I just felt like making this post as someone who played New World back at launch and really enjoyed it. The core gameplay hooked me right away, combat felt great, PvP was exciting, and the trade skills were surprisingly rewarding. But like many others, I eventually dropped it. The content felt thin, and the game seemed unfinished overall.

Since then, I always kind of thought of the game as a “flopped” MMO. That changed recently when I started seeing YouTubers covering it again, and then I watched the devs Season 10 preview (which is basically a free expansion). It actually looked really good, so I decided to give it another shot about four days ago.

Now that I’m freshly max level, I can honestly say the game feels like it’s in a great place. The new zones are beautifully designed, the gameplay still feels as tight as ever, and the overall polish is miles ahead of launch. I haven’t reached the deep endgame loop yet, but from what I’ve seen, Season 10 is supposed to address a lot of those issues, including a new 10-player raid and the new Catacombs system (a procedurally generated dungeon that ramps up in difficulty the deeper you go).

If you’ve been itching for a new MMO or thinking about returning to New World, I’d highly recommend checking it out right now. It’s genuinely worth your time again.

EDIT: It's had a massive reassurance of players the last month(s). Back in june/july it barely reached 9-10k on pc (keep in mind there's console players unaccounted for). This weekend they reached approximately 25k on steam.

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.

I’ve heard a lot of talk and recommendations towards playong New World. I’ve always thought its a bad MMO. Has a new good update been released or what?

Edit: i know the game died off. I was never gonna try it out. Was just curious about all the fuzz

What’s up with all the slander? just curious

The shutdown of New World should not be such a surprise to those who have followed this game since it was first announced. New World was originally designed as a sandbox survival game similar to Rust. That is a huge reason why the game was so hyped and millions of players showed up on launch day.

Unfortunately, to the frustration of millions of players, that is not the game they received. I will provide some backstory about the development of New World. New World throughout most of its development time was never intended to be a theme park style MMO. It was a sandbox survival game with PvP elements. That was the core design of the game, and the Lumberyard engine was used to specifically caters towards that. If you ever wondered why New World is so bug ridden and janky, it's largely due to them converting the game from a small scale sandbox to a large scale theme park mmo. The engine and tools that built the game were never intended for anything large scale like an mmo.

The decision to turn New World from a sandbox survival game into a themepark mmo is what ultimately doomed it. The millions of players who came to play a higher quality Rust were essentially hit with a bait and switch. New World was a broken game at launch, because so many of the gameplay and technical systems which were intended for the survival game were now stitched together and or gutted.

Why AGS ever thought they could compete with other theme park mmorpgs is baffling. That is what killed the game. The cold feet and cowardice that caused the game to be redesigned during the alpha is what ended the dream. Scot Lane was not the original design lead. The original design lead was a guy who directed a Dreamworks film from the early 2000's. He, along with several other key developers left New World during the early alpha stage after the decision was made to turn New World from a survival game into an MMO. I completely understand why he and many others abandoned the project. New World was no longer the game that it was originally intended to be. To put it succintly, it was intended to be a survival game with crafting, gatheting pvp, and building where players battled against the environment and Native American NPC populations. Instead, what we got at launch was a bug ridden half baked MMO. It was still incredible fun however, due to the survival game skeleton that still existed.

No MMO does a theme park MMO as good as WoW. Trying to copy it is so astoundingly foolish, and AGS ruined what could have been the best survival game on the market. New World cratered from almost 1 million concurrent players on steam to less than 10,000. A 99% player drop, and this happened years ago. Any other game that had the budget, development time. and support that New World had would have been shutdown years ago. This game has literally been bleeding money for years, and I hate Amazon as much as the next person, but even I was perplexed at how long they left the lights on at AGS. No amount of bug ridden "content" could have ever saved this game. The game died the day they decided to betray the millions of survival game players that it was originally designed and marketed for.

AGS has known for a long time that the studio was closing. The announcement to convert New World to console was a sign of the end. The recent Nighthaven content patch was not delivered in earnest, it was just scheme to milk the playerbase one final time.

If you want to know who killed New World, then find the players who demanded the game become another boring WoW clone, but also don't forget the company that caved to such petulance.

New World didn't die today, it died around 5 years ago when the heart and soul of the game was ripped out so that the 385th WoW clone could be one day be sunset.

Rest in peace New World.

