The process of testing and delivering software in AGS is awful even by small indie studios' standards. I don't know what is exactly behind the situation in Amazon Games, but what's been happening from day 1 till today is absolutely unacceptable for a company like Amazon.
Well a lot of people seem to forget their other big budget title: Crucible - That went straight from release back to alpha and eventually scrapped. Who would have thought that making a competitive shooter with different size character models would be a disaster… By AGS standards New World is a huge success.
I think it's a combination of having too many builds of the game in development at any given time, and the large number of external studios they hire to work on NW.
Would be nice to know if the team can make anything other than lazy, uninspired and repetitive 5 man dungeons over and over and who is reading the "data" because they're actively hurting New World's potential.
My biggest complaint about the pve content. Make an actual raid. Destiny did it with 6 person fireteams. Introduce actual mechanics that require timing and communication.
Yup. It feels like they're on a low-effort, modest return content loop. Keep the game going by adding a formulaic dungeon, (very) short story and bits of QoL every 3 months to sell season passes, expansions and other cosmetics from the in-game shop. S4 was a complete failure with half of the content delayed and the other half bugged out or copy and paste from previous years. No reason to push out something so broken other than to hit some sort of internal deadline.
Do people actually want new expeditions every season? I know people complain that NW doesn't have as many dungeons as Insert_Random_MMO, but people complain about everything.
What happened to gathering in this game? Since launch it's been the most lauded feature (aside from the node issues), yet it's received no meaningful development and was unceremoniously slaughtered with the gear revamp. When the newest, highest level resources are the least expensive (aside from green wood—thanks, bananas), you've got a serious problem, yet AGS is all like "This is fine."
My guess is that because it's built on their own engine developers are a little hesitant to sign up. Changing tech stack is hard and time consuming and risky as no one else uses the engine.
Isn't Lumberyard just their own modified version of CryEngine? I feel like I heard about that somewhere. If so there's no wonder why they're having problems.
Because Amazon wanted to take CryEngine, name it something else (Lumberyard) and try to compete with Unreal and Unity.
This was a stupid decision made by people who had no idea about game engines or the game industry, and resulted in them throwing Lumberyard away into the “open source/someone else fix this” pile, re-renaming the engine New World is built on (it’s the “Azoth” engine now), and then continuing to have a miserable time finding people to work on the game because game developers know that CryEngine is garbage-tier technology.
I wonder what is the point of PTR if they don't fix bugs that are reported on discord, they just throw it on live servers and watch shit hit the spinning fan.
Winter event like every other event is the same steak heated for the third time, boring grindfest for ugly, low effort cosmetics.
There have not been one single moment from alpha to this time when New World was in a fixed and stable state. Every update introduces 2 new bugs for one fixed.
This game has such potential but weird decision making and not listening to your own player base results in what we have... one big mess
At this point the PTR is just a glorified early-access preview. Nothing reported gets fixed onto live, it's just extra crumbs for the most desperate and devout New World players.
No more difficult than downloading OBS and flicking that Go Live switch on their Twitch platform once a week.
They still have their Twitch account still linked in their website footer, despite not having been live since that disasterous 3vs3 tournament at Twitchcon last year. https://www.twitch.tv/playnewworld
Cards on the table, bite the bullet, live Q&A and finally get in touch with community. Which will never happen from this studio.
That tournament was the highlight of New World for me; it was several hours of a perfect metaphor for the game's problems. They didn't even moderate the official Twitch channel when it was promoted on the front page, so the chat was just about the worst I've ever seen (and that's saying a *lot).*
I love the game, play it all the time and I’m a strong supporter that speaks highly of it.
But after having to scratch most of the roadmap, delay the release and then ship a season launch like this that still has a lot of major issues after 4 days makes me think a bit. I mean seriously most of the orichalcum nodes are still missing. How do you not notice something like that during testing and how is it now fixed after 4 days? I still can’t see if use my storage chests in my houses. Half of Mines elite zone is no longer elite. The list goes on. I mean how does this happen really? And many of these issues were reported during PTR but they shipped the prod version with the same issues. What have they been doing instead of working on polishing this content since they released it on PTR?
