The New World fanbase is still reeling from the fallout over the announcement of its soft relaunch on consoles as New World: Aeternum. Something I’m really struggling with is how very different this is from what I expected to happen in 2024. Maybe it’s just my stung ego over my predictions being wrong, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect this wasn’t the original plan for this year.
Put on your tinfoil conquistador helms, everyone, it’s time to get speculative. I want to propose that part of the reason expectations were so poorly managed is that the developers themselves didn’t initially expect things to go this way.
Let’s go back and look at what the future of the game seemed to be at the start of the year. Personally, I was optimistic. We’d just had the first expansion, and while it wasn’t a wild smash, it made some pretty positive additions to the game. The seasonal content cadence had been rolling well for a while, and the population numbers seemed to have settled on a consistent average of at least ten thousand average concurrent players.
We had also been told that 2024 was going to be a big year for the game. I remember a dev video from aways back where Scot Lane said he felt the roadmap for 2024 was even bigger than 2023’s.
Yes, devs exaggerate for marketing, but if what we ultimately got in 2024 was always the plan, that would have been far more than an exaggeration. No reasonable person could look at the current plan for 2024 and say that it’s more than we got last year. Personally, I don’t believe Scot Lane is a liar. I think he believed his statement to be true when he said it.
There were other hints at big things coming. We had datamining of the Dunwood zone, and the ending of Rise of the Angry Earth‘s main story had some big teases for what was to come. We also got a tease in a February dev article about “underground areas and mausoleums.” It all telegraphed pretty hard that our next destination was a spooky gothic horror zone.
That could still be coming after the Aeternum update, but it’s weird to do all that teasing if you’re not planning to follow through on it for over a year, right? Why kill your own hype like that? If they knew a revamped Cutlass Keys was where we were going next, why not tease that instead?
Maybe the revamp of Cutlass Keys ties into the previous teases somehow, but I doubt it. Nothing about the current version of the zone fits any previous teases; it’s all pirates and towering above-ground Ancient monuments, not vampires and underground catacombs. I don’t get the impression this is going to be anywhere on the scale of of First Light’s transformation into the Elysian Wilds, either, so I can’t see the character of the zone changing that wildly. The new raid looks to be Angry Earth themed, so again not fitting any of the previous teases.
Let’s also remember that when we first started learning about the mystery June announcement that became Aeternum, it wasn’t even in the context of being some singular major announcement. It was just supposed to be the roadmap for the last three quarters of 2024; we were told they just needed a bit of time to nail down all the features that would be on it. But then it kept getting delayed, and slowly the language around it morphed from being a roadmap update to the big announcement we ended up getting.
And I’m still hung up on the fact they said they weren’t planning a console release during the Rise of the Angry Earth press events. I wish I’d written down a direct quote because I don’t remember their exact wording anymore, but at the time I remember having the distinct impression that this was not the usual PR dissembling but a clear message to not expect New World on consoles any time soon.
There’s even the listed season five end time in-game to consider. Originally the timer on the season pass showed it ending in late June, following the usual cadence. Only after the announcement did it get updated to show that season five will continue until Aeternum‘s release in October.
Of course they wouldn’t want the timer to give away the surprise, especially when it’s an unpleasant surprise, but taken with everything else it feels like another hint that 2024 was originally intended to have a more normal content cadence. They could have just patched the timer out altogether, after all.
It doesn’t even make sense to skip a whole season. This is one of the main ways the studio monetizes the game. Skipping a season and losing its revenue feels like the sort of thing that only happens if something went badly wrong behind the scenes – or if plans changed at the last minute.
Even the tone of developer communication has changed radically in recent months. One of the reasons I’ve stayed so loyal to New World through all its ups and downs is because the developers have been so good at consistently showing transparency and humility, with a real willingness to own up to their mistakes.
All of this evidence is circumstantial, and there’s no smoking gun, but when you put it altogether, it does feel like it paints a picture of something drastic happening behind the scenes in the early months of 2024.
Here’s what I think happened.
I think the higher ups in the Amazon hierarchy are still hoping to return to the massive player numbers New World had at launch, not realizing how unrealistic that is, and they were counting on Rise of the Angry Earth to do it. Possibly they see how many people come back for World of Warcraft‘s expansions, not realizing it’s an apples to oranges comparison because ROTAE was nowhere near a WoW expansion in scale and WoW is a unique phenomenon that doesn’t really follow the normal rules.
I remember that when I interviewed Scot Lane around ROTAE‘s launch, he made a point to close by saying how much he felt like this was a great time for lapsed players to return. While I do think this was genuinely his opinion, the way he said it felt very much like something scripted, unlike the more authentic-feeling statements he’d made in the rest of the interview.
Rise of the Angry Earth seems to have sold OK with existing players, but it didn’t do a lot to bring people back, and I think that set the powers that be into a panic. They saw the success of games like Elden Ring and decided that chasing the console action game market was the path to easy cash.
Thus, the order came down to drop everything and focus on getting the game onto consoles. I think this was sudden and unexpected and that developers were as shocked as fans would ultimately be. I imagine they may have argued against it only to be overruled, hence the shift in tone and frequency of communication. They know this is bad but can’t say it publicly.
They may have tried to maintain the 2024 content cadence to some degree, but as all resources were diverted towards the console launch, the planned content for 2024 was increasingly delayed or pushed back to next year, until we reach the current content drought and disastrously mismanaged communication.
The one thing I’m not sure of is whether the game was genuinely losing money or just not making enough money in the eyes of executives. With its relative small population and lax monetization, I can’t imagine New World was wildly profitable, but given what seems to have been a pretty small development budget (based on the content cadence), I don’t think it would be very difficult for it to break even, either.
Obviously, this is all guesswork. I know blaming executive interference is an easy way out for fans who want to believe the best of the developers of their favourite game, and I am not immune to that bias. It is possible the developers themselves just made bad decisions all on their lonesome or that something else went wrong.
But my gut is telling me I’m at least in the ballpark, even if I don’t have every detail right. I just hope that the console launch is successful enough to make up for all the goodwill Amazon has burned with PC players and that wiser minds will prevail when it comes to the future management of the game. New World can’t afford another rugpull like this.
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.
