Game Review #3
About a month ago, Amazon Game Studios released their first major game, an MMORPG known as New World. This release was notable for two reasons: AGS (Amazon Game Studios) is an extremely inexperienced game development team, and New World is a game that can be called hardcore, even for an MMO. These two details would make anyone skeptical about New World’s success if they knew anything about what it takes to create and run a good MMORPG. As a result, I actually decided to pass on the game initially, expecting it to be an overhyped yet underdeveloped MMO, which is an unfortunate reality in today’s market. However, about a week after it launched, my dad purchased the game for me and convinced me to try it; since he works for Amazon, he was curious to hear what I thought about New World.
Despite my initial hesitation, I went into New World with an open mind. I didn’t expect it to blow me away, as my friends were already detailed all of its major issues to me, but I was curious if I could at least have some fun playing it. To my surprise, this actually didn’t take long, as the combat system immediately stood out to me as something that was really unique and engaging for an MMO. Going into New World I had heard many reviews stating that the combat system was “extremely simplistic”, and that you only had 3 abilities in total. This is a gross understatement, and it frustrates me that so many reviewers didn’t spend even the bare minimum amount of time necessary to understand it. After making my way through the introduction quests, it was clear to me that the combat system in New World was far more complex and fleshed out than most people were giving it credit for. Even when I stopped playing the game I found myself researching different potential builds. In my opinion, New World’s combat system is genius, as it appears very simplistic on the surface, making it really easy for new players to interact with it; however, behind the scenes there are a vast amount of options for build diversity, allowing for tons of freedom in how you actually play the game.
Once I had seen that the game was far better than reviews made it out to be, I went out to test the real meat of the game: the professions. While almost every MMORPG has professions or trade skills in some form, New World takes the feature and puts it front and center. Every player can train every single profession, and you’re highly encouraged to keep them up to date. This was the feature that a large amount of the game’s marketing was centered around, and it’s something that most reviewers praised as being unique and innovative. Unfortunately, it’s neither of these things; the best thing that I can say about New World’s professions is that they meet the industry standard. Just as in most games, you explore the world and find resources to gather, all before returning to town and pressing a single button to craft an item. It’s not bad, but I struggle to understand why reviewers are criticizing the unique combat while simultaneously praising a system that has existed since World of Warcraft launched in 2004. I also think that New World’s emphasis on gathering and crafting severely hurts it as a whole, since these systems are side content at best. Even Final Fantasy 14, which has arguably the greatest crafting and gathering system in an MMO, keeps it as a niche feature that most people won’t even notice.
Despite the fact that I disagreed with most large reviewers on previous topics, there is a point that I can almost entirely agree with everyone on: the questing and leveling progression in New World is garbage. Speaking as someone who leveled through WoW Classic as a Warrior Tank, the questing loop in New World manages to feel even worse. It took me roughly 140 hours over the span of 2 weeks to reach the max level, and I was forced to shut my brain off for most of that in order to enjoy it. The most amusing part is that I was told both by friends and by viewers on my stream that my leveling process was FAR more efficient than theirs, as I’m extremely experienced in these types of games. For the average player, leveling in New World is a horrendous slog that most will never complete. This is, obviously, a massive problem, especially for an MMORPG which requires a steady stream of players to keep its numbers afloat. Amazon is going to need to make some fast changes if they want to prevent their game’s population from stagnating; unfortunately, I don’t actually see this happening.
So far I’ve discussed the good, the bad, and the meh of New World, but I’ve skipped over one major and hilarious detail: the bugs. Oh dear god, the bugs. I’ve played my fair share of game launches over the years, and there are always problems. It’s completely expected that not every game will release in a perfect state, but New World has already gone FAR past the line of what most would consider acceptable. It started off relatively small, with some server crashes, lag spikes caused by animation errors, and Nvidia GPUs quite literally getting bricked due to poor optimization. Around this time an Australian server crashed, and upon being rebooted players found that the in-game time had advanced by over a month, resulting in all of their cities being destroyed. Things got a bit worse when almost every endgame feature had to be temporarily disabled, and players began realizing that most of the in-game equipment traits were not working. It was later discovered that you could make yourself invincible by setting your game to windowed mode, which people later deduced was a result of Client Side Authority being present in a lot of the game’s code. This was highly abused until Amazon patched it, at which point players found a workaround and abused it for yet another week. After realizing that you could manipulate the game through your client, people began utilizing SQL Injections to post images of large sausages in the game chat which would crash your game if you hovered over them. Before Amazon could even fix this issue, it was discovered that a massive duping exploit existed, causing the economy of many servers to crash overnight.
Needless to say, things aren’t going very well for Amazon Game Studies. It’s unfortunate, as despite its flaws, I feel that New World has a lot of potential as an MMORPG. It’s entirely possible that it will turn around, but I think that this might have been a bit too much for Amazon’s rookie studio to handle. They’re a relatively new team handling an already ambitious project, and they’ve been forced to play nonstop whack-a-mole with game-breaking bugs for almost two weeks now. While it’s entirely possible that they can fix everything and begin improving the game, I’m afraid things might be too late by that point.
