New World Approaches


After being delayed multiple times, the New World official launch is just a couple of weeks away when this article was written. Despite years of development by the largest company in the world, it is a "meh" game... and that is highly disappointing. Visually it looks good. Its mechanics work fine (although crafting is way over complicated). But after 25 years of MMO lessons learned, they implemented mistake after mistake that should have been learned by their team many years ago. The game quickly becomes "grindy" (which is a common word used by reviewers during the beta periods). The game quickly becomes "boring" (the second most common used descriptor). They missed the concept that players burn through leveling content super fast and need an end-game PvE focus. They added half a dozen small group dungeons but those are almost a waste of development effort. They are few in number... do not allow large groups of friends to tackle the content... and are super short. There is really no depth to them and thus almost no replay value to them except to "grind" for drops. They did invest heavily in PvP combat (fighting over forts) and building mechanics around that. The problem there is, they missed the lessons of 20+ years that PvP focused games are not mass market games. Those who PvP in MMOs absolutely love it and are often very vocal about it. But when you look at the statistics, they represent 5-10% of players. There is another 5-10% that tolerate it and participate in it but who are not rabid fans. That leaves you with 80-90% of players who want a strong PvE game and probably will never (or very rarely) touch PvP. New World is headed for a cliff. There is soooooooooo much pent up "need/desire" in the player community for a good MMO that sales of New World are excellent. It will launch to a huge influx of players and lots and lots of energy. But within a few months (unless Amazon has some amazing, rapidly deliverable, cards up its sleeve) those same players will be leaving the game in large numbers. That is sad because Amazon has the resources to pull off a great game but it appears, from an outsiders point of view, the wrong vision and focus are applied to this launch.