release. There did not seem to be much fanfare from console players in reaction to the news, and the media coverage surrounding the announcement largely focused on how poorly the rollout was being done. This article by MassivelyOP does a good job of going into even more detail about Amazon Games' attempts.

So by June 18th, when the apparent view-botting of the trailer started happening, all the potential excitement/buzz that could have been generated by "New World: Aeternum"s unveiling had already been tapped out, and the net result seemed to be a generally negative perception of the game's re-brand (which was, itself, a response to the negative perception of New World). Presumably that would have been the point where a decision might have been made within Amazon Games that they needed to 'do something' to try to 'fix' the situation. It looks like paying for views of the trailer was their solution.

Edit: As an update, the crazy views stopped suddenly on June 29th, ending at 2,590,413. That makes 2,561,085 views over that 10-day period. At the time of this edit, on July 7th, it has 2,590,729 views; only 316 more view in over a week. Engagement with the video is still essentially the same as it has always been, and the views never resulted in any change to the channel's subscriber count.

After initially making this post and reading the comments and videos made by New World content creators, I still don't believe that these views came from any kind of effective/good-faith marketing campaign. However, I think that New World may have decided to promote the video in the cheapest way possible through either YouTube or Google Ad Sense. For example, YouTube lets creators 'bid' on advertising costs, with prices reaching as low as $0.01 per thousand views in some cases; however, for this price those views are of incredibly low quality (ads running in countries where New World is not playable, or views from accounts that YouTube recognizes as being of very low value because of demographics/viewership-patterns, etc.).

It is unclear if Amazon Games would understand this type of advertising system, as this is clearly the first time they've ever tried something like this given the channel's lifetime view history. It's possible they understood this, and only wanted to pump up the videos views, as cheaply as possible, without violating YouTube's ToS. I would still fit that under the category of view-botting.

However, I also think it's also possible that they didn't understand how the system worked, and they might have spent something like $25,000 on generating 2.5 million views, and now they're really confused why it didn't gain them any channel subscribers or pre-orders.

Either way, I find it fascinating.

So New World is having a console launch and a bit of a rebranding effort along side it. I think the overview story of this situation is pretty infamous at this point and I wont go into the full details of the situation. I think most understand it at this point.

But I wanted to have a discussion about potential reasons to do this and my views on this. So this update is in due in about a month. They're doing an open beta of the first 30 levels this weekend with PC and console players on the same server. I played for a little bit of it. This console launch will include an update to the PC version of the game. Some of the update is free for all, but the "new content" aspects will require purchase of the latest expansion. You can see the feature list here:

The beta is really just that bottom right square I believe. At least from what I saw. I believe the new pvp zone, raid, and soul trials (which are semi not new) will require the latest expansion.

So first, its obvious that this entire situation is a marketing play to try to increase revenue. But the question becomes what their actual plan is beyond that. What are they envisioning? Here's my theory on the two most infamous parts of this situation.

1. Console Focus - They're doing a full court press on the console launch. Their marketing, talks, everything; its treating the game as if its a new game. With all of its features being presented as if you were presenting a new game. Even though the game and its features have existed for years now. To the point where it seems like they're ignoring the PC players. To give an idea the extent of this, there was a lot of confusion among the PC community (and still is) on if this is a new game they will have to purchase or not. This is not the case. But its not uncommon to see the occasional comment being confused on thinking they will have to spend money to play the game again. So the main question is why? Why are they going so hard on this aspect. My guess here is that the revenue they're getting from the PC playerbase is not great. Its clear they made this decision prior to the announcement, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was made late 2023 to go this route. And the playernumbers were looking pretty good at the time. Still decreasing, but good (peaking at ~30k in 2024). But even with those numbers, they weren't happy with the revenue. So a lot of those players must have not been spending money in a frequency that they were hoping for. I know in my personal circle, there were quite a few friends of mine who only bought the game at launch and played 100-300 hours of the game without spending another dime. This situation must have been common place as the game doesn't have any subscription fees. I'm also going to estimate that their angry earth expansion did not meet sales expectations, further pushing this drive to, for lack of a better term, put new PC content development on the backburner while they focus on the foundational game changes and console support. From my personal standpoint, I did spend money on the cash shop occasionally. But I would say this game had some of the worse looking cash shop offerings I've seen. I'm not sure who their target audience is, but they're going for this renaissance masquerade ball aesthetic in so many parts of the game. And that appeal just doesn't land for me, and I suspect it doesn't land for many others. It was that + pirate aesthetics mainly it seemed like. With these crazy looking weird helmets in a lot of their skins and strange furniture to match. Overall I just wasn't a fan and they really need a new direction there. From what I've seen in the past year or so, they seem to be getting much better at this. But you'll still occasionally see things pop into the cash shop that just look horrible. Seemed like they didn't want players to take their own world seriously at times, but I digress. Another huge flag, for me, that this is the case is that they've stopped making new armor skins for the cash shop, I believe. I think the last time they released a new armor skin set for the store was back in either the first few months of 2024 or final months of 2023. You know its bad when a game like this stops investing into their MTX store. They must be getting horrible sales if its not providing value and they're just re-releasing old skins. The in game skins actually look really good for the most part. But they seem to be struggling to delivery quality skins in the store haha.

