Earlier this morning, Amazon sent over an interesting press release about New World that included a batch of “most asked” questions with dev answers specifically focused on “the single-player experience and PvP within the game.” We generally pass on releases like these, but in this case, the messaging on the game has been so weird – remember, Amazon tried to convince everyone this game is no longer an MMORPG, despite retaining all of its MMORPG content and features – that we thought we’d give it a look. And I’m glad we did because one answer in particular caught our attention.
The responses are at least attributed to senior producer Katy Kaszynski, who appears keen to reassure the MMO fanbase playing the game that a whole lot of Aeternum’s content is soloable, from the returned main story questline to endgame soul trials. Fine, makes sense. But then she bizarrely suggests that PvP content and multiplayer dungeons are part of the solo experience. I thought I was reading it wrong, so I made two other MOP writers read it too, and no, they are as baffled as I am.
“Will players be required to team up to beat content in New World: Aeternum? Players can complete the Main Story Questline completely solo, and take part in the end game repeatable soul trials for daily rewards. For those that want to dabble in group content, they can use the easy queuing system in the activities menu to play modes like Outpost Rush, 3v3s, and Expeditions, where they can continue their solo experience ‘alone in a crowd.’”
“These aren’t goalposts; they’re wacky waving inflatable tube men,” MOP’s Chris remarked.
“In other news, all football players play the game alone,” MOP’s Justin quipped. “Just alone in a crowd.”
Just so we’re absolutely clear, multiplayer PvP and multiplayer PvE dungeons are not in any way solo content or part of the solo experience or “alone in a crowd” content, and if you try to play multiplayer this way, you will be disappointed and your fellow players will be angry. And that content isn’t “dabbling” in group content. It is literally core group content, same as you’d find in any other full-fledged MMORPG.
The rest of the doc doesn’t try too hard to convince players that up is down, for what it’s worth. More sensibly, Kaszynski addresses how solo players can join the multiplayer PvP scene, acknowledging the multiple types of PvP available to players as well as the fact that endgame PvP offers a clear-cut way to acquire the new 725 gear.
That said, one question asks how often we might expect new content and challenge coming to PvP play, and the devs dodge it hard by simply relisting the existing on-demand PvP types and the scheduled influence races and wars.
Last week, we checked in on New World post-Aeternum to see how it was doing and found that at least on Steam, the numbers were higher than we expected (but lower than we hoped) and the conversation on social media has shifted to console players. Those Steam numbers have continued to soar; this past weekend, the game saw 46K concurrent – nine times the peak concurrency seen in August.