Never played it before, since i've never heard much good about the game until recently. But bought and tried it after a recent post about new upcomming stuff.

New endgame will prob be good for the game, but i feel this game lacks midgame and things to do in the world in general.

Like mobs and dangers out in the world, cool stuff to find and such. Or just mobs to grind, there are areas with mobs but not felt anything challenging so far.

Not much to do other than quest is there? The quests do not seem very interesting either.

The general wilderness feels empty, other than an animal here and there. Maybe realistic but not very exciting.

Why make such a pretty world with so little in it?

It's a beautiful game, at least on max settings. I'll give it that. Though the voice acting is terrible, i had to turn it off.

Though it's not very immersive to me, with it's static towns and lackluster Npcs.

The character creator is a bit sad. The fact that everyone in the world is the same size bothers me:P

The combat system is fine, actually fun for the most part. Simple and straight forward, with enough customization to be interesting enough.

Just don't feel it matters much since there is little to fight part from pvp. I can see the pvp being decent in the game but never been a thing that interests me much.

So far the questing has been easy, way super easy and honestly boring.

Am i wrong, does it get better? Is there more interesting stuff in later zones?

I lost motivation to play rather fast.

Probably still dabble in it but feel it falls short both as an mmo and an rpg. I do see the potential though, it has a lot of that.

Am i wrong?

title

I see lots of hate on New World but, as a dad who gets to play for maybe 10 hours a week it’s fantastic. Playing on console on the big TV while laying back relaxing is honestly just a really good experience. The sound design in the game is incredible, the zones have nice contrast. The crafting and gathering is top notch and while the console UI and controller setup isn’t as refined as ESO it’s damn close. Story is meh but honestly I don’t think anyone is playing these games for the story. The combat feels way better than ESO, and I love the wide range of weapon selection. How many games let you wield a fire staff and a musket then whip out a drumset and play a mini game somewhat like guitar hero??? Sure, I’ll probably run out of things to do eventually but at my pace it’s hard to feel like I wont get my moneys worth with a 1 time purchase, the game is underrated imo and anyone on the fence, especially an ESO player should try it out! If I had to bring up any gripes, it would be the transmog system. I think if you salvage something you should automatically unlock its appearance, then use the tokens to change your appearance. It appears to be setup for them to make money off of it but honestly as someone who’s been bent over for years by ESOs crown crate and cosmetic system I can live with it.

So for the past couple weeks I've been down this rabbit hole trying to figure out what's actually happening with AI in gaming, and just when I think I'm getting somewhere, some new article drops that completely changes things.
Found this one today and honestly it's kind of wild - Amazon is basically pulling back on a ton of their AAA stuff, especially MMOs. This is all happening while they're doing massive layoffs (like 14,000 people across the company), so you can kinda see why Amazon Games is hitting the brakes and reevaluating everything.

Here's what's NOT getting axed though:
That new Tomb Raider from Crystal Dynamics is still going
Maverick Games' driving game is still on track
Amazon Montreal's March of the Giants just finished closed alpha and seems fine
And apparently Luna just got "Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg" which... okay then. Seems like they're pivoting toward more casual/AI-driven stuff on that platform.

The MMO part hurts though. New World isn't getting any new content anymore (servers stay up till 2026 at least), and who knows what's happening with their other MMO projects. Feels like Amazon's just done betting big on those long-term multiplayer experiences.
Pretty crazy to see them scale back this hard after pumping so much money into gaming over the last few years. Anyone else following this? What do you think it means for the industry when even Amazon with their infinite money is pulling back?

Its been a couple years since I stepped foot into NW. any current players have any advice to a potential returning player?

New World player here, and while I'm as sad about the game being essentially canned after being put into a great state, there is a good lesson here into making sure that your entertainment isn't too deeply a part of your identity. It's a good thing we're in November with a bunch of great games coming out.

That being said, I'm actually extremely surprised at how severe the player drop off on steam has been for New World after the announcement.

• The game went from 40,000 Steam Players at peak times on average to 12k and then lower to sub 10k.

• It looks like not even the current content being good was enough to keep people engaged, as people were not just playing the game to have fun NOW, they were playing the game with the intent of long haul investment.

I have never seen an event like this in the past, am I just unaware of something like this happening before? Are there similar incidents with publicly available data? Super interesting phenomenon.