After the failure that was Crucible, I had low expectations for anything from Amazon Game Studios. Luckily, the second release from them seems to be successful. New World is an MMORPG from Amazon, and while that combination of words may sound like the worst sentence ever to have been written, the truth is something unexpected. It’s a good MMO, even if you don’t want to take my word for it. New World has been one of the top games on Twitch since its launch.

It is no fluke that the game is one of the most popular on Twitch either. The graphics look great when compared to other MMOs and the combat is a breath of fresh air. Of course, one of the major flaws that I have experienced so far while playing New World is the amount of grinding.

The main gameplay for New World is leveling skills and weapons. There are no set classes in the game so you can level any skills or weapons you want. The experience needed to level is not insanely large for skills, but getting the ability to collect new resources requires 25 levels in a skill. This means that while leveling woodcutting, you are going to be chopping the same young trees over and over again until you hit level 50 in the skill.

Weapons on the other hand do have large experience requirements for each level. The experience needed scales with weapon level, so you need 50 at level one and over 1000 at level six. The experience granted per kill also scales with the level of enemy you kill. This leaves you with a choice when leveling weapons. You can either spend hours killing low-level enemies and get small amounts of experience or you can spend hours fighting higher-level enemies to get decent amounts of experience. Either way the grind to level weapons is time-consuming.

This skill grind is made slightly better because of the randomly generated town quests. Every settlement in the game provides at least 3 quests that are very generalized, like killing three wolves or handing over 150 iron bars. By gathering the materials needed for the quests, you will also be leveling up your skills and weapons. This allows for passive leveling of skills while you increase your character level.

A slight issue with these quests is they can sometimes request a resource that you can’t harvest. This means you will either spend even more time completing the quest or you must wait for the quest to change out with another one. Either way, you are going to waste time by grinding the skill for way longer than you need to or waiting around.

The environment of New World is one of the more beautiful I have seen in MMOs. The only game world that I have seen look as nice as New World is Guild Wars 2. Another interesting note on the world is that almost everything in it is interactable. Every single body of water can be fished in, almost every tree can be cut down, many boulders can be mined, and every bush and plant can be picked.

On top of the interactable world, many of the world locations have stories to tell. Most locations have notes that can be gathered in your journal to complete short stories about the world. The short stories, of course, tie into the main story of New World and help to provide more background information for the players that want to learn about it, rather than just shoving it into mandatory dialog or cutscenes.

The actual story of New World is an interesting one. You play as a settler coming to the island of Aternum in search of a substance called Azoth. This substance is suspected to be linked to eternal life and you seek to claim it. Of course, you are not the first group to have made this journey, many have come before and have fallen into the clutches of the Corruption. The Corruption wants to consume the whole island and anyone that is going to try to stop it.

In order to progress on your journey to claim Aternum, you will need to side with one of three factions: the battle-loving Marauders, the scientific Syndicate, or the faithful Covenant. Joining one of these factions will provide you access to a faction-wide chat, a faction mission that will either be PvE or PvP related, and a faction store that sells gear specific to your faction. Once you join a faction, you are not locked to it. The first faction change you make is immediate. After that, you may change your faction once every 120 days.

Player-made guilds within a faction may fight to take over territories in the world. When a territory is owned by a guild, that guild is named Governor of the town inside that territory. By being Governor of the settlement, the guild will need to pay upkeep but will also be able to set the tax rate and collect the taxes generated by the settlement. The taxes in the settlement that is changed to players are a housing tax, a trading tax, a crafting tax, and a refining tax.

The guild that owns a settlement can also choose to spend money on upgrading the crafting stations inside a settlement, as well as providing buffs to any player inside the territory. This system leads to different factions fighting for control over territory in all-out wars, which the game facilitates.

New World is shaping up to be a fun and interesting new MMO, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. The game currently has no subscription service which leads me to believe that paid expansions are in the game’s future, should Amazon continue to support it. I only hope that the game lasts long enough for new content to be made, and currently it seems like it will.

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New World

$39.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Engaging Combat
• Beautiful World
• Enthralling Story
• No Class Lock

Cons

• Grinding can be Very Tedious and Slow
• Earning Money is Difficult
• Boring if Played Solo
• Long Travel Times to get Anywhere