I’m back in one of my happy places: loitering in an hours-long queue, twiddling my thumbs, waiting to log on to the overloaded servers of a massively multiplayer game. Soon enough I’ll be back inside Amazon’s latest video game, New World, where I’ll be mining ore veins, skinning animal pelts and turning over 10 ghoul heads to a featureless character who promises a reward of experience points and a longsword juiced with a modest dexterity bonus. It’s been a long time since the mid-00s apogee of this genre, when countless World of Warcraft facsimiles broke on to the scene, eager to replicate its runaway success. (Warhammer Online, Tabula Rasa, The Matrix Online. All of them failed, it was a bloodbath.)

The business model was declared dead as studios pivoted to the Guild Wars or Destiny multiplayer format – a few hub zones populated by the spectres of thousands of players that you scarcely see or hear. This makes New World, the first game from Amazon Games since its shooter Crucible crashed and burned spectacularly last year, hilariously out of date. And yet, this RPG has managed to reinvigorate a rich, dormant genre, one that had been left to ferment for decades as the well ran dry. The numbers are mind-boggling. New World racked up 650,000 concurrent players upon release, making it the most played new game on Steam and one of the true surprise hits of the year.

Watch the New World trailer

A vogue like this is difficult to ignore. After all, the best MMOs are primarily powered by oppressive Fomo. So, I plod through the waiting room, crunching the integers on my talent tree, scrolling through guild recruitment notices posted to the subreddit. I can’t believe it. It’s like I’m in high school again.

I still don’t know if I’m actually enjoying New World or if I simply relish the chance to indulge in many of my most repressed gaming instincts. Your character washes up on the shores of a fabled island called Aeternum, which is swaddled in a remarkably generic tropical-colonial aesthetic, and weighed down by paper-thin lore. (There’s a lot of talk about some sort of centrifugal malignant force called, sigh, the Corruption.) I brandished a battered shield and a water-damaged sword, while a band of survivors ushered me to the first questing hub.

From there, New World revealed its staid fundamentals. A shipwreck nearby is home to a roving pod of ghostly sailors, and someone at base camp wants me to cull the herd. I slice through a dozen and return to the quest-giver, who dispenses a slightly better weapon into my hands and reveals next step in the quest chain: there’s a different shipwreck elsewhere on the beach, and now I must dispatch some slightly beefier enemies in pursuit of another marginal armament.

We’ve all been executing this same loop since EverQuest, and New World isn’t eager to shake up the formula. Instead, the game buttresses its conservative MMO trappings with some other elements ripped directly from the Steam charts. Aeternum hosts a whole ecology of trees to chop, plants to harvest and stone to pick. The fruits of …….

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/oct/29/new-world-review-amazon-video-games