Telling players it’s received “over a million” pieces of feedback on the game so far, Amazon has a new dev video and blog up for New World players this afternoon addressing… well, not all million of them, but definitely some of the most pressing issues.
New World’s playerbase on Steam has continued its steady decline since its original peak last autumn; it now sees an average player count of around 40K, with concurrency peaking at 81K in the last month – a massive drop compared to its 410K average/913K peak in October. While these are not unusual figures for an MMORPG faced with stiff competition, it’s surely something Amazon should be countering.
However, it won’t be countering them with more merges, according to today’s missive. Instead, as previously noted, Amazon handed out another transfer token to try to allow players to settle themselves organically before reconsidering putting more merges back on the table.
So what is Amazon doing? Reducing the friction of systems players have been complaining about for months, many of which are holdovers from the game’s more survival-centric development.
“We think there are numerous things getting in the way of people playing the game that they want to play. Fast travel, mutation orbs, storage, a lot of things differently making it difficult for people to experience the game they want. That’s something we’re definitely looking at and we’re going to be taking a look at. The game has gone through a long history and some of these things are from past iterations of the game, when it was a little more of a survival/crafting game, and I think we’ve held onto those. I think now is the time to start shedding that, and letting people experience the game. […] One of the things we’re working on that should be in the Feb build is reducing the cost of azoth travel. Big boon, teleport anywhere you want at any time. Reducing inn recovery time from an hour to 30mins. Resetting the cost for your house recall as well. A lot of reductions, you’re going to be able to move around the world really freely, it’s going to be great.”
The aforementioned February build will still focus on “bugs, bots, and balance.” According to the devs, they’ve already “fixed more than 700 defects” as part of the update. The studio also touches on “clunky movement” and Outpost Rush scoring and rewards, including “increasing the amount of rewards from gypsum casts” as well as “adding more ways for players to earn gypsum and umbral.” Here’s too hoping it’s not too little too late.
