New World - An Update


After the painful preview week for New World, it went back into development and was delayed for months to address the concerns. Late in 2020, word started to come out about changes being made. A number of pain points had been addressed but one massive roadblock remained that the developers, at least publicly, seemed oblivious too. That roadblock was the 50 person guild size limit. Looking across WoW, as one example, there are hundreds of thousands of guilds with more than 50 people. So, picking a limit of 50 is arbitrarily setting up systems tha ultimately destroy the fabric that makes up cohesive communities. As many games have seen in the past, when you make decisions that errode the very core of your communities, the game fails. Crucible shut down so Amazon is banking on New World being a success to show the world it can be a player in the gaming space. New World is going to be a failure (or at least fall far short of what it would be) if it retains the 50 person limit. Forcing communities to break into smaller chunks, that are unrelated within the game (don't share a common chat, common guild systems, common sense of being and purpose) will create divisions that will cause communities to implode or to bypass the game entirely. It is a horrible design decision that, unless altered, will come back to bite the game hard upon launch. There will be a rush of people to explore the game and Amazon will be happy with initial sales. A couple months in, retention will crash and they will wonder why. That will be the cause. As of the start of 2021 it is not too late for Amazon to realize this and change course but they, so far, had shown no signs of recognizing the cliff many developers before them have gone over.