When Amazon Game Studios' New World was first announced and then tested by players through its beta cycles, it showed a lot of promising content that, with just about the right tweaks and changes, could lead the MMO to be a huge hit. There was a lot of hype and there were many expectations placed on New World before it was released, and many players were eager to finally get into it. The launch was an enormous success, with a total of over 700,000 concurrent Steam players active on day one, and then reaching its all-time peak of 913,027 players just a few days after that.
As it does happen with major releases and meeting deadlines, several players still believe to this day that New World was not in the right state to launch when it did. There were many issues with its design that became apparent the more fans played the game, and then there were game-breaking glitches like one that allowed anyone to duplicate Gold and materials, to which Amazon took action a few times by disabling trading posts and all forms of wealth transfer.
New World's November patch was released two days ago, and it was supposed to improve the game in many of its weak areas to make it what players expected it to be at launch. This was achieved through differentiating quests and enemy types more than ever, rebalancing the state of New World's weapons through major and minor adjustments, and then the introduction of a new weapon archetype in the form of the Void Gauntlet. However, the new update brought an unforeseen set of nerfs to loot and chests in the endgame, making many drops trivial.
These changes made many players upset, but they also thinned the trust the New World community had towards Amazon Game Studios, to begin with. As a result, several players changed their reviews on Steam to negative, and others reviewed the game for the first time to show their dissent with the game's current state and direction. Thus, recent Steam reviews for New World are sitting at a 65% rate of approval, which in turn means the game has an average Mixed score.
This is happening just a few days after New World players praised Amazon for its communication with the community, which makes the whole ordeal all the more infuriating to some. Still, there is a chance New World will get a deserved respite, especially if the current issues are acknowledged and tackled quickly.
New World is available now on PC.