New World was full of bugs at launch and still is now. Players continuously demand a “New World: A Realm Reborn” – inspired by the restart that Final Fantasy XIV underwent. MeinMMO editor Alexander Leitsch finds this absurd. Because New World isn’t that broken, and a new version wouldn’t change much.
What are the problems with New World? The list of problems in Amazon’s new MMO is quite long:
- There were server issues and queues at launch. Now there are the first ghost servers, leading to calls for mergers.
- There have been numerous gold dupes.
- There were bugs that blocked progress in the main quest.
- There were glitches that made players invulnerable.
- There are still many balance issues with the classes.
- Some mobs are also poorly balanced.
- There were long-standing issues with specific game modes.
- Players can still intentionally trigger lag spikes.
- New World is full of gold sellers and bots.
Moreover, with almost every update, new bugs sneak in, like recently when the developers wanted to give players a little gold as compensation. However, some players accidentally received up to 300,000 taler, emptied the trading post, and caused a server rollback.
How do players react? Especially due to the bots and gold dupes, some players are calling for a complete server reset. This would erase all progress, and everyone would start over at 0, hopefully without bugs.
Others wish that New World would be completely shut down and relaunched later with a major rework. MeinMMO reader AlexMK recently called for a “New World: A Realm Reborn”. You also see this phrase come up from time to time on Reddit.
But in my opinion, this demand is total nonsense. On the one hand, New World is not broken enough for a complete rework, and on the other hand, not much would change in a re-release.
New World is not even close to being as broken as FFXIV
Is New World really that broken? New World launched with many bugs, but it has a functioning gameplay loop. You can level up, you can farm gear, and you can engage for hundreds of hours.
Even after over 200 hours, I still have enough ahead of me, and even streamers like shroud are still impressed by the game.
That was quite different with Final Fantasy XIV in version 1.0. Although I didn’t play it myself, a good friend and my colleague Irina Moritz have often reported about it.
And Final Fantasy 1.0 was missing almost everything, as these examples show:
- There was no quest log in the game.
- The maps were almost identically designed and also looked similar in the assets.
- There were no dungeons or raids – or generally any endgame.
- Quests outside of the main story were omitted.
- Enemies dropped no gear or generally valuable loot.
- There was no option to customize key bindings.
- Jumping was not possible, and you also couldn’t fall from ledges.
- The hotbars were reset when you switched jobs.
- There were no official forums or community managers.
- There were no shortcuts for important menu windows, such as gear, inventory, etc.
- Each interaction was registered server-side first and thus was delayed by several seconds.
- There was criticism of the old engine, which had massive FPS drops and graphical issues.
Additionally, there were several design decisions that many considered critical.
The fatigue system, for instance, meant you received less experience points the longer you played. After 8 hours within a week, XP was reduced. Anyone online for more than 15 hours received no experience at all. The timer was reset weekly.
Furthermore, you could only complete all 8 quests every 36 hours. After that, there were no more releases, and leveling consisted of grinding mobs.
You can read about all the problems of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 in this column by Irina Moritz:
No, your games that launch poorly do not need a reboot like Final Fantasy XIV.
As big as the criticism of New World is, many of these drastic problems have been avoided by the developers. While endgame content is lacking, it can also be patched later without taking the servers offline for long periods.
A rework wouldn’t change much and would only anger players now
Why is the demand for a rework nonsense? New World has a very distinct style that doesn’t appeal to everyone but makes the game special. Yet this style wouldn’t change much in a rework.
The focus would still be on exploring the world, crafting, and the wars for territories. The MMO would not suddenly become a story game like SWTOR, the combat system would not suddenly adjust to tab targeting like in WoW, and the world would not suddenly become colorful like in GW2.
Because everything that would change in New World has already been changed by the developers:
- They created a main quest
- They introduced voice acting
- They brought dungeons into the game
- They made PvP in the open world optional and simultaneously created new incentives for it
These were the major changes intended to make New World accessible to the masses.
Everything that would adjust the MMO during downtime or a restart would involve fixing bugs, adjustments to the distribution of talers, and more of all the content we already have. More dungeons, more quests, more weapons, more PvP modes, more areas.
But these are all things I would consider “hotfixes” or “content patches” and not a “rework”. None of these contents would require the servers to be offline for months or years.
And a restart due to the economy is akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. No one is currently completely left behind in the economy, and Amazon has at least been able to isolate and remove most of the gold. In return, the frustration among current players would be enormous.
How many players does New World have? Now, 2 months after release, there were still 177,572 peak players online (Sunday, November 28).
This made the MMO rank 4 in the charts on Steam. The game still has a community, and it would be destroyed if Amazon really brought a “A Realm Reborn”.
What do you think of New World right now? What do you miss most about the game?
How the developers envision the endgame of New World in the future has been explained here:
