New World

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About

New World is an MMORPG game developed by Amazon Games which was released on September 28th, 2021. The game is set in the mid-1600s, with players colonizing a fictional island loosely modeled after colonial America.

History

On September 29th, 2016, Amazon Games (formerly Amazon Game Studios), announced the MMORPG sandbox video game New World at TwitchCon.^[1]

On December 12th, 2019, the official trailer for New World premiered on YouTube,^[2] gaining over 1.6 million views in two years (shown below, left). On May 11th, 2021, the second trailer for the game premiered, gaining over 761,000 views in two months (shown below, right).

On July 20th, the closed beta period for the game began. On the first day of the beta, the game peaked at 190,000 concurrent players on Steam^[3] and over 731,000 viewers on Twitch.^[4]

On September 28th, 2021, the game was released globally (launch trailer shown below).^[9]

Setting and Gameplay

New World is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in on a fictional island Aeternum inhabited by monstrous creatures, with the setting inspired by European colonization of the Americas. In the game, players are tasked with acquiring resources to survive, exploring the world and gaining control over settlements. The game heavily focuses on survival tasks such as collecting, hunting and cooking food and crafting tools, ammunition and supplies.

In addition to PvE, The game features opt-in PvP with territory control and factions. The combat system in the game does not feature auto-targeted attacks, with players required to aim and time their blows (gameplay video shown below).

Reception

On release day, the game peaked at over 757,000 concurrent players on Steam and over 925,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch.^[10]

As of September 29th, 2021, the game had a 48 percent approval rating on Steam^[11] and over 26,700 reviews, with many players reporting very long queues to get in the game.

Graphic Card Damage Reports

Following the launch of the beta in July 2021, multiple players reported that their high-end EVGA and Gigabyte RTX 3090 graphics cards were damaged while playing the game (posts shown below, left and right).^[5]^[6]

On July 21st, 2021, Amazon Games^[7] responded to the reports, reporting that no issue with RTX 3090 graphics card series had been discovered and that a frames-per-second cap would be implemented as a precaution. On July 23rd, 2021, EVGA^[8] announced that the company would replace the damaged cards.

Queue Issues

On release day, multiple players reported long queues to get onto servers, with several posts^[12]^[13] about the issue going viral. On that day, Amazon Games acknowledged the issue, promising to resolve it.^[14]