Amazon didn’t have a good run when it comes to games. Well, they do, but only on selling them, not on making them. Crucible is a great example of this, with the game being discontinued and all. However, they’re still not done; this time, they have the upcoming New World game.
What Is Amazon’s New World Game?
New World is an MMORPG created and to be published by Amazon Game Studios. The game is stated to use a buy-to-play business model similar to World of Warcraft or Black Desert Online. This means that there’s no mandatory subscription fee to be paid every month.
When Is the Release Date?
The New World game is slated to be launched in spring 2021. The game was originally supposed to be in for a May release. Then, the game was delayed and the release date moved to August 31, 2021. This is after feedback from various beta testers persuaded Amazon to push the release date further.
The game’s studio director, Rich Lawrence stated that they wanted to make sure that dedicated players have a lot to chew on when they start the game. They aim for players to be completely immersed and to spend time with New World and play it. Time will tell if that promise would be kept. But for now, let’s talk about the game’s planned consoles.
Where Can You Play It?
New World is stated to be an MMORPG on PC. We don’t know, however, if there are plans of the game being released on consoles as well. And with the delays on its release, we won’t hold our breath that that’s going to happen.
New World Game Preview
New World Game Mechanics
As stated, the New World game is an MMORPG that has sandbox mechanics. The game is rendered on an engine created by Amazon Lumberyard, made to be played on PC. The typical requirements for MMOs apply. This means choosing their player “Region” to get good latency, and then choosing a game server, or “World.” As per usual, players can choose their preferred servers to join up with friends if they wish, or go for the highest speed. After that, players create their character’s base appearance and input a name.
New World allows players to control their character avatars on a third or first-person view. The game also has a leveling system similar to World of Warcraft, where the max level for characters is on Level 60. Time will tell if this limit will be increased shortly.
Familiar MMO Gameplay
In general, the gameplay that New World will have is similar enough to other MMORPGs out there. Players go in the world, they level up and get resources by killing monsters, get more skills and armor, rinse, and repeat. Other than that, New World will have players forming five-player groups, as well as having the ability to join one of three factions: the Syndicate, the Marauders, and the Covenant. Players can also make use of various node resources, create items for their use, and control settlements. They of course have the usual MMO fare of killing monsters for items and levels.
Another staple in MMOs is the character level-ups as well as attribute skills. On New World, the attributes that you can put levels into are Focus, Constitution, Intelligence, Dexterity, and Strength. Another thing that’s typical with MMOs is the diminishing returns that players get as an attribute’s level increases. Other than that, players also level up various skills that can be either trade or weapons.
Next up on the list would be the quick travel mechanic, of which three were stated to exist on New World. The so-called Life Staff skill tree contains a few speed boosts. This might make it an essential skill for players that want to travel fast. Unfortunately, there are no fast-speed mounts available or confirmed in the game. Other than that, we have no idea about the other two quick travel mechanics for now. There’s also the part where jumping is nonexistent. Instead, players can dodge or climb a lot of the game’s environments.
Story and World
Players start New World after they get washed up on Aeternum. Aeternum is an island of legend that the player was going to travel into. Inside said island are veins mystic ores that can either empower individuals or corrupt them. An island of mysticism, magic, and terrifying monsters.
Inside the island are also a few ancient ruins that were left behind by a civilization that made their living there. Of course, as per usual with these MMOs, they’re guarded by their skeletal remains. Due to the magic in the island, your everyday woodland and mundane creatures are enhanced by magic. Combine that with some early corrupted settlers, and a few other things, players won’t run out of enemies to fight.
Of course, that’s not the only thing. There’s more to New World’s story than that. However, so far gamers only have the briefest of setups on what the story would be. And there’s not even the slightest glimpse of any main villain. Well, unless you count their second trailer.
New World’s Economy
The economy of the New World is centered around gold coins. Players earn them the usual way of killing monsters and completing quests. They can also get more gold coins by disposing of items they don’t want through a trader. There’s also the game’s salvage/dismantle, a system that’s exactly what it says in the tin. Other than that, they can also straight-up drop items or directly trade with another player.
New World Game Combat
The combat of New World doesn’t have any auto-locked targeting in its attacks. You can press the tab to target the next enemy, but that’s it. Thus, if you’re a ranged character, a steady hand when aiming is needed. If you’re a Genshin Impact player, you pretty much have that done if you want to do good damage with an archer.
With each level that players get, the various enemy mobs in the game are programmed to increase in complexity as well as strength. Their behavior will also change, with their attack behaviors changing to add a bit of spice. This requires the players to learn the new patterns and immediately counter using abilities and attacks.
Currently, players can choose between bows, hatchets, a fire staff, the aforementioned life staff, hammers, muskets, spears, and of course, the sword and shield. The mechanics of the game do lend themselves to some PvP combat and Co-Op. Before players leave a safe zone, they have the option to set a flagged state which allows them to be PvP’d by other players.
As per usual on other MMOs, players don’t drop items when they die. However, with each death, or even combat encounter, the items that the player has equipped will undergo damage. Of course, players can repair said damage through repair items and gold coins. Let’s hope they don’t go the Fallout 76 route in terms of item repair and put microtransactions on it. Though that’s a fool’s hope.
PvP
As for their PvP, the only thing that we know of right now is the usual PvP stuff available on other MMOs. That, and their siege mode, which is similar to For Honor’s Dominion with attackers and defenders. Simple, direct to the point, but without For Honor’s great graphics. We’ll talk about the game’s graphics in a while.
Both the attacking and defending sides have 25 players, making this game mode a 50-player game. The defending side needs to defend a fort that will be attacked by the other team. The attacking team, meanwhile, needs to take a flag that’s located inside the enemy fort to win. Both sides have 30 minutes to either hold out or capture the flag.
