Unfortunately, here we are again. I am once again in the position of reporting on the death of a game I enjoyed. You all know the news by now: New World is abruptly entering maintenance mode mere weeks after a massive and mostly well-received update.
It’s a bad week to be a New World fan, but I would argue it’s a worse week to be an MMORPG fan. I fear this is a blow not just to one community but to the genre as a whole, one it may not recover from.
All things considered, I’m taking the news of New World‘s sudden demise in stride. I’m sad, disappointed, and angry, but this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve lost a lot of games I cared about over the years, and for better or worse, you do get used to it.
And while Nighthaven has made a lot of positive changes, it hadn’t entirely erased my frustration with the year of neglect that preceded it, and it did still have its stumbles. As someone who cares about story, I found Nighthaven’s the weakest New World has produced yet (that was going to be the topic of my next column, but there seems little point getting into it now).
Mostly, it just comes down to the fact that I feel like the writing has been on the wall since the disastrous Aeternum relaunch and ensuing content drought.
Mind you, I didn’t think the entire studio was going to get canned; I thought we’d limp along with smaller updates for at least another year or two. But I did feel that New World‘s glory days were behind it. As I said when we first started getting news about season 10, it was clear to me that the executives at Amazon did not have faith in the game.
And I want to be absolutely clear that’s where the real blame lies: with the higher ups at Amazon, not the developers on the New World team. I’m already seeing people coming out of the woodwork to say how New World was a disaster from the start, how it was a terrible game, blah blah blah, and I don’t have the patience to put up with false narratives like that.
New World certainly was not without flaws, and the developers definitely did make mistakes, and I have not been shy with my criticisms when that has happened, but it’s also a game that made a Herculean effort to recover from its launch stumbles, something that the wider gaming community has never given it credit for. New World‘s developers worked harder than any other team I’ve ever seen at listening to player feedback and making positive changes, and it’s a game that even at its worst still had spectacular combat, a beautiful world, and rich lore that clearly showed the passion of its creators.
It is so unbelievably frustrating to me how many people still don’t understand just how much the game changed for the better in the year or two after its launch, rebuilding the entire MSQ from scratch and implementing more quality of life improvements than I can count. Only Final Fantasy XIV and perhaps No Man’s Sky can boast more dramatic transformations, but few people outside the MMORPG-centric gaming press ever took notice when New World did it.
It’s clear a lot of the critics either played New World only in its much rougher early days or never played at all, and in both cases they have no idea what they’re talking about. I see this happen a lot with games that have died — Monday morning quarterbacks who never really paid attention to a game but still feel confident giving lectures on why it didn’t survive. Again, there is lots you can validly criticize about New World, but it’s always clear to me when criticism comes from well-meaning fans versus mindless haters, and New World‘s always had plenty of the latter (as do most big games, really).
It was a game with a rollercoaster history, and the changes weren’t always positive, but the narrative that it was in a downward spiral from the start is completely false, and those who claim so only prove they weren’t paying attention.
I doubt that New World was a huge money-maker, but I would bet that it was at least modestly profitable through most if not all of its run. Consider that just a few weeks ago the team was telling us that three new weapons were in active development, with one scheduled for release either late this season or early next. We also knew that other features like shared storage, skill trees in gear loadouts, and farming were being worked on, and there are lore notes in Nighthaven that seemed to be teases of an upcoming zone.
These are not the actions of a dev team that’s hemorrhaging money and knows the end is in sight. Nor does it make sense to spend all the time and effort releasing a huge update like Nighthaven and then scrap the game immediately after — not unless the decision has nothing to do with New World‘s performance at all.
Sure, if New World had proven massively successful and made a Morbillion dollars every month, Amazon wouldn’t have canned it, but being unable to satisfy the dragon-sickness of out of touch executives should not be the measure by which we deem a game a failure.
It seems pretty clear to me that Amazon just decided developing games was no longer a business they wanted to be in, and New World is the victim of that decision. That is what should be the story here: of executive indifference, not developer mismanagement.
