I'm no fan of Amazon. Not The Amazon, that rainforest has yet to aggrieve me in any significant manner, but the monopolistic online retailer created by, mid-construction love doll, Jeff Bezos. As a fellow all too familiar with how it feels like to work under the thumb of a waste-sniffing megalomaniac, I can't help but scoff everytime I hear of a new scandal from the Amazon store house. And don't get me started on the fact that Amazon has next to no competition on this half of the globe, allowing them to practically set the online retail standard on their storefront. (I thought there was supposed to be tradelaws established to curtail this level of market manipulation.) What I'm trying to say is, whenever I see the 'Amazon games' tag on the side of a product, my initial reaction is of hostile skepticism.
What essential corner have they cut in the founding of this game, how many coders did they slave over this piece of software to get it out and how awful will the, inevitably overbearing, microtransactions be. I'm enough of a bitter, cynical sod to expect the worst from every studio I see, a prejudice that will take a decent amount of good decisions to shake. With Amazon's track record, I wouldn't count on this game being the 'best it can be', in fact, I'm fully expecting Amazon game studios to make a good shot a dethroning EA as the 'Queens of mean'. These aren't the sorts of thoughts that one wants to be courting when approaching a potential brand new IP, but here we are.
Divorcing this game from it's developer for a moment, we get a title that sounds both different and familiar in a rather curious manner. Set in the 1600's, 'New World', quite predictably, sets players up with the task of colonizing a new fictional continent loosely modeled on British America but swarming with supernatural beasties. That's right, this game is quite literally a note-for-note copy of the premise of Greedfall. In Amazon's defence, I do not believe that any of this was intentional, two separate studios just happened to dream up the exact same concept at around about the same time, only Greedfall was an RPG and so came out sooner whilst 'New World' is set to be an MMO and so is a lot more demanding. It does suck for the team, though, that every effort of theirs already has a comparative counterpart before they've even put out a beta; they were already fighting an uphill battle with making a fresh-IP that is also an MMO in today's world, now that task has become damn near vertical.
Taking a look at the Game Awards trailer alone, we get the image of a historic fiction setting that does, admittedly, hold some vague promise. Despite squatting itself firmly in an alternate version of the 17th Century, we do get to see some ancient civilizations pop up such a legion of Romans who seemingly become cursed to haunt this land as undead. (Move over, Nazi Zombies.) Although the logistics of that does seem a tad suspect. (Apparently these Romans managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean somehow. Sure.) This does open up what one can expect to see in this alternate history world. We also get a vague preface of a battle between the forces of 'Life' and 'Death' which summons to mind the whole 'Raava/ Vaatu' conflict from 'The Legend of Korra'. (Although that just makes me wish this was an 'Avatar' video game instead, so maybe that's a negative association.)
We are not completely in the lurch when it comes to what we can expect from this game, as one would imagine, for all the way back in February Amazon teased us all with a gameplay overview that offers a brief idea of what the final product might entail. (Or at least what they were aiming for last year.) The immediate takeaway from that gameplay establishes a huge concern for someone like me, namely that this title seems intent on aiming for a 'survival' experience. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with the survival genre, (If you don't count the fact that 99% of dedicated survival games being frustrating snore fests as an 'inherent problem') but I feel that gameplay style significantly clashes with the whole 'epic story of light versus darkness' angle that the MMO is going for.
'Surival' is an ultimately grounding topic in gaming. It asks players to balance all their fun adventuring with the everyday tasks of eating, sleeping and drinking. It is an ideal that works in situations where everyday survival should be thematically appropriate, such as in post apocalyptic scenarios, but can prove quite distracting when improperly implemented. From a customary glance we can see that 'New World' intends to profit off of the 'epic adventure' crowd that typically excites the crowds of titles like 'The Elder Scrolls: Online' and 'Black Desert Online'. The type of story wherein the players become fonts of buzzing magical potential with the power to battle gods, and wherein the key worry for any player should be managing their buffs and set bonuses. Fallout 76 has taught us that this type of high level MMO strategy gameplay doesn't gel with a dedicated Survival experience and actually has the potential of sundering that careful balance between challenge and fun. (By that I mean, no one wants to give-up on a hard boss because they've run out of chicken legs to munch on. It's demeaning and boring.)
In terms of combat, Amazon game studios have gone for the 'Action = response' combat model that emulates the movement of traditional RPG's much in the way that ESO does. However, I've yet to see the kind of real-time agility that BDO provides, but then there's surprisingly little combat to sift through at all. (Which is an odd omission in a 30-minute gameplay run through.) We also see the hints of a faction system that may offer the same sort of territorial bouts that Cyrodiil does for ESO, but I shudder to imagine how much actual balancing has gone into a system like this. What's to stop one faction taking over the entire map and making it unbearable for everyone else to live through? These are the sorts of fundamental structural questions that Amazon need to be answering before slapping down another highly-curated CGI trailer.
To say that I'm highly dubious about 'New World' would be an extreme understatement. I don't trust in the marketing, I don't trust in the concept and I don't trust the studio making the big decisions. Amazon is an untested development studio, and the fact that they're opted to cut their teeth on an MMO is both applaud-worthy and eye-rolling. Personally, I expect this title to be a colossal flop, but that is just my initial inclination. Honestly, there isn't nearly enough out there about this title to get a strong idea of what to expect, which is a fairly big problem considering this is meant to launch a new franchise. At the end of the day, Amazon game studios have to decide between drumming up marketing and fleshing out tangible details, and there's no inbetween.
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