For now, that’s the only thing we know about the PvP system in the game. There’s also the territory system which allows players to take territory from the Island and claim it as their own. Perhaps that territory system is part of the game’s eventual PvP. However, that’s all just speculation for now so there’s no need to do anything drastic.
Territory and You
If you’re the kind of player that wants interaction with others, you might want to start, or join, a company. Companies on New World are similar to Guilds composed of 50 players. They can then take over and govern various territories in the game’s worlds and servers.
However, those that are not part of Companies don’t need to fret. This doesn’t mean that they can charge players with crimes or fines. The Company system of taking territories is stated to be way more regulated to prevent such an occasion. There is, however, the caveat that these take-over systems have been constantly changing on the game’s development. So for now, there’s not that much confirmed about the territories in the game.
Graphics
There’s quite a bit riding on the launch of New World, Amazon’s reputation in particular. However, even though the title might be a bit pretentious, and the game’s a high-budget, there’s nothing that makes it stand out graphically. If you focus on what it looks like right now, the game doesn’t look like one that’s released after the previous generation of consoles. Previous videos that showed off the gameplay looked a bit choppy and a bit on the lower end side.
However, the game does seem to have a bit of improvement on the graphical scale after August. This, however, doesn’t mean that the game isn’t out of the bush in terms of graphics. While it’s true that New World can beat World of Warcraft, it can’t contend graphically with Final Fantasy XIV. And this is something that we’re going to be talking about later.
Next up would be what the game can output graphically. New World is stated to support 4K graphics, and for now, that seems to be the case. In terms of frame rate, both the lower and higher ends of the scale seem to be on the OK side of things, which is another point in favor.
For now, though, we’ll have to wait on how the game would look in the future.
Sound and OST
Currently, what we have are some snippets of the loading screen OST for the game, which sounds pretty good. However, we don’t know how the game’s OST would mesh with the completed game.
How Does New World Compare to Other MMORPGs?
As for how New World compares to games like it, we have three of them to make our comparisons with. We’ll start with World of Warcraft, the premier MMORPG from back then that’s still great today. After that, we have Final Fantasy XIV, a game that came out bad but returned swinging on A Realm Reborn. Next up would be Phantasy Online 2, a really good anime MMO. And lastly, Black Desert Online, an up-and-comer that has a lot of goals to go for.
World of Warcraft
As stated, World of Warcraft is one of the oldest MMORPGs out there, only beaten by Runescape. The game has a long and storied history, following after its strategy game roots from the first Warcraft Games, all of which are still beloved to this day.
For now though, in terms of graphics, New World is way better. However, in terms of the other aspects of an MMO, we don’t know yet. World of Warcraft has been around for a long time now, and a lot of the usual MMO staples were directly a result of WoW being the start of the trend. Thus, It’s going to be more along the lines of, “who can do it better” at this point.
Other than that, World of Warcraft also has an incredibly diverse race list. This includes the Undead, normal humans, Night Elves, Blood Elves, Orcs, Trolls, and a metric ton more. There’s even the Pandaren, an April Fool’s joke that looks like a standing panda that hails from the island nation of Pandaria. It’s as cool as it sounds.
Other than this, we’ll just have to see how the game fares against World of Warcraft.
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Next up is Final Fantasy XIV, which is Final Fantasy if it was taken to its logical conclusion. The game, on its release, was bad. The graphics and OST were praised well by the players. However, the game’s UI, as well as several aspects of the core gameplay felt off to them, making them reject the game. Thus, it needed a complete overhaul before Final Fantasy XIV even became the juggernaut that it is today.
A Realm Reborn is one of the best things that happened to the game. It was a complete overhaul of the gameplay and has quite a lot of things that made it appealing to players. This included the prelude of the game. For one, the original iteration of FFXIV wasn’t shut down immediately, there was a legitimate story event that was added to commemorate A Realm Reborn.
This was done through Bahamut, Final Fantasy’s mainline summon, unleashing hell and destroying much of Eorzea. The players, through the blessing of the gods, managed to escape five years into the future. That alone would be hype enough, but the addition of several new zones, items, monsters, and events helped skyrocket A Realm Reborn and restored the flagging player base.
For now, though, we’ll just have to wait if New World will be a good MMO before we do any serious comparisons.
Phantasy Star Online 2
Phantasy Star Online 2 is a great anime MMO that has a lot of references to past Phantasy Star games. That alone would bring players and fans rushing in, the Phantasy Star games were beloved by their player base and had a lot of fans. Combining magic and science into a cohesive, narrative, and exciting gameplay, the MMO has a lot of things going for it.
Nothing needs to be said about Phantasy Star Online 2 other than that. The game is incredibly solid and has a lot of cool events and other new stuff happening to keep players coming back. For now, let’s hope that New World can follow in those footsteps.
Black Desert Online
Lastly, we have Black Desert Online, one of the newer MMO titles in this article. Black Desert mostly automates a lot of the grind that usual MMOs have. This is indeed one of the better automations of MMORPGs out there. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t allow players to go at it and play the MMO if they wish. There’s still a lot of autonomy for players to have on Black Desert Online.
It also helps that the game’s graphics and quality are top-notch. The characters look great, the environments look good, and overall you won’t have any complaints when it comes to graphics.
Should You Be Excited for the New World Game?
If you’re looking for an original MMORPG storyline to sink your teeth into, you might want to try out New World. The game, to its credit, isn’t following a lot of the usual tropes of other MMORPGs out there. However, there’s a lot of uncertainty on its future and on its release. That’s mostly because Amazon once tried to release a game that pretty much flopped. That game was Crucible. Only time will tell if they’ve learned from the mistake that killed that game.
