Where are things at?
New world; the Amazon wow-killer. I jest, of course, the very idea of a 'wow killer' is fanciful wish making from those desperate to house the next billion dollar MMO franchise in their stable. But New World did certainly have lofty expectations shooting around it's noggin, and high peaks it wanted to top. I wasn't quite so clued up on everything about New World when I last spoke about it because I was never interested in an Amazon-made game and thus I ignored it, but watching it's fascinating trajectory over the past few months has aroused my curiosity as an observer, if not a player. Something about the promise this game once made and the way that has evolved over the years resulted in an initial stamping of greatness that has slowly peeled away and diminished more and more into this meagre state, and I find that just fascinating. How could a game that had the world's ear for a moment fall so spectacularly? And can it ever recover?
First of all I'm going to start by mentioning what New World initially sold itself as, because this is a very important ingredient in what went wrong. New World was a going to be a full loot PVP MMO. If you don't think that sounds ludicrously risky for a budding AAA game studio to slap together as their first blockbuster game, then that's because I haven't explained those terms to you yet. A full loot PVP MMO is a massively multiplayer game built and geared around the action of players fighting one another, rather than AI enemies, dungeons and big raids, with the kicker being that when any player dies, they drop everything they had to be looted by other players. (hence 'full loot'.) The intention of this is obviously to make death punishing and something to be avoided, but it takes a very special type of person to dedicate themselves to a world like that.
Essentially, Amazon were thinking of a world where players would go out and craft, build equipment, resource collect, amass huge towns with their guilds and then gamble it all in warfare against other players. If they die, then they could start all over again from scratch. Sure, maybe the player 's skill level's might have improved, making the resource gathering just a tiny bit quicker, but you're still getting as close to square one as you get upon every death, and that makes failure cost a pretty penny in the most valuable commodity we have as humans: time. Incidentally, it's all of that risk, alongside the typically unfriendly, elitist community that games like this amass, which makes them usually pretty unpopular MMOs. The biggest I can think of at a moment's notice would be Mortal Online. (Although when I google the term I see Albion Online in the list. I don't know if that's a mis-categorisation or if Albion has been doing bank with Full Loot all this time and I've just never noticed.) And anyone who's actually played New World might have noticed; the game isn't that at all. And that's because things changed.
Whether it's from the feedback in their early testing, or maybe someone in the research department actually took the time to go out and check how much MMOs in this genre can typically hope to make, but Amazon made a pretty big heel turn towards leaning back into mass appeal- but needless to say that change in direction came a little too late. They had the bones of a game, they'd created enough to show it off to people, but now the mandate came down that this carefully crafted battlegrounds for PVP clan warfare now had to have AI enemies, and dungeons, and non-PVP progression, and essentially had to be a completely new game slapped onto of this one. Now I know that the Amazon Game Studios team are good, but they aren't wizards, so the fact that they put out a game which scored decently out the gate with critics and newbies alike is great- the subsequent fall off when people realised the content in this game was about as deep as a puddle is predictable. Like Anthem all over again, an insanely ambitious game genre not treated with the oodles of dedicated commitment and planning that it deserves.
The beginning was grand, as befitting a project with the sort of scope that Amazon was shooting for. 100,000 players, people enjoying their time, big name streamers having just been driven from WOW, sizing up the offerings here for their next big full time MMO. But then the cracks started to show. The content provided lacked variety, enemies played exactly the same, content dried up considerably towards the midgame, the main narrative didn't have nearly enough steam to guide the player until they were comfortable with all aspects of the gameplay. The endgame loomed in the far distance, most players didn't want to grind in order to reach it despite the pleas of fans who insisted that was where the real game started, and little by little the player numbers dwindled. Now I didn't think anything of this, because MMO's always have big drop offs as the curious peel off to reveal the dedicated subset. But New World just didn't stop shedding players.
And that might have been because of the seemingly endless bad news that the game has received day in and day out. There was the reporting exploit wherein players could mass report good players in order to get them temp banned and win company wars, only possible because of the automated reporting system. (Which is significant given that New World's staff insisted previously that all report cases were handled manually.) There were the failures in revenue streams that lead to mass deflation to the point where the 'repair' function because useless because it cost precious money so everyone just replaced their gear, an newcomer-unfriendly barter economy was set up by the community to keep resources running somewhat smoothly and faction wars toned down because of how expensive it was to keep territory tax up. And then there was the content creator who New World banned for exposing an exploit for them.
We've seen a drop-off rate of around 90% of the original player base, which isn't quite as bad as it sounds because they had so many players to begin with, but on paper that sounds downright dire. 10,000 active players is more than enough to sustain any middle-of-the-road MMO, provided that Amazon can keep them or win back others to replace those they may lose. Of course, to do that we're going to need Amazon to fix the one big problem that New World had suffered from over these few months: no new content. Not even a hint of new content. For a game as starved for things to do as New World, it's almost more important that new activities are added than it is for the rough patches to be smoothed out, because every month that people come back to the same lean game they bought at launch, those people slowly lose just that bit more faith in the plan of action that live service and MMO style games promise.
So New World is in a tough state right now, but it's not totally slipped down the pit of irredeemable despair. There is a way out and forward, should the publisher Amazon have the faith to dedicate the resources to make it. New World crossed a huge milestone when it entered the public consciousness, and though I still have no love for the idea of a successful Amazon Game Studios property, I can't just pretend that this one doesn't have a future. But then again, so did Crucible, but Amazon just wasn't prepared to stick through it's problems. At the end of the day the biggest weight on this game's shoulders is a conflict in identity that I don't see getting resolved unless the team falls on one side or the other definitively. Either they retreat back to the original vision of a PVP MMO game, maybe not with Full-loot per se, but definitely with PVE content removed or heavily reduced; or they need to dedicate more to the wider appeal of a PVE MMO by flooding this game with enough content to compete with other PVE MMO's. (The later of which would be a huge undertaking, but would certainly prove the most profitable in the long run.) Which route will Amazon end up taking?
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