If you followed me at all last week, you would know that I have been back in New World poking my head through the changes that have been made since I last played. I even wrote about a number of extremely positive changes that have taken place, and how weird it is that the New World team is not making a bigger deal about it. It is around this point that I feel like I need to come clean. I fell in love with New World back during the late alphas after they had already shifted the game to be significantly more PVE-focused. When the game was released it broke my heart, because for the first few weeks what had evolved in the game was everything that I said I had wanted and reminded me so much of those early days of Everquest with the player-created “camps”. Then Patch 1.1 came along and destroyed that community and with it much of the underpinnings of what I loved about the game.
This shifted me from being passionate about the game and hoping for its success, to ultimately wanting to watch it burn down around me. I pretty regularly kept track of the downfall as charted by the steam concurrency numbers. Yesterday the above video was released and I SHOULD feel righteous about the send-up about this game, but I don’t. It is a well-crafted video and pretty much every point that is made in it is true. However, after poking my head back into the game there is a huge part of me that has hope that maybe just maybe this game can be saved. There is a game here that is good and enjoyable and a world that is extremely fun just to roam around in. So many people have lampooned the looting of boxes and the zergs, but I found all of that extremely fun. I still find it enjoyable to roam around and clean out a town while working on my weapon skills.
Please note this is not me being unrealistic about this game’s fate. The numbers are going in the wrong direction and eventually Amazon Corporate will decide that it is no longer worth the expense of keeping a game studio active and cut its losses. As the above video outlines… they did everything they could possibly do wrong… and weirdly still made an enjoyable game as a result. There are folks who are actively playing that are completely riding the waves of “copium” as evidenced by a conversation that I experienced last night. Folks were in global chat trying to tell people that 20,000 concurrent players were actually “good numbers” for an MMORPG. The thing is I am not even sure what could be done to turn this game around at this point short of a global relaunch as a different business model like free to play.
Yesterday I was lamenting this on Twitter, and my friend Jae suggested that they get streamers engaged again. The truth is… I am not sure if this would work a second time. Amazon went into this game in a big way when it came to promoting it with the most popular streamers on its platform. Similarly, they did the same thing with Lost Ark and in both cases… players, in general, felt burned by the gameplay experiences. I am not sure there is enough goodwill left in the Twitch community for another round of 10+ hour stream drop chases, and even if people watch it… it does not mean necessarily that they are going to stick around. I farmed most of those drops on my second monitor with twitch running in the background and muted, and I figure the majority of players did the same thing. I think in order to come back from this, there needs to be a more grassroots approach in getting some exceptionally passionate folks to be promoting the game organically.
Coming back to New World I have noticed that almost all of the video creators that I followed at the launch of the game have moved on to other things. They often times follow the same trail of the “next new hot thing” because once a creator starts turning a profit… they can’t really afford to be devoting time towards a stale game. This creates an interesting opportunity for the next new creator to step in and really take control of this community in a big way. The only folks who appear to be really active in content creation are the “Economy” videos, and I think there is room for someone to step up and make a name for themselves. However, Amazon is going to need to foster this community rather than chasing the big-name Twitch stars who have already moved on from this game. Paying them to come back is going to feel exceptionally shallow considering many of them have already created their own version of “What’s Wrong with New World” videos to get those hate clicks.
I think the core flaw with New World that cannot be changed easily, is it was not designed to be an MMORPG. The largest servers in the game have a maximum active population of 2250 players, which is what lead to the massive queue times at launch and overwhelming fragmentation of the player base. Players want to play with their friends, not create new friends when they land in a game, and as a result, any amount of word-of-mouth pull is going to lead back to overpopulation. Any “community” that was built up along the way is long dead given that my server Valhalla, has been merged twice from the Minda I started out on to the Frislandia that consumed it. It is now just a game with a bunch of random strangers playing it mostly, and the folks who largely stuck around are the hunter killer type that chased the PVP highs. Even on Valhalla which used to be one of the highest pop servers in the game… Outpost Rush takes forever to fill the queue in part because the game is not rewarding enough to have non-pvp types queue for it.
I think the only way this game survives is to completely gut the way that the server infrastructure works and effectively start from scratch in designing it. If I were going to take a do-over here I would move to something more akin to the model that Guild Wars 2 uses with many instances of the same map active at any given time, and then have a large battlegroup of a sort where different factions vie for territory with other factions. When I walk into Brightwood, I would see who holds the phase of that territory for my battlegroup and the state of machines for my “server” but when I walk out of the town I would be in an instance that may or may not be blending me with players from other servers. I get that this is extremely complicated to pull off, but it is the only way I can see having the “game-changing” impact of the war system while still letting players play freely together regardless of where they landed.
We know the name has some rudimentary phasing technology already because it is displayed around the housing system. This house with the weirdly stacked furniture in the yard? That is being shown to me because it is the homeowner on my server with the highest accumulation of points. If I owned a house in this location, it would instead show me my home. My hope would be that they could expand upon this system to knit together a world made up of “virtual” instanced server communities that are built and disassembled on the fly. I get that this is a massive ground-up redesign of the way that the game works, but it is also the one thing that might just save the game. At its core, the game has a scaling problem because it was not designed to be an MMORPG, but instead was designed to be something more akin to a Rust or Ark with a fixed player base.
The reason why this problem is so key to the failure of the game is it is the thing that keeps players from recruiting their friends in a massive way. We went through this at launch with no one actually being able to land on the same server… and be able to play the game without massive queue times. The design of the infrastructure goes completely against everything that we know about how MMORPG populations are formed. I guess the alternate path that they could take is spinning up custom servers through something akin to the Fallout First program. There is absolutely a part of me that I would pay for a private server where I could hang out and play with my friends. The problem is… doing so would effectively destroy many of the aspects of this game that make it interesting. I think the Achilles heel of New World is likely an unfixable problem… unless Amazon is willing to pour a truly ridiculous amount of money into changing the way the server infrastructure works from the ground up.
With the core problem surrounding player counts and congestion in place… I think any amount of improvement and progress will be fleeting. I really do love this game and I am happy to play it, but also know that at some point it is going to be shuttered. I am not sure Amazon has the fortitude to stick this one out, because so far… their track record as a game studio and publisher is not phenomenal.
The post The Unfixable Problem with New World appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