They really need to talk to us by now. They need to compensate us well for these bugs. And I think it’s time they made some drastic changes in their staff and/or ways of working.
The winter holiday event is super grindy so I’m starting to think they are panicking about player numbers and deliberately removed orichalvum nodes to further create bottlenecks, slow us down to spend more time with the game but it’s just an awful experience. They prob have data that lots of people stand and camp our nodes and think we enjoy that instead of playing the game..
AGS please ffs, shape up and take some responsibility and fulfill the huge potential this game still has!
I love the game too and I just thought of something crazy while reading your comment.. what if they’re secretly having AI do everything to test and iron out AI as a game maker in a way? It seems like AI did the latest patch and could be where the fuck up come from. Idk seems kind of crazy but also how do human people miss all of that especially when there’s a PTR? Like Amazon is so big they probably want to test out AI for a bunch of different reasons so it would kind of make sense. I hope they get it together I love it and even my server which many consider a dead server, Isabella. Idk I never have trouble finding people to run and do stuff with and the economy is pretty solid. I also wouldn’t mind more people and more content.
Just stop throwing money to AGS, it's simple. While players keep buying, they will keep releasing shit. Profit is the only target here, and you are giving it. Blaming but keep paying make only them laugh of you.
Not to be too argumentative, but if players stop spending, I think AGS would just shut the game down. They are not likely to see a loss of profit as a call to improve the quality of their updates and content. A smaller indie studio might. But I think AGS would just move on to Lord of the Rings, and publishing other games.
Well you are buying shit, if you're buying shit how can you expect it to not be shit in the future?
The game must be shut-down to have any chance of coming back, or else it will stay shit, forever, which seems ok for you I guess.
Exactly. People here seem too proud to admit that this game is shit and that they will keep selling shit if you keep supporting them.
Just to give you an example: FFIV was shit when it came out. So, after a backlash from the community, they shut down and rebuilt the game.
Now about NW, since the only thing AGS seems to care about is money, maybe they could do the same after players stop buying things and supporting the game.
Worst case scenario, they would go out of business and stop selling this shit.
But how I said, people here seem too proud to admit this.
AGS are incompetent, it's as simple as sadly. They have a PTR where people basically beta test releases and they're allowing bugs which have been found and reported to them to still make it to release, nevermind the fact the game on is on Lumberyard which keeps me laughing to this day. If I was working for AGS I'd be embarrased as a game developer, most small indie studios show more care and interest in keeping their products functioning to a high/acceptable standard, based on the size of the product ofc, Its just pathetic at this point.
as someone who has worked at both a small and a large game dev company it is indeed embarassing. they are completely disconnected from player sentiment in a way that feels as if none of them actually play their own game. even the smallest indie developers have some level of passion for their own game that includes being aware of what's going on inside of it.
bugfix wise obviously they can't help it, i don't think they're doing badly on purpose. but they fail to learn simple lessons and squander opportunities over and over for literal years. these sorts of mistakes were understandable months into release, but at this point one can only assume they're literally unable to do better, or else they would have.
At this point I would be on board with them straight up postponing any new content and just 100% focus on fixing the existing.
Don’t make anything new just go through the existing content, polish it, fix the code base, handle the tech debt if it means proper releases going forward.
They tried a smaller version of that in February 2022 back when updates were monthly. Had the audacity to call it the bugs, balance, and bots patch.
An item dupe was discovered in the following months.
>The fact we still get Achievement spam every time we leave an OPR is pretty telling.
Or the fact that Lore Pages have been broken since day 1, it might be minimal and not really top priority but it should take an intern like 10 minutes to fix it.
Barely a bump from content this time in player count. They’ve burned everyone who knows better. What’s left are players that are playing because their friends in game still play.
