Let’s take stock of New World Aeternum one week into launch, shall we? Or at least of what we can know for sure, which is limited since we don’t have console data.
For starters, New World Aeternum on Steam is actually going well, by the numbers. Oh, it’ll never see 900,000 peak players again as it did for its launch in 2021, but at least it’s now seen its highest peak concurrent all year – 61,364 – though it didn’t quite blaze past its 2023 peak concurrent of 77K, achieved after the launch of Rise of the Angry Earth. It also hasn’t bested the average player counts seen earlier this year (16K in January), though math says that 12K it’s currently sporting will expand as those weaker September weeks fall out of the equation.
All of this is to say that a whole lot of New World PC players came back to at least gawk at Aeternum, in spite of the content drought of 2024. Whether they actually purchased Rise of the Angry Earth or the new bundled Aeternum version of the game is hard to estimate without numbers from Amazon. We do have some hints from Steam, however: Aeternum is #11 on the Steam top sellers list right now – up from #51 – so somebody’s buying it even on PC.
What may perk those numbers up is New World’s Halloween event, Nightveil Hollow, which arrived on all platforms this morning and runs through November 5th. The main downside here is that the core quest is aimed at characters 35+, so new players may not be ready for it yet. In addition to the return of the Baalphazu world event and loads of skins and deco, we’re also getting a very small bug-fixing patch that repairs some rendering issues, crash problems, and the Ifrit Flame fight.
As for console, we’re still in the dark on hard numbers, so let me offer some anecdotes based on what I saw myself. Over the weekend, I took a dip into Aeternum on PS5 and saw plenty of servers packed to the brim, particularly in US East and Europe (Oceania and US West looked quiet, but it wasn’t peak playtime for those regions). I also saw lots of players around in the newbie areas, particularly the first big city – and plenty of trolling and guild ads in the fast-moving chat. It wasn’t as packed as PC at launch, not by far, but the server infrastructure has blessedly come a long way since then. (This isn’t really a review, but apart from the controls/UI, I enjoyed my time in there, even as a PC-first gamer. At least low-level New World translates fairly well to casual couch gaming. The music was also just as spectacular as I remembered.)
But maybe the best indicator of how the population is settling is the fact that New World subreddit has calmed way down without slowing down. All summer, it was full of (justifiably) angry PC players ranting, but it’s now been taken over by curious lil console noobs trying to figure out their way. Fun fact: Nobody appears fooled into thinking this is anything but an MMO, and in fact, I flipped through several conversations where gamers were pointing to it as the best MMO available on console right now – and they didn’t even mean it as an insult as they usually do.
As we argue on today’s podcast, if Amazon can just follow up this launch and Halloween with a banger of a roadmap and ideally a solid update, it might manage to stick its second landing here in the MMORPG genre after all.
