NOTE: New World: Aeternum is a brand new re-launch for PCs and a new launch for consoles. There are many improvements across the board but while some things have improved, a lot of the game is the same so we stand by our original review and score. Either way, if you haven’t tried the game at all, we definitely recommend diving in.
Story and Gameplay
The scope, story, lands, crafting options, and gameplay mechanics of Amazon Game Studios’ New World are absolutely immense. Oh, the places you’ll go! The adventures you’ll have. The people you’ll meet. Even though the MMO market is chock full of options, it’s not every day that you see something this massive launch and witness the birth of a whole new MMO world. It’s just epic in scope and there is just no other way to describe it so, instead of typing an equally immense novel about the gameplay and story, I’ll try to hit the highlights.
First off, after an absolutely stunning intro, you find yourself on Aeternum Island to begin your adventure and a tutorial of sorts. Right off the bat, you’ll notice there are no defined classes or restrictions in that regard. It’s absolutely liberating to use any weapon type, armor type, and fighting style along with crafting options on the same character. Yes, FFXIV has done it before but it’s even more of a polished experience in New World. Within the first hour of the game, you begin to see the incredible highs and a few of the shortcomings as well. Combat, in general, feels stellar, and being able to blast enemies with a fire staff and then finish them off with a rapier up close is quite the rush, especially with gear that you craft from gathering a plethora of goodies that surround you on the island.
Exploration is a huge part of New World and like most of the game, it’s filled with peaks and valleys both literal and figurative. While parts of the map are split out by a large level range, you might run into a level 5 monster and then a few steps down the road, a level 24 monster. That wouldn't be so bad except the aggro range is huge and monsters are absolutely brutal in this game. It makes the encounters much more visceral and exciting but also deadly and can make exploring a pain.
Lastly, back to crafting, New World has the best crafting system in any game, period, end of story. There are so many cool things to do between cooking, stonecutting, mining, and the many other crafting activities in the game, it’s almost like a full game inside a game. It is truly stellar and probably the best part of the game.
So, whether you are in PVE, PVP, exploration, crafting, or playing the extremely competitive trading market, this is just scratching the surface of a huge game with a myriad of overall well-designed systems. Speaking of PVP though, I just couldn’t get into the faction-based wars and even though you can toggle PVP off and on with a switch, I was too engaged and busy with the PVE portion of the game but for those of you who crave PVP content, it’s there in spades.
Yes. You get to gather The Devil’s Lettuce.. to make it into clothing fibers!
Visuals and Audio
To say that New World is a beautiful game would be a massive disservice to the many artists, engineers, and other humans who have brought such a huge island truly to life. A full day and night cycle highlights an impressively detailed world of mountains, oceans, streams, caves, creatures, and towns that just burst with detail. Effects around water and creatures are particularly amazing. That being said and for some reason though, a lot of the running, jumping, and movement animations are just odd. They are a bit janky and for a game that relies so much on real-time combat, I constantly found the animations to be a pain. Hopefully the devs can work on a patch for those issues.
The audio matches the visuals as overall very high quality. The soundtrack utilizes instruments from around our world and history for a variety that is impressive and great to listen to. Almost all quests are fully voice acted and while the quality there varies, most of it is good stuff. Finally, the sound effects in general are fantastic with weapons having plenty of power and combat sounds visceral.
Oh look, a fast travel stone! Good luck affording to use that in the early hours of the game as resources can be tough to gather.
Replayability
So, this section will be extremely brief. It’s an MMO. There are a billion things to do and see. You could play this for hundreds if not thousands of hours. Also, since there is no subscription fee, it opens that door even wider as there is no rush to level or hit end game content anytime. That makes such a big difference just enjoying the world along with everyone else.
What It Could Do Better
While there is plenty of awesome things about New World, there are also several items that could use some improvement. Apart from the mentioned animations that are lacking, this game is an absolute beast to run with settings maxed out. With 32gb of RAM, a 3080Ti, and a 16 core processor, it was taxing our system during most of the game. That is just insane as currently, it’s one of the most GPU AND CPU intensive games I’ve seen yet. Luckily, we have a few tips and tweaks to help alleviate some of the pain and help get the most from your experience.
Another issue is even though the world is huge, there is quite a bit of copy and pasting in the aforementioned enemies that are just a slight color variation of previously mentioned, easy to provoke enemies. Also, with a very costly fast travel system, sometimes getting from point A to B is a total slog. Lastly, there are quite a few faction and PVP-related details that are not explained at all in the game and while discovery is fun to a certain extent, being totally lost is not.
Did I mention the crafting system yet? Oh several times? Yeah, well, it’s that good.
Conclusion
In the end, there is so much going for New World. Even though it’s had a rocky path to launch, for the most part, those delays paid off. Things such as the crafting system being the absolute best, the world so detailed and massive, having no subscription fee is just perfect for this type of game, and so many other things I could mention for a brand new MMO. That being said, there is definite room for improvement and a little more polish, especially on animations, could go a long way. Overall, if you are looking for a massive game to sink your teeth into, New World should satisfy you for a long time to come. If you dive in fully, just say goodbye to your free time…