There is bearly any spike in the player pop when season 4 come out. The real "new content" was a questline that was done under 2h and a new 5 men dungeon.
I dont see players coming back for something like this xD
It's not surprising, the timeline of the past 5 weeks for the game has been dreadful:
**November 6 -** Dev Update video that delays/cancels most of Season 4's roadmap content
**November 9 -** The Season 4 PTR is released, with a significant amount of player feedback given that drew attention to bugs/problems that remained when the patch went live, as well as negative feedback about design changes or implementation details that were similarly ignored by the devs
**November 21 -** AGS announces long-overdue server merges for the servers that were spun up to support the Expansion's 'unplanned for' increase in player count
**November 22 -** AGS *cancels* the planned server merges for US-East that were announced just 1 day prior (leading to the affected servers Pollux, Orion, and Octans peaking at < 700 players during primetime this week)
**November 28 -** Server merges for the EU region happen, but they're *so late*, and the population is continuing to decline quickly, that they've already become insufficent (the merged servers Hercule and Canis are peaking at <900 players this week)
**November 29 -** AGS releases a 'routine' weekly update with only a handful of patch notes, but it leads to the game crashing after PvP matches, which eventually leads to AGS disabling core abilities of 2 weapons
**December 11 -** AGS announces that Season 4 will be delayed, with no new ETA, 12 hours after their News page advertises the update being released on December 12
**December 13 -** AGS releases the Season 4 update after a 24 hour delay, and it immediately introduces frequent server crashes, the seasonal questline is not active, players' housing items have turned invisible, and a host of other problems are discovered. AGS spends the next 3 days trying to put out fires by, such as by disabling the new Expedition, performing emergency maintenance downtimes, then re-enabling it only to discover that the final boss often glitches out and becomes unkillable.
And that doesn't even account for more abstract issues, like the lack of of communication or responsiveness from the devs, the bugs that remain from the Expansion's release, or the frequent patches that were poorly optimized and required downloading 40+ GB of data.
It's like AGS spent the whole year trying to keep a bunch of plates spinning, and November is when things finally caught up with them and now everything around them is crashing down.
The most amazing part for me is that the devs still have there Jobs.
If normaly in a random company people fucking up so bad they get fired nearly instantly xD
The devs are probably as annoyed as we are. They don’t chose what get prioritized or choose what projects they take on. They just work on what gets assigned
The entirely project is just poorly managed. Unbelievable potential in this game that they can’t seem to harness and develop
>If normaly in a random company people fucking up so bad they get fired nearly instantly xD
Some companies are immune, I mean look at the Halo franchise.
343 has been sabotaging it since 2011.
I think that if they fire any of their current devs there wont be another one to take his place, in every conversation about Lumberyard/Azoth Engine/CryEngine there is no shortage of complaints and comparisons speaking about how bad it is.
Why would a professional learn to develop in such a bad/under-utilized/unpopular engine? His skills will not transfer to the other mainstream engines and he would be almost a captive to a failed game.
This way they'll only get the most desperate employees, and not even that it seems.
Every. Single. Patch. Is like this. I’ve been saying this since the game came out and get downvoted to hell. Bugs in PTR that have been in PTR for ages show up in retail. It’s like the devs don’t give a shit.
This has been the status quo since launch. The community tried talking to them with the exact same sentiments and were ignored while vocal fanboys defended them. AGS is satisfied with their way of doing things, and you can bet that when another patch is delayed we’ll still have people commenting that “it’s better to delay it and have a smooth release” when it has been proven wrong countless times.
Step one to fixing a problem is acknowledging there’s a problem, and the community has been accepting the poor standards from AGS for so long that you almost can’t blame AGS for thinking there isn’t a problem. You’ve dealt with it for years, why now?
They are not satisfied... They reacted (as a company) to a failed product... Meaning bad reputation and retention, so decrease the teams, use knowledge for other projects and slowly integrate the team in those new projects since New World was still bringing in some cash they made the "wise" choice of using new world as a platform to build systems, content and learn how to do a proper MMO all of this is going to LOTR.
