New World (MMORPG, Amazon Games)

[Trippy]

https://www.newworld.com

Now in Closed Beta for a couple of weeks and being streamed by your favorite MMO / RPG streamers. Has PvP on some sort (three factions are in conflict). No classes a la UO. Graphics look pretty good. Release is August 31. Pre-order for guaranteed Closed Beta access. Published by the worst gaming publisher in recent history (0/2 for game releases so far, this will probably make it 1/3).

Edit: actually Stadia Games is the worst in recent history but Amazon Games is probably a close second

[schild]

I don't even consider Amazon a games publisher. They don't seem to even hire people that want to make games. Netflix however has out done them. What an embarrassment. FAANG really just seems to quite literally not understand fun.

They are not fun havers.

[Rendakor]

Falc hooked me up with a key and I played for a bit last night. I was having a lot of fun, until monsters decided to stop spawning and I could no longer progress my quests. Messed around with crafting a bit, but a lot of stuff needs leather which was not on the table.

[Trippy]

Game is (maybe) frying VRAM chips. Be careful on menu screens if your card has poor VRAM cooling unless you have a way of capping the possibly uncapped frame rates. Right now seems to be limited to some 3090 cards but if it is VRAM cooling related then potentially any video card with poor VRAM could be affected.

https://old.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/oobi56/did_the_new_world_beta_brick_your_gpu/
https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/oollg4/amazons_new_world_is_bricking_rtx_3090_graphics/
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/rtx-3090-owners-beware-amazons-new-world-reportedly-breaking-graphics-cards

[Sky]

I wish manufacturers in general would find a way to stop that insane uncapped frame ramp-up. I get it most noticeably in Madden (both on ps4pro and the new pc), but it's instantly recognizable as the uncapped thing.

[Trippy]

Yeah and in a noisy test environment where you may not be able to hear the fans spin up all you need is an FPS counter running while QAing the different screens to see if it's happening.

[Rendakor]

Apparently happens during the login queue too; Falc posted in Discord that he was getting 90 FPS and 98% GPU usage.

[Falconeer]

Super annoying, especially because it keeps draining your card even when minimized AND in the queue. Anyway, capping the game at 60 FPS completely fixed the issue, GPU usage went down to 55%. I was at 75 fps before, so I didn't lose anything meaningful.

[Trippy]

Game is (maybe) frying VRAM chips. Be careful on menu screens if your card has poor VRAM cooling unless you have a way of capping the possibly uncapped frame rates. Right now seems to be limited to some 3090 cards but if it is VRAM cooling related then potentially any video card with poor VRAM could be affected.

Game is totally safe to play, lots of people playing with no issues, people with bricked cards are lying, oh and we're patching in a menu frame rate limiter

[Falconeer]

Meanwhile the game hit 190.000 concurrent players on Steam and 90k playing right now (past midnight in the US and 8am in most of Europe) so it's probably doing something right too.

[Trippy]

Cause it's a free beta*?

* If you cancel your preorder

[Falconeer]

That, or maybe it's a fun MMORPG.

[Gimfain]

numbers during the first two weeks are always about hype. let me know how many dropped off at the 3 months mark.

[Rendakor]

numbers during the first two weeks are always about hype.

Tell that to Crowfall.

[Falconeer]

I can tell you right now that the numbers will shrink horribly because New World's biggest issue is an obvious lack of enough content, but the foundation is extremely solid and fun so I bet that:

1) Will launch to good numbers
2) Then it will shrink and struggle through the first 6 months to a year
3) Then it will steadily grow over the next many years.

[Rendakor]

I tend to agree with you, provided Amazon doesn't shut it down between 2) and 3). The core game is fun enough that it should be able to sustain a good sized audience, assuming they can keep content coming and find a way to monetize it down the road. Do they have an optional subscription thing in mind? And if so, is it free with Prime? I really had not looked into this game at all, other than chatting with you guys in Discord, until playing the Beta. Now I'm pretty hyped for it; I'll post my full thoughts in a day or so, once I know the shine has worn off a little.

[Chimpy]

Hmmmm....hadn't heard about this.

Any word on if there will be a sub or if it is Box+F2P?