But either way, the reality is the end has come, at least when it pertains to new content. Even if I’m not quite the flag-waving fanboy of New World I once was, I am still pretty disappointed, especially after Nighthaven made so many positive changes. Just before the news broke I was thinking how nice it was to see the game so populated again, with massive crowds for Myrk runs and a festival air wherever you went.
I also mourn the lost potential of what could have been. We’ll never find out what happened to Artorius. We’ll never meet Myrddin. We’ll never get pistols, or daggers, or a lightning weapon. I’ll never get a nice cozy farm in Everfall where I can plant vegetables and sit on the porch, complaining about kids these days.
But as much as this news upsets me as a New World player, it upsets me much more as an MMORPG player. Even if you didn’t personally enjoy New World, if you are a fan of MMORPGs as a concept, its death should send a shiver down your spine. I truly believe this is a disaster for our genre.
For all its many faults, New World was the one game on the market that truly felt like a modern MMO. It was the one trying to move the genre forward, with the quality of gameplay we should expect in the 2020s. I will say again it has the best combat and core gameplay of any MMORPG in history (and better than most single-player games as well), and I now worry it will never be toppled from that throne.
It is very, very bad for our genre that its most successful and stable titles are all at least decade or two old. MMOs already have a reputation in the wider community of being clunky and uncool, and the genre’s big names all being legacy titles only makes that worse.
I’m not even saying these are bad games — I’m still playing WoW, after all — but if the MMORPG genre is going to survive long term, it desperately needs new blood and new ideas. Developers were already gun-shy about funding new MMOs, and I fear the perception (justified or not) that even a company as big as Amazon couldn’t make one work will only make that worse.
The only hope for new big budget MMORPGs now seems to lie with Korea and China, but we’re not seeing a lot of innovation out of the games from those countries. They mostly seem to like just iterating on existing concepts, and their tropes aren’t always to the taste of Western gamers. I’m not saying Eastern games are necessarily inferior, but they don’t currently feel like the right choice to really modernize the genre and give it the fresh ideas it needs to attract new fans.
I am generally an optimist when it comes to the world of gaming. Over my 30 years of gaming, I have seen the medium evolve in ways I couldn’t even have imagined as a child, creating beautiful and innovative new forms of artistic expression, and I fully expect that to continue. The economy might be rough right now, but that won’t be true forever, and even now lots of amazing games are rolling out every year. I still believe that the future of gaming as a whole is bright.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure the same can be said for every genre of game, and I have had the misfortune to be particularly in love with some niche genres that seem to get smaller every year. I’ve been worried about the future of real time strategy games for a while now, and I’m now even more worried about the future of MMORPGs.
Bluntly, I’m not sure I see much of a future for our genre at this point. At least not beyond the current big names continuing to maintain their status quo until their existing playerbases age out. Games like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but it’s hard to imagine any true innovation or growth in our genre at this point. I fear MMORPGs are destined to be remembered as an evolutionary dead end on the gaming family tree.
But we might as well enjoy them while we can. Before I go, I do want to leave you with a final message: If you’re a former player who was considering a return to New World for Nighthaven, don’t let this discourage you. I know a lot of people are put-off by the idea of playing a game with no future, but I’ve played a lot of games that ended up dying over the years, and never once have I regretted the time I spent on them. I only regret not playing more of them when I had the chance.
Currently the game is still well-populated, and you can easily find people to run content with. The endgame shake-ups brought by Nighthaven make for a really deep and interesting gear chase, and you could easily play New World as your main game for months without running out of things to do, even without new content. If there’s such a thing as a good time to enter maintenance mode, this is it. The game is currently in a great place to keep people entertained for a good while to come.
I, for one, plan to keep playing, at least for now. If anything, my motivation to enjoy what’s there while I can has increased. With no more zones to come, I’ve got no reason not to use up my final housing slots. I got some decorating to do.
I also don’t think I’m quite done writing about it yet. This is probably not going to be the last Vitae Aeternum column you read.
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.
