New World: Aeternum, the soft relaunch of Amazon’s flagship MMO, was released on October 15. A month later, and we’re yet to see a roadmap for any future plans for the game. MMOs live and die by the promises they make, and the promises they eventually deliver on.
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You’d expect Amazon to capitalise on the healthy spike of traffic it’s seen in New World since its relaunch, but radio silence from the development team regarding future updates only solidifies a thought that’s been growing in the back of my mind for some time now: New World is finished. Doneso.
The State Of MMOs
To offer some perspective, Throne And Liberty has already delivered some fantastic updates within its first month, including a well-loved Halloween event, quality-of-life features, and a clear roadmap for future content. Admittedly, the game is being developed by NCSoft, not Amazon itself, and has had a year of content already refined in the Korean version of the game. That being said, the response from the community has been very positive—surely Amazon can see that this is how a live-service game is meant to be run?
However, there are a few reasons why I think there’s a chance we never see a New World: Aeternum roadmap. Firstly, the game had been performing poorly on PC before the relaunch, sitting at an extremely humble three or four thousand players. In reality, not much has changed between that version and what we currently have in New World: Aeternum. There are console players, which I thought might be enough to keep the game alive, but we’ll have to see whether Amazon judges the influx of players and cash as worthy enough of future support.
Secondly, Amazon Games is working on a new Lord Of The Rings MMO. The team working on the new MMO are based in Orange County—where, you guessed it, New World was also developed. There’s likely still a core team working on New World, but now that they’ve shipped New World: Aeternum, it might be that the studio turns its full attention to LOTR. We’ve got no news about the LOTR MMO other than it was in early development in 2023.
Lastly, Throne And Liberty has been extremely popular since its western release. By all measures, it’s a pretty different MMO than New World, but there’s no doubt that some of the audience for New World has been cannibalised by T&L.
It may be that Amazon Games views Throne And Liberty as the future of its MMO offerings (for now), and New World: Aeternum as a finished product. From a business perspective it makes perfect sense: put your focus into the clearly more popular game.
What Happened With New World?
I’ve been an unashamed New World enjoyer since the game’s release and while I’ve always acknowledged its glaring issues over the years – my particular favourite was when you could crash people’s games by posting jpegs of sausages in global chat – it’d be sad to see New World bow out. Aeternum was a great relaunch of the game but it didn’t see the player spike I was expecting on PC—it didn’t even come close to Throne And Liberty. It might be that Amazon have been slightly disappointed by their attempted revamp of the game, but what expectations did it have exactly?
I think New World’s launch was a real flash in the pan moment. Almost one million players in an MMO developed by a studio which at that point had worked on a game called Crucible, which lasted for five months before being cancelled, and a game for Top Gear’s Grand Tour. The hype verged on hysterical considering how random it was that Amazon was making an MMO.
As expected, the studio’s inexperience with MMOs and live-service titles in general led to some early problems. There were massive queue times, exploits, bot problems, players duping items on the market, and a glitch with the Hatchet that made players basically invincible in PvP, a problem which was remarkably not fixed for some weeks. Players took a steep drop after a month, and then steadily declined over the next months—spiking again with the launch of the Brimstone Sands update and the Rise Of The Angry Earth expansion.
New World has the fundamentals of an excellent MMO, but its downside has always been a feeling of a lack of support from the developers. Not in terms of expansions and content – it’s clear Aeternum is a totally different game in many ways from its predecessor – but rather the day-to-day management of the game, and an inability to react to what players really want. No real endgame content. No updates for PvP aspects of the game (one of the core consistent audiences for the game has always been its hardcore PvP contingent.) A lack of clear and concise roadmaps with obvious deliverables. And that leads us to here, at New World: Aeternum, one month in – the end of New World? I’m starting to think so.
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