[Trippy]

Its box + real world money cosmetics. They ditched their P2W cash shop items based on the backlash.

Also, this game is horrible.

[Setanta]

Its box + real world money cosmetics. They ditched their P2W cash shop items based on the backlash.

Also, this game is horrible.

So like Guild Wars 2 but shit?

[rattran]

The combat is interesting if you have a consistently sub-30 ping.

Not good, but interesting. 150+ ping and it's total dogshit combat. Mob AI is terrible, quests are all fetch/k10r. PvP is pretty bad, open world pvp is aids. Loot got adjusted right before I gave up, went from 99% is salvage trash to 95% is salvage trash. Crafting at the highest end is inferior to drops, and at lower levels not worth it.

You have options in how you look from Hobo to Pimp to Pirate to HoboMonk to PiratePimp. Or Knight/Conquistador, but heavy armor kept getting nerfed.

[Sky]

I'm kinda sad that I haven't played mmo in over a decade and instantly know what k10r means though I've never seen it shortened that way.

Which made me realize I'm technically doing k10r bounties in State of Decay 2, but they're interesting because while there are some straight kill x of x type zombie, most of them are 'kill an armored zed with a pistol (bring a lot of ammo)' or 'kill a juggernat with a melee weapon'. Heck, I thought 'kill 6 armored zeds with explosives' was going to be easy until I used up my entire inventory full of grenades to kill 2 (I ended up taking my swordswoman along and chopping their legs off and planting remote bombs on their back...and a van full of remote bombs). So it required some thought and planning to execute, and you can stack bounties by zed type, so the killx stuff kinda increments while working on the tricky ones.

[Chimpy]

The combat is interesting if you have a consistently sub-30 ping.

Not good, but interesting. 150+ ping and it's total dogshit combat. Mob AI is terrible, quests are all fetch/k10r. PvP is pretty bad, open world pvp is aids. Loot got adjusted right before I gave up, went from 99% is salvage trash to 95% is salvage trash. Crafting at the highest end is inferior to drops, and at lower levels not worth it.

You have options in how you look from Hobo to Pimp to Pirate to HoboMonk to PiratePimp. Or Knight/Conquistador, but heavy armor kept getting nerfed.

So it sounds like they hired Koreans to design the game.

[Trippy]

Korean MMOs, at least, have a minimal level of technical competence which far exceed what this game has. The jump animation, for example, is comically bad. And your character "wobbles"/leans to the left when moving (watch your head movement relative to the center crosshair when moving). Also tapping a movement key will make your character "lunge" in that direction but not actually change their location (i.e. you lunge in place).

[Zetor]

The combat is interesting if you have a consistently sub-30 ping.

Not good, but interesting. 150+ ping and it's total dogshit combat. Mob AI is terrible, quests are all fetch/k10r. PvP is pretty bad, open world pvp is aids. Loot got adjusted right before I gave up, went from 99% is salvage trash to 95% is salvage trash. Crafting at the highest end is inferior to drops, and at lower levels not worth it.

You have options in how you look from Hobo to Pimp to Pirate to HoboMonk to PiratePimp. Or Knight/Conquistador, but heavy armor kept getting nerfed.

I find it amusing that Amazon, of all companies, can't find a way to make the UX work on pings above 30. I mean, even WOW figured that shit out back in 2005-6 with ability queues and whatnot (I played on a west coast server from eastern europe with 600 ping and combat felt reasonably enjoyable for everything except organized pvp).

(the real solution is negative ping code, of course  )

[Khaldun]

About six or seven years ago, I got called to a meeting of friends who had a major cultural initiative starting around a worthy issue. They had a big funder who wanted to build a fully-functional virtual world related to the issue, where the model was World of Warcraft etc. and they'd heard I knew a little about it all. I asked what the budget was for development, they all looked at each other and said, "We're not sure, like maybe $75,000?" I loved all these people but I basically couldn't help but fall over laughing.

It's just so fascinating to me that no matter what people spend, they can't even hit the marks on things we've learned in fifteen years of relatively mediocre MMO gaming. I'm not talking technical performance, I'm talking basic design like "is the combat fun" and "is there a reason to play besides the treadmill?"

