The time has finally come. New World’s semi-relaunch under the New World: Aeternum banner is here. Regular readers of this column will recall that my initial impressions of the new starting experience and general gameplay improvements were pretty positive, but now that I can play Aeternum on my existing characters, I’m afraid my feelings are much more negative – and I suspect a lot of veteran New World players feel the same way.
In short, Aeternum contains serious missteps around endgame rewards, monetization, and a (lack of) new content. Let’s quickly go through all the ways this update ill-serves the PC playerbase, long-time fans, and casual players.
The biggest issue around the Aeternum relaunch going in has been how neglected the existing fans have been in the last few months, and rather than trying to mend fences, Amazon Games seems to be doubling down on that neglect.
The relaunch is accompanied by the Trials of Aeternum event, which rewards weapon and armour skins and transmog tokens for completing in-game goals… but not for existing characters. Only characters on the newly introduced “standard” servers can participate in the event and earn the rewards, which means you’ll have to roll a new character on a new server to participate – and you can’t transfer your old character to the new servers.
To be honest, I think the skins are rather underwhelming, so it’s not the end of the world to miss out on them, but it feels bad, especially in context of everything else that’s happened in the last year, and it’s just so unnecessary. What possible harm could there be to letting legacy servers participate in the event? It seems as if those of us who stayed loyal to the game through all its trials and tribulations are being punished for that loyalty.
It’s a shame to be missing out on the rush of new players, too, because no one in their right mind is rolling on legacy servers right now. I was looking forward to using my time and experience in the game to help folks out; I planned to run groups of newbies through Amrine with my healtank build. Can’t do that now.
Clearly the devs want everyone to reroll on the new servers to get everyone on the same page, and already my existing server is looking pretty sparsely populated, but there’s no way I’m leaving my current home.
I have nearly seven hundred hours logged across two level 65 characters. Both are well-geared and have maxed gathering skills, nearly every weapon skill maxed, and two intricately decorated houses apiece. I will not abandon them. I’d consider making a new character to replay the story again, or to play alongside a friend, but fully starting over? Not going to happen.
Speaking of playing with a friend, I had been in the process of convincing one of my closer friends to get New World so we could play together, but that’s going to be a lot harder now because the PC version of the game has now seen its price increased significantly to accommodate the automatic bundling of Rise of the Angry Earth. It’s still available as a separate upgrade for folks who own the original PC version; however, $60 for the new base game plus ROTAE and Aeternum is a heavy barrier to entry for a curious fan. (Editor’s note: We originally misstated how the pricing works now; the PC Aeternum now automatically includes ROTAE, hence the price change equivalent to the console price.)
But what about the new content? The flagship features are the new FFA PvP area in Cutlass Keys and the Hive of the Gorgons raid. I’ve got nothing against these features, but as I’m neither a PvP fan nor a hardcore raider, they don’t do much for me.
Given that one of the main selling features of Aeternum for veterans was an increase to the gear score gap, I also find it distressing that these two activities are the main content that awards item level 725 gear (though apparently it’s still possible, if slow, in other PvP formats and territory invasions). All other PvE content, especially casual content, remains capped at ilevel 700 or less.
It makes sense for the new content to be more rewarding, but making it the only way to consistently get gear above 700 is demoralizing. It makes all of the other content feel a bit pointless, which isn’t great for a game that has always struggled with endgame retention. I wish we could see a return of the Umbral Shards system that let us upgrade items to the gear cap; that would allow players of all stripes to slowly earn their way to 725 while the raiders and FFA fighters get the fast track. That would be a fair compromise.
But that’s not where we’re at, and not only does existing PvE content not offer any path to 725, it’s now actually less rewarding than it was before Aeternum because elite chests no longer have a chance to drop transmog tokens. Obviously this sucks given that transmog tokens were already so hard to come by, but I don’t think transmog token availability is even the most serious issue with this.
The chance at a transmog token, however remote, was a reason to keep running endgame content even if you already outgeared it. It gave you something to look forward to even if you’d already run a dungeon or elite area a hundred times. Now that’s gone. When a game is struggling with endgame retention as New World historically has, it’s not a good idea to remove one of the main chase items that kept people running content.
One of the features of Aeternum I was most excited for was repeatable endgame versions of the solo soul trials from the main story, but the rewards for them turn out to be severely undertuned. Gear drops from soul trials cap out at ilevel 675, which is something that will be relevant only to newly dinged level 65 characters and barely even that. You can easily get better gear doing chest runs. You also get a measly pittance of 25 gold per completed trial.
Soul trials are also time-gated; only three are available each day, and each gives rewards once. This would be reasonable if the rewards were any good, but they’re not.
It’s strange because the one trial I’ve run so far was pretty challenging even on a character with nearly 700 average ilevel. Which is good! Challenging solo content is why I play this game. But it doesn’t make sense for this to be so much less rewarding than just zerging through a chest run.
Bottom line, there’s no reason to ever run soul trials unless you really want to revisit that moment in the story. Virtually anything you might choose to do in this game would be more rewarding.
I also had some hope the revamp of Cutlass Keys would give some decent content for a mostly solo player like me, but the new “main story” quests are just a couple of brief breadcrumb quests to introduce the raid and FFA area. That leaves just a handful of side quests, mainly of the “kill 10 rats” variety. I’m pretty sure at least some of them are just upscaled versions of the old Cutlass Keys quests, too.
It’s a bizarre contrast that so much of the marketing around Aeternum has been about promoting it as a soloable, story-driven game, yet the actual substance of the update is perhaps the hardest pivot away from those things in the game’s history. The overriding goal seems to have been to funnel everyone into the new raid and PvP map. It feels like Amazon is starting to shift toward a “raid or die” approach to endgame.
One other small thing to note is the ongoing issue of my characters’ faces. For most of 2024, my Syndicate character has suffered from a bug that left her face looking like the granny out of a body horror reimagining of Red Riding Hood. Aeternum has updated all character faces, and the good news is that it no longer has her looking so monstrous… but it’s still not exactly her old face, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the new one.
My Covenant character, though, I have no such ambiguity about. Her new face definitely just looks worse than the old one, and I resent having it forced on me. If the studio wanted to update the faces, it should have just added new ones and given people the option to recustomize their characters. A barbershop has been requested forever anyway. Forcing the change on everyone leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Ultimately, though, players like me are not the target audience of Aeternum, for better or for worse. From the start, the revamp has been about attracting new players, and its success or failure will be measured in its ability to do so – and then its ability to hold onto those players long term. But I have concerns about that, too. My complaints around endgame and rewards will affect new players as well, just not right away.
As unhappy as I am with all this, I still want to see New World recover and have a bright future. As the archives of this column will attest, I used to be a pretty ardent fanboy of this game up until quite recently, and I would like to be one again.
There is good to be found in Aeternum, as I covered when talking about the beta. The improved performance and smoother animations feel great. The changes to make PvP matchmaking fairer should be a boon for those whom it affects. In my opinion, New World still has the best combat and core gameplay of any MMORPG on the market by a commanding margin.
But there needs to be some serious course correction around things like endgame rewards, and soon, before New World loses all the new players it’s just gained. Keeping people around after leveling has always been the biggest struggle for this game, and Aeternum‘s changes look poised to make that problem worse, not better.
New World’s Aeternum is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers delve those secrets to provide you with in-depth coverage of all things New World through launch and beyond.