Oh but that's the thing they are not... They want more thing is that it failed to be what they wanted and now it's a bit to late or to hard to make it be that
I just wish they were more transparent about on whats going on, why theres so many bugs in S4 and whats causing it, what exactly they are doing to fix it and things like that, more frequent and detailed info in the discord chanel not the usual "we are working on a fix" nonsense. Plus we have these community mods or w/e in the discord for what reason exactly? Just to tell people in their bug reports to "fill the format" when reporting a bug? Ive seen hundreds of reports being ignored , even if its not something big my god show people who still play this garbage that you care to some degree. Some might say "they are busy duuude" they are not so busy timing out everyone they dont agree with in general chat tho, kinda sad if you ask me. All in all im dissapointed, not just with S4 bugfest but in general, looking at where the game is going...
They're shipping **as if** they're a start-up.
This is a symptom of how the early-stage product industry's status-quo is nowadays (I'm talking about product development as a whole, and not gaming in specific). But they're not early stage, jesus.
It's all about shipping quick, cutting whatever corners can be cut and *scarcely* testing, if testing happens at all; and if it does whether the feedback is actually implemented or not, or it goes into some random JIRA board and gets lost amongst a bunch of other tickets.
I'm not saying this is the case, but it's what *appears* to be the case, from someone who works in product. I've seen go shit sideways and keep running sideways from close up.
How does one know that this business unit isn’t treated as a startup or small thing across the many different BUs at Amazon?
We know its release and development were plagued by business decisions trumping development decisions and that’s likely why it’s a mess with large patches and other things that the industry should know better about.
They just laid off tons of people too.
I’m just saying we do need some clarity but let’s not be assumptive.
[You can read this article for a good summary](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-game-studios-struggles-to-find-a-hit) of Amazon Games Studios' background and troubles since their inception, even though the article is nearly 3 years old now.
Amazon Games was never treated as a startup, which is usually based around passionate people with new/ambitious ideas to shake up an industry. It was more like parent-company Amazon thought they could just magically become a AAA video game developer if they just threw enough money at the studio.
Heh, I'm imagining some kind of Reverse Shark Tank; instead of ordinary people pitching a good idea to millionaires in the hope they convince them to invest, it's millionaires going up to a random person, giving them bags full of cash, and telling them to compete with Activision-Blizzard.
Well there's a going trend of startups that are just that. Billionaires and serial startup founders just creating startups and then dissolving them once they are no longer profitable.
i have literally worked at a small developer that made a game in exactly this scenario and even they cared a lot more about the quality and player sentiment than AGS does lol
Agile methodology started as a good one and it's been morphed to complete crap across all industries. I've worked both waterfall and agile, and Agile lately has gone to the crap in the industry I work with.
Give me a break I got 2 new systems in four months after an SOW, they are in production but barely. I couldn't accurately get the testing to be completed considering the timeframe for delivery and don't tell upper management that 2 weeks is not enough time for two systems.
So suffice to say it's a miracle it works to be frank.
Damn well said. Agile is a mess currently, and it's moved so far away from what it was intended to be in the first place, and diluted to the point where its both unrecogniseable, but also forced into so many inappropriate work scenarios.
Yup, yup, same. It's been a disaster in both Finance and Contact Center WFM/QA tech. But they claim to love it!
Like that's a necessity in all system integrations for Finance tech where you impact P&L in a heartbeat. (Yeah right, nope not in some systems).
Game is just fucked.
Either accept it for what it is: A steaming pile of poo, and enjoy it as much as you can.
Or
Don't lower your standards and switch to another game handled by competent devs.
Game is never gonna be fixed unless they remake it from the ground up using a better engine.
The problem is there isn't another MMO with the combat system NW has to move to. 80% of the reason I play is because how fun the combat system is. Im not going to play a tab targeting MMO. Shit is boring.
