Where I'm At With New World

 After reading Massively OPs article, Massively Overthinking: The New World Aeternum debacle, I wrote a long comment I wanted to capture on my blog as well.  It really captures where I am at with the whole situation and I'd prefer to spend no more energy on the topic for now.

As one of the louder New World fanboys who was devastated by this turn of events I have come around to this take on the situation: they screwed up communication but this is actually the right step for the game.

Out of all the MMORPGs I’ve played (which is practically all of them in the last 30 years) New World is one of the few that I feel makes sense on console. It’s action combat system fits consoles and that action combat extends to the rest of the game where you spend a lot of time involved with the game world and not a bunch of time with UIs like many MMOs.

So I think console was the right direction and having cross play and shared servers between PC and console was the right move. Also since AGS has shown a higher-than-normal focus towards MMORPGs (regardless of this recent genre twisting) and is working on other MMOs then I want them improving the base line tech for future games.

I also think there is some good content coming. The lawless PvP zone, raid, cross server arenas (my key item), sharding (assumed larger server sizes), and gear score increase to 725. All things the community has been begging for. Did they hit everything the community wanted? No, but that is still a fair shake of items.

The only issue with it is the wait time and AGS needs to improve their speed of delivery. I am hoping with the console transition done they go full bore on content delivery. I really think the game has a second wind coming and we’ll be talking about it at it’s 10 year mark similar to how we’ve seen GW2 and ESO both ascend post initial declines.

With that said they absolutely cannot f-up communication like this again. I was a huge “trust but verify” player before this and now I’m “zero trust”.