New World has set a high concurrent player count in the process with a peak of over 900,000. Unfortunately, the game is not moving as smoothly as expected. A lot of bugs have been recorded since the launch of the game and the player count has been reduced to 100,000. AGS tried to fix the issues with patch updates which resulted in several more bugs and exploits to the game, which then moved to rapidly shutting down servers for maintenance in worse case emergency resolutions like disabling trading posts or rolling back servers which took long hours to fix the issue.
As a result, the game statistics of the player base since the launch were down badly. Things have been more stable as of now for the game, currently, more than 100,000 players are playing it on steam, it’s not as bad as it was, the player count is nowhere near what they were at launch, but still respectable.
In the recent interview with New World Game Director – Scot Lane said that the live games are their “Top priority” and if something goes wrong which is impacting the player – “It will come to our full attention” But this doesn’t impact the development of new content for the game he explained, because they are separate jobs he added.
“We’re still able to work on future content because the work is very specialized”, he said. “For example, the recent issue we faced with in-game where game coin required engineers who understand that part of the code, while void gauntlet update was handled by a different team of gameplay engineers, designers, and artists.”
The priority for the game is to ensure that New World gives the “Best-experience” rather than pushing out new content, so Amazon has increased testing resources and launched a Public Test Realm (PTR). He said, “We have made some mistakes by moving too fast, and we’re still finding the balance of speed and quality.” Lane said, “Our goal is to give every player a great experience, and as a team, we get better every day at patching and testing.”
Developers of New World actually working hard on fixing a lot of issues and trying to improve the game every day. New early and mid-game content for solo players is also a work in progress as of now. There might be expanding the size of the game world, launching fresh servers, and allowing players to create more than one account per server, small things are being made too such as recent changes where players were able to run faster on roads.
Lane said they are working on ways to help connect players who are looking for expeditions, dungeons and adding more quests and crafting markers. There’s also map improvement coming and much more.
According to lane, Even though the percentage of cheaters is small, they can have a huge impact on player perception. New World developers are doing plenty of things like adding expeditions, adding new antagonists like Varangian Knights, lots of new quests, more events in the world. So, players, who have reached the level cap might be a really good experience for them. He also said that there are a lot of areas of PVP and PVE which will be worked on to be well balanced for the players. Scot said, “We were so focused on fixing issues that we don’t do a good enough job communicating with players we know that we have had issues and I want everyone to know that the team is working around to clock to fix them as soon as possible.
New World developers are planning to let the players access their inventory while running. The majority of players are not interesting in using exploits – they just want to play and enjoy the game.
New World developer rolled out a new seasonal event in PTR called ‘Winder Convergence.’ It is expected to go live soon after they have already delayed their update as of now we do not have an ETA on the update.
Hopefully, after things go stable for the game, playerbase might increase with new content as well as a lot of fixes for the issues soon. The only things matters in a game is having fun, if the game has game-breaking bugs unfortunately player base will decline. Aeternum may change as New World establishes itself as one of the top MMOs of all time.