So TLDR; revenue was way below expectations (both MTX sales and expansions) on PC, despite strong population numbers.

2. ARPG Rebranding - The next part is them going for this rebranding of their game's genre. Focusing more on RPG and ARPG appeals than MMO. Almost as if they're trying to distance themselves from the MMORPG tag. My theory with this direction is that they're looking to not only distance themselves from the previous feedback/negativity around the PC game; but they're also trying to change expectations around their game. The MMORPG tag comes with it a set of unique expectations and competition. Players, and understandably so, will compare your game to others on the market. Games like WoW, Gw2, ESO, FF14. Games that have had 10+ years of polish and content development. Along with this, expectations on how long the game will keep players entertained (usually on the longer side) and post launch content development (good content updates every 3-4 months typically). I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the devs may be trying to make it so those expectations and competition will not be applied by their audiences to their game. Especially on a new platform release, consoles. Basically going the route of "Don't compare us to MMORPGs on the consoles and don't expect update cadences similar to them".

Again this is all just theories and nobody will truly know whats going on unless they're high up at AGS.

Overall, I think it could work for them. Now what kind of support this game will get in the future is anybodies guess and will determine heavily by how successful console launch is. But based on the ~5-10 hours I played of the open beta, the reception seems to be what most are expecting. PC players are upset and in general negative in chat. While the console players who are fresh to the game are being positive and showing interest. I think this represents the overall opinion of new world where that first playthrough, exploration, leveling, etc; those are all very strong. But its that long term engagement around the endgame loop starts to rub players the wrong way.

The new pvp zone looks interesting to me, same with the souls trials. I already owned the expansion so I'll redownload and try the game again because why not. But just from an observation perspective, its going to be really interesting to see how this whole situation goes down.

In a sweeping layoff, Amazon is getting rid of 30k+ people today, and in the future they will remove more and more to replace them with AI.

New World is feeling these layoffs, some people are missing from the discord, and artists are posting on Twitter talking about being laid off. We don't know the full extent of the layoffs yet, as they're going out this morning.

I'm worried for the future of the game.

Edit Update: The Amazon Employees subreddit is saying the entire Irvine AGS studio is gone. That's the one that runs New World.

Edit Update 2: Amazon Games jobs listings do not have the Irvine site listed. Probably confirmation New World is cooked.

Edit Update 3: The AGS LinkedIn page no longer exists. I think we might be cooked cooked.

I‘ve enjoyed this game so much, spent nearly 2000 hours into it since release. It‘s incredibly unfair for them to shut it down. I will not touch another game from amazon in this lifetime.

I'm familiar with Steam as that is how I do most of my gaming. I'm not opposed to going through Amazon to purchase the game though.

For anyone that bought it directly from Amazon:

1. If I buy it from Amazon, does New World have it's own launcher that I download directly from Amazon?

2. I already have the Amazon Games application on my PC. Will New World show up in that instead of it's own launcher?

Is there any chance Amazon would be willing to sell New World to another game studio or publisher? By selling they could recoup some of their investment. And to avoid such huge backlash maybe Amazon would sell New World to avoid bad publicity.

Holding onto a viable game, ensuring it drowns and not letting anyone else touch it and revive it is really insane and feels malicious. If New World was given to a reliable studio they could easily bring it to life again.

Maybe we could start some bad publicity so amazon feels forced to sell New World? Then we could get back the game we love.

Link to post

I saw on the front page a post about being done with New World, Amazon's mmorpg, due to an upcoming patch making crafters useless. Players losing 100s of hours of work and players losing hope in the devs. Ive been reading thru the subreddit posts but I cannot understand what exactly they did. I dont know the terminology for the game. Could someone explain it to someone who doesn't play? Or put it in terms of another game, such as destiny light level?

I am probably jumping into something I know nothing about, but I bought New World on the Steam sale for $15. I took the risk because I really love MMOs and wanted a new experience. So far I've found it to be an enjoyable game. Obviously nothing earth shattering but the environments are interesting and the combat is decent. I don't really understand the overwhelmingly negative reviews it's getting. It was well worth my money and I am considering getting the expansion when it is on sale.

That being said, I use a dollar/hour spent scale to determine if a game was worth the money spent and the amount I have already put in already exceeded the dollars spent. I am sure that number might be different for other people and I can respect that.

I like the game for what it is and I feel like I am missing something or am just ignorant to what's causing the negative reviews.