One year later, New World’s never-ending MMO grind is just fine

digitaltrends.com:

It hardly feels like much time has passed between now and last October when I dropped over 170 hours of my life into a new pirate-themed MMORPG with a suspiciously colonial-inspired backdrop. When it was still relatively new (pun intended), Amazon Games Studios’ New World promised to be a whole bunch of things that a “modern” MMORPG like Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft usually isn’t. It combined gameplay loops often seen in survival sandboxes — for example, foraging herbs and crafting your own potions — with a perpetual PVP battleground that determined the quality of life for all players on a server. It also promised many “old school” sensibilities like minimal fast travel and punishing combat where simple trips across the map were both expensive and treacherous.

Granted, New World really struggled to make any of these individual systems work well, and very little of the game was that much fun to play. Its combat system was thoroughly limited and repetitive, with very little changing between levels one through 60. What made the experience enjoyable was also often what made it feel so disjointed — namely, the player-vs.-player contest for the map, which influenced elements as basic as how much it would cost to repair gear after a battle. Some people really love that sort of bare-bones, down-to-the-wire experience, but frankly, I couldn’t get past how unintuitive it felt. I walked away from New World feeling like it was mostly just OK — a decent experiment with some pretty cool ideas that ultimately succumbed to its own emphasis on grind.

When it was first released in late September 2021, New World peaked at about 913,027 consecutive players before steadily dropping to a consistent range between 20,000 and 40,000