Last week, Amazon’s Prime Video launched its Secret Level anthology series of short animated episodes based on a variety of games. Included in this is The Once and Future King, an episode based on New World.
Today I want to talk about that episode and how it fails to be a good advertisement for New World, but I also want to talk about the broader implications of the episode’s existence and what it says about Amazon‘s priorities when it comes to spending its resources.
First, let’s talk about The Once and Future King. This will contain extensive spoilers, but the story is so predictable that it’s hard to imagine spoilers would affect your ability to enjoy it in any way.
The story’s focused on providing some backstory to Aelstrom, a minor character introduced in the Aeternum update as part of the new starting experience. In his Secret Level episode, Aelstrom arrives on the island of Aeternum bent on conquest, only to lose his army to the Stormwall and proceed to fail miserably (and fatally) at pretty much everything he does from that point on. Aeternum’s magic returns him to life after every misadventure, leading him to eventually and painfully gain some emotional maturity.
I’ll be blunt: It’s pretty bad. It’s full of the kind of “lol quirky” forced humour that so much of our media is drowning in these days (thanks, Marvel), and the entire story is, as I said, very predictable. Arnold Schwarzenegger does bring a certain campy charm with his performance as Aelstrom, and the ending is a bit sweet, if terribly corny, but overall it’s a pretty dull ~15 minutes to sit through.
The bigger problem, though, is that it’s a terrible use of the New World IP. I’d say the two things that make New World unique are the spiritual struggle characters face through centuries of traumatic death and rebirth, and the way it combines various elements of real world history of mythology with its own mythos.
The latter is entirely absent from The Once and Future King, and the former isn’t really utilized, either. Yes, Aelstrom’s constant reincarnation is a key plot point, but it’s just treated as a form of slapstick comedy, rather than the source of existential horror it is in the game. You could have Aelstrom being beaten unconscious at every turn instead of dying and it wouldn’t have changed the story in any way.
Most frustrating is how this story treated Corruption. At one point, Aelstrom turns to its power to try to gain the strength to conquer the island as he believes is his right, but even this is treated as an opportunity for more laughs, as the Corrupted literally beat him into shape.
Eventually Aelstrom is forged into a juggernaut of unholy power, and the episode even showed him wearing an amulet identical to Isabella’s, implying he’s not just Corrupted but a full-blown Tempest at this point, and then… he just gets immediately rolled again, and all the Corruption vanishes from him.
Is this really all it takes to cure someone of Corruption? Cut off their amulet and make them look silly? Wish we’d known that before now. Could have saved a lot of lives.
Whether this episode is even canon to the greater New World lore is debatable at best, so I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it, but man, this is exactly what you should never do with your setting’s biggest antagonist faction. Does anyone remember this was supposed to be a horror game?
So as a standalone piece of entertainment, I’d put The Once and Future King at about a five or a six out of ten, but as an introduction the setting of New World I’d say it’s about a one or two out of ten at best. This is frustrating because there are so many genuinely fascinating stories the showrunners could have adapted instead. The Minotaur’s friendship with Gilgamesh, Adiana losing her faith in humanity, Imhotep’s struggle to hold his mind together down through the centuries, the battles between Artorius and the fallen Myrddin, the Heretic’s seduction of Isabella…
Well, at least we got a cool armour skin out of it, I guess.
That brings me to my other point, though, which is that ultimately this was just an ad for New World, and I’m sure one that didn’t come cheaply. That does feel a bit weird in the context of all that’s happened lately.
While I find the derogatory “small indie company” meme tiresome, it is true that playing New World often feels like, well, playing a game from a small indie company. It’s a good game that does a lot well, but it clearly struggles with development resources. The content cadence is extremely slow for what is ostensibly a triple-A title, and of course there are the ever-present bugs and jank.
And yet it’s clear that the broad Amazon corporate entity is willing to spend big when it comes to this game. It’s always enjoyed lots of advertising. Up until recently we had very regular and well-produced developer videos, several every week. Rise of the Angry Earth came with a lavish and probably pricey cinematic trailer. Amazon has been quite willing to throw swag at journalists, as the New World-branded cocktail kit on my bookshelf will attest (in a hilarious irony, I’m actually a teetotaler, but at least it looks pretty).
And now we’ve got this whole Secret Level episode. It’s clear that Amazon wants this game to succeed and become an IP with some real cultural cachet, and someone at corporate is clearly willing to spend the money to make it happen, and yet it’s equally clear that the developers themselves are holding the game together with duct tape and good intentions because it’s all they have.
Between this and the mismanagement of New World‘s sudden swerve to consoles, I am ever more convinced that the bosses at Amazon Games — not the New World devs, but their bosses — simply don’t know how to run a successful games studio.
I hope this is an area where they can improve because I really want to see this game continue to grow and prosper, and based on the effort put towards things like New World‘s Secret Level episode, I think they want it to as well. They just need to learn how to prioritize their resources 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.