[HaemishM]

Amazon took an interesting concept (open world PVP set in low-magic colonial America) and sideways fucked it into the most generic, terribad fantasy world possible, all with what appears to a semi-functioning but completely standard MMO gameplay loop engine.

[Trippy]

A full-loot PvP open world MMO survival game would never have attracted enough Western players to justify the costs. I'm surprised Amazon even allowed Double Helix Games to proceed initially on that design. And after that initial design failed, Amazon should've just killed the entire project like they did Double Helix Games other Amazon Games project Breakaway rather than let them try to shoehorn the initial base mechanics into as many other PvP and PvE design patterns as they could.

Edit: ...in the hopes that some idea might stick

[HaemishM]

Given Amazon Games track record with shutting down products before they release, I'm kind of amazed this one got as far as it did.

[Rendakor]

I don't get the hate for it, but I admittedly love bog-standard-MMO gameplay loops and haven't really found one that's clicked in a long time. It's pretty, it's fun to play, and there are a lot of cool crafting and harvesting things to mess with.

[Falconeer]

People here are stuck on the justified hate for Amazon, and enjoy the idea of a trainwreck. Which this game is not, not even close. It certainly was a few years ago, it almost died many times, but now it's chapter 0.1 of a pretty cool MMO.

Mmorpgs are piles of shit, that's a fact. The simple notion that FF XIV is super succesful NOW is unjustifiable and is a testament to that (full disclosure: I play FF14 and have an active subscription at the moment).

These games are about finding some hooks in parodies of open worlds, with some terrible combat and very cheap slot machine mechanics trying to appeal to the addiction to growing numbers. New World does the same as everybody else, failing in some departments and succeding in others. Pretending this game is a disaster doesn't make it one.

Highlights:

Combat is good. If it's not your style, then bummer.
Crafting/gathering with rabdom stats is good.
Loot with random stats is good.
Game looks more than good.

All it needs is more enemies/dungeons/zones/stories. Which will inevitably come.

[Khaldun]

I just want someone to make an actual open world that isn't just a damn treadmill. I still think it's possible; hell, I think Minecraft pretty well accomplished it, so what I really mean is that I want more of them.

[HaemishM]

I want someone to make a virtual world that isn't just one of 3 or 4 iterations of DikuMud, only with different tweaks on the gameplay loop. The closest thing I've come to an MMOG that really captures me was Conan Exiles.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I enjoyed the building in that and some of the world design.

[Mandella]

People here are stuck on the justified hate for Amazon, and enjoy the idea of a trainwreck. Which this game is not, not even close. It certainly was a few years ago, it almost died many times, but now it's chapter 0.1 of a pretty cool MMO.

Mmorpgs are piles of shit, that's a fact. The simple notion that FF XIV is super succesful NOW is unjustifiable and is a testament to that (full disclosure: I play FF14 and have an active subscription at the moment).

These games are about finding some hooks in parodies of open worlds, with some terrible combat and very cheap slot machine mechanics trying to appeal to the addiction to growing numbers. New World does the same as everybody else, failing in some departments and succeding in others. Pretending this game is a disaster doesn't make it one.

Highlights:

Combat is good. If it's not your style, then bummer.
Crafting/gathering with rabdom stats is good.
Loot with random stats is good.
Game looks more than good.

All it needs is more enemies/dungeons/zones/stories. Which will inevitably come.

Yeah, most folks here are just totally burned out on the classic MMRPG mold, so not much chance they're going to like this.

That said, even though I still enjoy an old school Dikumud descendant, this setting doesn't attract me, plus I just don't have any confidence in Amazon to support this game for very long, especially if launch is rocky -- and launch is always rocky.

[Falconeer]

What annoys me the most is that they made the game easier over the past year. Combat was slower and more challenging, if you were aggroed by two mobs you were always in trouble, and defending was a much more important factor. Clearly this was great according to me as it was much more *Souls-like, but their focus groups must have revealed that the majority wanted more faceroll mowing through enemies and everything accelerated and became a matter of offense only. I still think the combat is fun enough, but it took me a minute to realize why I was enjoying it less than in 2020's closed alpha.

Too bad, really.