Amazon’s long-awaited new world was released on steam on Tuesday morning, and today’s news should have let Amazon executives breathe a sigh of relief, but the early buzz around the game is still very stable.
Even if there is a server queue, new world is the most played new game by steam in 2021. The former competitor, Swedish Pirate simulator valheim, peaked in February with more than 500000 simultaneous contestants. At the time of writing, steamdb locked the peak of the new world at 707230.
It is reported that this is enough to make “new world” the fifth concurrent player on steam, after player unknown’s battlefield, counterattack: global attack, dota 2 and cyberpunk 2077 last winter.
At the time of writing, the number of viewers of “new world” on Amazon’s twitch network also fluctuated between 798000 and 850000. Ribbons such as “shroud” and “fextralife” were played for thousands of viewers. Several well-known streaming media companies cooperate with Amazon to carry out gift promotion activities, so this is not entirely organic, but it is still an impressive number.
New world is only the third original video game launched by Amazon game studio. Despite years of efforts and failure, its launch is widely regarded as a critical moment for Amazon’s ambition as a mainstream game developer.
In new world, players play the role of survivors of the mysterious etnam island. This history is roughly based on the earth in the 17th century. In etnam, magic has been out of control for centuries. Over time, it has created miracles and monsters. Players must unite into three factions: marauders, syndicates and covenant to protect them from the hostile natives of etnam and each other.
This is a strange choice for Amazon, because new world is a large multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which is currently dominated by world of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. However, unlike these two games, new world has a real-time combat system and does not have any type of character class.
On the contrary, when you upgrade, your character will get core attribute points. You can disperse the core attribute points into five main attributes, and you can collect, make and refine classes according to your needs. Similarly, if you fight with any weapon in the game, you will gradually gain the experience value of mastering that specific weapon. This is an open method, reminiscent of an elderly scroll game.
Generally speaking, MMORPG is one of the most difficult games to be fairly reviewed. They are deliberately built because they will last a long time. Once you reach their end, many of them will change greatly. The new world has an upper limit of level 60, which few people can reach before this weekend. Amazon itself also suggests that critics spend at least 40 hours in-depth understanding of the new world before trying to write the new world, which seems completely fair.
Therefore, there are not many actual comments on the game. There are some critical previews, such as pcmag, but at the time of writing, the meta critical page of new world is a big fat “to be continued”. A proper critical assessment (such as our own) will have to wait for some time.
New world is currently experiencing a typical first day problem that any online game will encounter, such as server queuing, which makes it “comment explosion” on steam. Many people now want to play the new world, but they can’t. They are looking for their own way to express this frustration.
Amazon, the birthplace of Amazon online services, has a queuing problem in new world, which is a little strange, but it is also a typical problem that any online game will encounter when it is released. Most studios will choose to queue in the first week of the game rather than expand the server capacity, because it is generally cheaper for developers. People think it’s safer to assume that your population will decline and stabilize than to assume that all the audience on your first day will stay during this time.
I also want to know how popular new world was in its early days because Amazon chose a very reliable release window, which was entirely accidental. World of Warcraft, the defending champion of American MMORPG, has been quietly losing players and behind the scenes talents for most of the past year.
This is due to the lack of updating of its current expansion and a series of disclosures of the workplace culture of the developer Activision Blizzard, which eventually led to the lawsuit against Activision Blizzard in California in July. Although it is too early to say that world of Warcraft is in danger of closing down – it is reported that world of Warcraft has halved the number of players in the past four years, which still brings its monthly active users to 26 million – many dedicated and well-known Warcraft fans have recently found some excuses to view other games.
“Final Fantasy XIV” has inherited most players, but if the ending of “new world” can interest people, it may be the time to pose a real threat to world of Warcraft.