Despite still being in the top 10 of Steam's most played games on a daily basis, New World's record of concurrent players is a far memory of one of the best launches games have had this entire year. With over 700,000 players on launch day and an all-time peak of 913,027 players on Steam, New World was looking like the most promising MMO to come in quite some time, especially seeing how Amazon Game Studios was quick to solve server problems. After the first couple of weeks, however, New World players started to notice an abundance of issues, either tied to design choices on Amazon's part or glitches.
The state of New World post-launch was not great a little over a month after its initial release, but now it is arguably worse due to ongoing issues with no ETA regarding solutions and lack of communication from the developer. Around two weeks ago, Amazon released the Into the Void patch for New World, which was seemingly going to bring a lot of general improvements to the game. Ultimately, it failed to do so because of a slew of secret changes included with it.
The general sentiment among New World players after the November patch was that Amazon decided to secretly change core mechanics and apply a lot of nerfs to make the grind take longer in order to possibly retain players for longer, too. A Reddit user by the name of Shuckle-Man shared a post that highlights Amazon's reasons behind the nerfs to elemental creatures' drops of Motes, a valuable resource that New World players enjoyed getting from enemies rather than plants or stones due to the fighting bit.
Motes Removed From Elemental Creatures Is a True Display of the Total Incompetence of AGS from newworldgame
Players are mad at Amazon for prioritizing changes to things that aren't truly harmful to the game over long-lamented issues such as New World's crafting system, or even the closure of trading posts across all European servers. Some elemental creatures did award a huge amount of Motes compared to the original sources of plants and stones, but removing them entirely (alongside Wyrdwood from wolves) is a bad change.
New World solo players had also been punished in the big November update, but no further change was made to improve their experience. As a whole, things are looking a bit on the bleak side for Amazon's MMO, but the developer can still somewhat land on its feet by making better changes in the near future.
New World is available now on PC.