New World; Old money

He's going over that cliff- ARRGH

Stockholm syndrome has now officially kicked in; we're stuck with 'New World' fast approaching as the only Amazon Game Studios title to be actively out very soon and I'm just at the stage where I want to see the darn thing. At this point it feels like this game is the work of generations of Amazon employees, passing the cradle of development across the bloodline like a treasured heirloom, all sworn to loyalty in the knowledge that this game, their birthright, would one day rise to the challenge to become the savoir this world needs. (So no pressure, right?) But I mean you really reap what you sow in that regard considering all the extended years of hype non-representative CGI trailers, bigging up the invisible game with talk about how unendingly amazing the endgame will be, and delaying it forever in order to get the thing just right. Don't you know how things work in the Game's industry, Amazon? If a game isn't coming quite together yet you just dump it onto the masses with all the wires hanging out and maybe get to fixing some of them over the course of the next two years. (Gah, amateurs...)

But we're past the hyping stage at this point. Well past it, truth be told, we're well onto the time when we can look upon the final finished game and start to judge what it is we're witnessing with our very own eyes. Is this the game we've wanted for the better part of forever ('we' being MMO fans, I'm not personally fussed) or is this just another wet fart that was promising to be a tsunami? (Not the best comparison I've ever made. And yet, somehow, absolutely the best.) The game is practically out there in the laps of consumers right now, and it's gotten to the point where marketing has no choice but to bite the bullet and actually show the thing in action. In fact they have shown the thing in action, there's some playthroughs of content to look at including a PVP siege and a Dungeon walkthrough. And what is the takeaway? Well remembering that everything is subjective and your threshold for amazing may differ from any others around you; I thought it looked boring.

Again, 'personal opinion warning' for all those hopefuls, coupled with a 'these are just previews, the full product could put them to shame." Yada yada, are my bases fully covered yet? Good, because I'm about to go off. That Dungeon, one of the pieces of content designed to be played through again and again in the loop of progression was just about slaying ghosts in an abandoned mineshaft. Is that 2006 calling? How is it that the best you could come up with for one of the staple gameplay sections in this vast fantasy world tinged with the supernatural and colonialism? An abandoned mineshaft with boring looking ghosts? In their defence the team said that there would be different versions of this dungeon to run, some of which might not put you instantly to sleep to walkthrough, but I doubt it's going to be anything like those redux dungeons from other MMO's, where the entire contents and storyline evolves each time you run it. And then there was the PVP fort battle which looked quite fun and was touted for featuring 'massive' 20 on 20 player skirmishes. '20 on 20' is what's considered 'massive' these days? (>Laughs in ESO<) But I'm here laughing at the surface like a superficial jerk, what about the heart and soul underneath?

Of that I'm unsold, but not as dismissive. New World doesn't feature any rigid classes or class abilities, but rather a heavily simplified levelling tree where you latch onto equipment abilities so that you can 'build the class you want'. A.k.a "We couldn't find a way to make the game play significantly different with classes so we made the game in a way where all 'classes' feel the same." You don't need to lie to me, Amazon, I see you. A heavily lauded element is the way combat works, in that it's tooled to play like a single player action game with enemies that don't just run up to you and start spamming abilities. They duck and weave and just make your life hell when you go for them, looking like actual action game enemies. It's something that's more impressive if you're familiar with MMOs than if you're not, and as a familiar myself I guess my only real takeaway is "I better have constantly good ping else this game is going to be impossible to play". Also, visually it's said to be 'the prettiest MMO on the market today', which is already a misnomer as this game is not yet on the market. I don't know, I think attractiveness is a concept utterly divorced from fidelity and comes into the actual design of the world rendered, and New World's world has yet to show me a single inch of it that sticks. The colour palette isn't even striking, I just see bland everywhere. (Hey, maybe I'm not looking hard enough. I don't know.)

