New World: Aeternum News

New World's Steam reviews are now 'mostly positive'

Now that the dust is settling on Amazon Games' New World, people's true feelings about the new PC game are coming to the fore. One more measurable metric of that sentiment is that New World's Steam reviews have now shifted from 'Mixed' to 'Mostly Positive'.

Some more recent reviews praise the PvP and the Runescape-like nature of the crafting and gathering gameplay loop. Some of them even compare New World as it is now to what World of Warcraft felt like in the early days. "This is the most immersive MMO I've played in years," one reviewer says. "Very Classic WoW vibe with OSRS skills. Level 29 as of 71 hours. Lots of drama in chat because the game is somewhat competitive, but PvP can be really fun. Really cool map and sound design. Some graphical/audio bugs every now and then. For the vanilla version of Amazon's flagship MMO, this is a good game. But it could be much better in time."

New World isn't entirely out of the woods yet, though. Some of the more negative reviews focus on what some players feel is a lack of story, a world lacking in excitement and soul, and a tedious levelling experience. "New World has some interesting ideas but overall feels shallow and soulless (yet somehow I'm still playing)", one reviewer concludes.

Read the rest of the story...

Steam Global Top Sellers for the Week ending 10 October 2021

View more information and data on SteamDB

New World's server transfers won't let you change regions after all

The long-promised New World server transfers will finally be available this week, but unfortunately it seems that one feature will be absent - the ability to do a transfer between regions, despite developer Amazon Game Studios previously suggesting that this would be possible.

The promised free server transfers were supposed to arrive last week but - as reported earlier today - Amazon delayed them to next week to fix some issues with the transfer option "before we feel comfortable giving everyone their free server transfer token".

Since then the team has posted a few answers to numerous user questions on the New World forums. The most notable is the fact that the ability to change region during the upcoming server transfers is not going to be possible - players can't change from an EU server to a US one, for example, or even between the East and West US coasts. This is apparently because "each region is a separate database", so it's not possible to move a character to a different one.

Read the rest of the story...

New World server transfers should arrive next week, but you'll only get one for free

Amazon's MMO New World is by all measure a tremendous success, but the cost of that for players is that the game's servers have been overwhelmed. Now the full details of Amazon's promised free server transfer have been revealed - but the bad news is that it's been delayed again.

While Amazon has been continually adding new servers to ease the lag and queue times reported when the game launched, only newer players or characters can really take advantage of them. Amazon promised that it would offer free server transfers for everyone, so initial players could move their characters and progress over to a new server without issue.

Those server transfers were supposed to arrive last week, but Amazon has delayed them to next week instead. "During our testing, we uncovered some edge cases where the transfer experience does not meet our standards for its release," community manager TrevzorFTW says in a new blog post. "This means that we will be taking some extra time to get these issues resolved before we feel comfortable giving everyone their free server transfer token."

Read the rest of the story...

New World review - a shiny new player in the MMO game

You know an MMO's starting to click with you when you're logging on during lunch breaks. There's a moreish interplay between New World's gathering and crafting that's got its hooks in me. But for everything that Amazon Games has got right in its new MMO, there are plenty more features that feel undercooked and ill-considered, putting a significant dampener on the experience.

Does it scratch that itch you've got in the back of your brain for a new MMO? Definitely. Will you be gasping in awe, wondering how Amazon Games has managed to reinvigorate the genre? Probably not.

As soon as you get your first sword and shield in the tutorial zone, you'll notice that New World's combat differs significantly from most other MMOs. Rather than leaning on auto-attacks and cooldown-based abilities, New World employs an action-combat system that's closer to Elder Scrolls Online's bastardised take on Skyrim's combat. The result is that swordplay feels so much more satisfying, and I'm no longer mindlessly clicking between mobs until the XP bar ticks over. It's certainly not the first MMO to give the player a more active role in combat, but melee brawls feel tight and responsive.

Read the rest of the story...