Amazon Games Wanted New World To Be New MMO Experience

After months of being constantly delayed, New World was finally released at the end of September. Barely a few hours into release, the game received up to a million concurrent players across Steam. Even now, the game continues to receive almost 300,000 concurrent players every day. Whatever Amazon Games Studios did with its MMORPG, it certainly worked well for the company.

At its core, New World is like any other MMORPG — it shares most of its features with other games of the same genre. However, at the same time, the game is also distinguished in its own way; be that the gameplay or the narrative; and it seems like that’s exactly what the developers wanted. During a conversation at the recently hosted Develop: Brighton 2021 event, United Kingdom’s biggest conference for game developers, Katy Kaszynski, the Senior Producer at Amazon Games Studios, revealed that New World was never meant to be like other MMORPGs.

In response to a question asking the developers about how they chose to balance the game’s new and distinct mechanics with the already established knowledge of MMORPG players Katy Kaszynski said, “It’s a hard genre to break into, and we didn’t want to be like everybody else.” She further explained, “And it’s not like we’re railing against mounts in the game.”

“What we want is it to be an immersive experience, and we felt like the spirit shrines, for instance – those fit the lore better than mounts did,” she explained while saying that the company is “trying to create a new game.” Furthermore, Katy Kaszynski told that the developers are focused on creating an immersive experience for players. “We have lore that says the beasts of Aeternum can’t be tamed but, besides that, it’s all about the immersion that we want them to have, and then they get agency to do whatever they want to do within that,” she said.

Additionally, Katy Kaszynski said that the company is actively listening to the community and are aware of the things that players want in the game but that’ll take time. “So, we hear them. We know that mounts are something that people really want. And it’s not just mounts – there are other things that people really are interested in having – and they’re not off the table,” she said. “Nothing is off the table in an MMO. It’s just not going to be soon.”

Katy Kaszynski then used PvP as an example of being aware of what players want in the game and deciding whether that’d be suitable or not, and then coming up with something that would be, saying, “We didn’t want to go full-loot PvP again.” Full-loot free-for-all PvP was a feature during the development stages of the game but was removed after to make fights in PvP more controlled.

It’s obvious that New World is taking a different approach with the MMORPG genre and Amazon Games Studios is making it work. However, the company still hasn’t told players about what it plans to do with the game in the future and that’s a concern for many. It still has many issues that need to be resolved but, as Katy Kaszynski said, that’ll take time.

What do you think about this? Do tell us your opinions in the comments below!

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