Amazon’s New World rolled into closed beta yesterday, and unlike some past test events, this one has no NDA, meaning the whole MMORPG community is weighing in. I got a chance to play a few hours yesterday, right as the server clusters were nearing around 200,000 peak players on Steam. Almost all of the servers were full in every region, with quite a lot of them struggling through queues (poor Brazil had a 5,000-person queue! They added more servers for you overnight.). And the newbie zones were absolutely packed.
“Lots to learn on our first day of beta!” the studio tweeted. “There are a few places we fell short, particularly with servers and queues. Additionally, we’ve encountered bugs with text-to-speech, accidental bans, and challenges with the Inkwell quest. We are reconfiguring as quickly as possible to deal with these issues until it works properly for you. We’ve received a very enthusiastic response, filling our servers to capacity! We want our servers to be full but we also want to make sure everyone can login and play quickly. We’re working to add capacity to provide everyone the best opportunity to Beta test New World!”
All in all, the mood in-game and on social media seemed chipper. I had a significantly better time playing on my own with a melee spec than I did playing the healer from the press preview last spring for sure. The game has already come a long way since just May, and I have to say, I mostly liked it, with only mild caveats. The character creation is much better this round. I like the armor. But the chat UI is awful. It’s like that – good but also some annoying bits. I’m a lot more interested in the game now that I’ve gotten to tinker with it without the stress of a group dungeon preview, although I’m still getting such strong Elder Scrolls Online vibes that I kinda want to play that.
What do you think of New World so far?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
