New World Preview Week
Syndicate members have been playing New World for some years now. The team attended SyndCon in 2018 and members have been involved in several rounds of testing. In total, more than 400 members have experienced the game as it has evolved and there were over 150 participating in the recent preview week. We asked them to pretend the preview week was the launch and to play the game from the perspective that if it had launched in that state, would it have keep them playing long term? Would they have only played a short duration of a month or two? Or would they have passed on the game entirely? And then to provide feedback on what it would take to make them into long term players. We hosted a Discord session to talk about the feedback and some submitted written reports that are included in this document. The Syndicate is intending to make New World our next major game and thus to have a long term presence so there is definite interest in seeing some tweaks made to keep our members playing for more than a month or two.
The preview week showed two things. First that Amazon made great progress at fixing critical flaws and had done very well with those fixes. Second, that there remained other critical flaws that needed to be addressed else the game was going to fail after launch. We submitted a 51+ page report detailing those and some of those issues were: The guild/company size limit of 50 has to be changed. That represents the development team arbitrarily telling gaming communities how large they can be. Those kinds of limits are doomed to fail. Players will bypass them with multiple guild entities but more importantly it will eventually fracture communities which are the backbone of a long term, successful MMO. It needs to be raised a great deal. And... Resource node locations need to be randomized and the respawn timer does as well. Rampant camping has made that aspect of the game a nightmare. And... Similarly, being able to jump on someone else’s kill and skin it, for example, before they are even able to start the act themselves is a giant pain point for the community. And... Kill Stealing is just another variant of that and was a widespread complaint. And... More end game content is already a known issue and being addressed but its worth pointing out given how fast players burned through the content in a week’s time. And... More character creation options was a common theme. And... The chat system was most commonly characterized as cumbersome and difficult to use. And... A lack of a sell option to vendors for junk is a common major concern.
We are hopeful that Amazon will address those topics and the game will become a success when it launches.