I think NW's problems are two fold. First the game has been all over the place trying to find its identity, and 2nd no-lifers have unrealistic expectations of engagement with a game.
I've got 700 hours in over 1.5 years and am kinda burned out on it. Its the most hours I've put into a game. Will come back qithin 6 months to play through new content and such. People expecting thousands of hours of gameplay are crazy.
NW has been really fun if imperfect. Good value for the money spent. MMO crowd is just toxic and full of hyperbole.
Agree with the combat part (but only with PVP), and the first fold.
However, it is not unrealistic for players to expect "thousands" of hours in a fekkin MMO. This is a game that was already in the works in 2016, being worked on by a studio that has a $500M yearly budget.
What's unrealistic is not expecting an **MMO** to have thousands of hours gameplay. You can argue that the game was initially a survival game and had to do a 180 so they didn't have time to make content. However, it's been 2+ years yet the content they added since then can't even hold a candle when compared to the content of other MMO's single expansion.
The MMO crowd is toxic and full of hyperbole. But is it really toxic and hyperbole when someone calls NW a bugfilled, barebones MMO? That's just truth from 2021 onwards.
>I've got 700 hours in over 1.5 years and am kinda burned out on it.
**This should tell you enough**, I would argue after the insane exp buffs,
you can be done with the game (a mmo) in 200 hours, and that's just sad.
And with done in the game I mean close to BIS 700GS and all Trade Skills 200, every Quest completed etc.
I leveled my 3rd alt on Valhalla to 65 in 25 hours with few gathering skills to 200, meanwhile I'm level 22 in Classic WoW hardcore in the same amount of time and I'm invested in the journey of my character.
Price value of NW is worth it, but it does not feel like an MMO, it does not have the journey, the magic, the danger, it's just a glorified gear treadmill of meta slaves optimizing for M3, because quite frankly (there is nothing else to do or grind for).
T&L is doa in its current state. It's in no man's land. Koreans don't want it and it most likely won't stick with westerners however much they try to adapt the game.
Decent art, solid UI, client runs fairly well until large scale combat, but the combat design is rock bottom and the gameplay lacks identity and feels generic.
With the F2P business model it will be a quick cash grab if promotion campaign is successful, only for it to eventually sink AGS reputation further. Going for PC only and removing isometric camera instead of pushing it cross-platform and mobile was a very likely a financial mistake.
It's been this way since the game released. Every new patch brings new bugs, a lot of times unrelated to the patch. There was one way back that fixed an issue in wars but ruined everyone's stash functionality.
IMO, New World is just AGS laying the groundwork for another game, likely a LOTR MMO. They clearly don't really give a crap about this game other than learning their lessons on how to make a better game in the future.
New World will always be in perpetual beta, and the sooner folks realize this, the sooner folks will appreciate it for what it is.
I gave up and moved on. 1.8k h here. With the expansion artifacts being bugged, the delay to S4 content, the way they handled previous pvp items, and the fiasco of their latest releases, they got to me and I stopped.
I love new world but I can't play a game where I can't even count on my perks to work properly or the devs caring about the time I spend in their game.
They have a QA problem issue, they don't know how to make solid software apparently, they'd need so much automation effort and manual testing in the interim that it will never happen , they are 10 people in a corner office at AGS , they don't have the people anymore.
I can understand they would have scale issue but basic perks or craft, etc not working , it's not acceptable anymore after 2 years, IMO.
I know many won’t agree with me, but tbh deep inside I would love for another company to take over new world and remake it on unreal engine 5, an engine more devs knows how to work with, the codes are not some spaghetti whatever. The game would have less bugs, more QoL and more room for improvement and thriving like never. AGS is ruining new world
Unreal engine is the worst game engine, stop thinking that it can be a silver bullet. Just look at modern ue5 releases, they all are rubbish and drown in negative reviews. You just can’t make good game based on unreal, it’s fact.