But all my raised eyebrows will surely be struck off in an instance when I hear about how the team seeks to handle monetisation right? Hmm? Oh, you bet they went off about how they're looking to make a buck from this game, one which you already have to buy in order to play in the first place, and the outlook is... it's bleak. First off, and this needs to be said, Amazon: if you treat your perspective audience like idiots and lie to their face, we'll spit in yours and cost you in cold hard cash; believe that. I say this because of their very own twitter statements where the team said they're 'trying out' quality of life features for players, just to get to know what sorts of things would be a right fit for their future player base. (Picking out furniture for the big move-in, huh, I get it.) Only the 'QOL' features they landed on somehow all seemed to line up perfectly to chokingly terrible monetisation strategies that have been tried and tested by other bottom feeding greedy publishers out there proving that Amazon Game Studios is so incompetent that they can't even swindle their consumer base in unique ways.

Okay, tell a lie, there was one real uniquely terrible thing they revealed. And remember, this is post launch and something that, in my heart of hearts, I want to believe they fabricated so that they can get free internet Karma points when they 'walk it back'. You really gonna charge me for Fast Travel, bro? In an MMO. Charging MMO players for fast travel is pretty much a hostile declaration of war on everyone's free time, ensuring that whatever cool levelling loop you come up with it'll always be limited to how fast they make your movement speed or how much you're willing to shell out to Amazon's money vault. That's literally super villains level of greedy dumb, to the point where I don't even believe it's real. It can't be. No one is that utterly out-of-touch with their fellow carbon-based lifeforms that they cannot understand why that's a bad idea. Seriously galaxy brained stupidity there, well freakin' done, team, you broke me already.

The next is one that's actually rather believable, because it's a hill that the Internet have been trying to die on quite a lot recently. 'Time savers' and 'Content skippers' are here to liven up your gameplay experience by letting you speed past it so that you can get to the 'good stuff'; just so long as you can cough up some grub for the big man upstairs; "come on, we ain't runnin' no charity!" If you are so insecure about how much value your game is worth that you have to sell a way to skip past it, you have failed to make an intriguing game. You have made- a bad game. Of course the team defended themselves with all the skill of a toddler arguing about way Leonardo is the coolest ninja turtle. "Nuh uh; we're just accommodating for those that don't have the time to play as much as others." Oh, you're thinking about the working man? How very magnanimous of you, Amazon GS. You're looking at the beleaguered everyman and thinking "He can't keep up with the curve so let's use that as a way to exploit some money from him". Geez, how did you get so kind and considerate, Amazon, I really want to know. I mean, the clever way to solve an issue like this would the development of somesort of XP slingshot system which might keep some players who play less levelling at a faster rate. Some might choose to exploit that, but they'd be intentionally limiting their own playtime in order to do so, therefore at the end of the day everyone ends up on the same playing field. However that would take thought and care, two things that I can see the folk over at Amazon are functionally incapable of now that they're mindless automatons programmed to respond only to the word 'profit'.

So as if it needs to be said at all; this isn't really how you go about launching your brand new MMO that's going to set the industry on fire. This is how you set your last bridge with the public on fire before you've set off on it, ensuring that your entire pox-ridden studio goes up in flames in the entirely preventable disaster. There's still time to save some face and put out the fires, some of the more gullible elements of the gaming community have already resigned themselves to this game and will surely try their damnedest to salve any wounds this game might sustain no matter how much they have to debase themselves to do so. But the rest of us just see a lukewarm offering steadily congealing and becoming more and more unappetising as the days go by, setting into a viscous muck that'll be damn near inedible by launch day unless emergency reparations are made now. Coming back to me, I will say that Amazon already lost me as a prospective player, but then their job was to win me over to begin with so they had an uphill struggle, whether you're still willing to give Amazon a chance despite... everything- well that's a decision only you can come down on. (I swear, if this game becomes a success with no amendments after this I'm going to lose so much faith in humanity I'll go hollow on the spot.)