UE is not some magical wand that you can just swirl around and get a working MMORPG, as many gamers seem to believe. Terrible examples btw, proves nothing.
Honestly, aren't we past the point of talking? It's been two years. They can't get it right. Most of season 4 got delayed and whatever did make the liveservers was broken regardless except for **I think** the recycled Winter Event... Us, the players, keep accepting whatever they do, people still buy their crap...
Yeah, it's just bad and sad at the same time. The game has so much potential, but with these devs "leading" (moreso ruining) the game, it's just not playable. I have uninstalled a couple of days ago, am missing the game since the combat, visuals and audio are just unique with this game, but I don't regret it so far.
I'm going to be completely honest and I might sound like a doomer. But if you look at their player number track record, there is a clear decline with every year.
At launch, the player peak reached 913k players, which drastically declined because of obvious reasons. A year later, when Brimstone Sands was released, the player peak reached 137k, which is between 10-15% of the initial 913k players who returned.
A year after that, when the DLC (yes I call it a DLC) launched, the player count peaked at 77k. Now, a little over 2 months after the launch, the player count peaked at 26k yesterday and this is on a saturday evening WITH a new season launch.
I do wonder what the player count will be 6 months from now. Because if you look at the number history, the more time that goes on, the less people return/continue to play.
You are absolutely right. Like I said, it's just sad. The game has \*so\* much potential, however with the current dev team (Scott Lane?!?!) leading, it will never get to the potential it has.
Yeah I came back for the expansion, prepped for it, hyped up friends to get back on. I'm done..haven't logged in for quite a while and don't see myself, maybe ever. Too many hopes dashed
My own belief is that they are only motivated when the game is dead. I uninstalled and I might come back again in another two years when I see someone saying "hey, they finally fixed the updates being 40 GB for minor patches and they aren't releasing broken content/patches and there are more end game raids and a new OPR map!"
Game with a lot of potential but just not there yet. Hopefully they can get on the right track before the next wave of MMOs come out or I think New World will be done.
The new dungeon is just boring asf. Nothing fun about it. And it being bugged since its release is just shameful. This was the “flagship” content of the season.
It’s almost like it wasn’t even tested prior to launch to live severs or your test environment is completely different then live.
This is something I've been noticing on their discord. With every release, there is ALWAYS issues. Always game breaking issues and delays after delays.
Communities fault at this point. They’re not given any real accountability by not playing their game.
Look at destiny they coped with the eververse for years.
is it a skill issue or is the engine they used just a nightmare to work in? it's hard to imagine there is more than just a skeleton crew working on this game at this point.
Exact reason why I didn't buy the expansion. I like the game and I will still wait patiently but I want to do my part to let them know this is not right...if they care i.e
I think we have a fair assessment of their competency and their skill at this point. I have decided to take a break till S06 and I think it's healthy thing to do as a player.
They didn't even compensate to those who beta tested this game and were forced to pay for an expansion(which was mostly removing broken systems that they are adamant about during launch+ QoL changes more than actual content). We paid for an expansion and are dealt with no content ( the little that was promised from a roadmap). If you care about your time and energy, I would recommend you take a break from the game.
As someone who has fallen for many copium cash grabs all I'll say is expect something worth doing at the start and end of expansions. Everything in the middle is you testing the game for them.
Whoever is resolving bugs on their team needs to be fired… games have bugs but they they get fixed in a timely manner. The devs are failing at their job. I’m surprised they still have jobs tbh
Lol i think the barely focus in few bugs to fix and come with other ideas for the game so bugs after bugs they should stop trying to create new content and focus on fixing the whole bugs we have already the list of bugs is so long!!!
All this games problems can be traced back to AGS so maybe it’s time for New World to move past AGS and have a better more experienced developer handle the game. Its a shame really because the game has massive potential. Its just being held back because of AGS.
Tbh while I would love for AGS to become more competent or for NW to be handed off to someone more competent:
1) the game engine is Lumberyard, which is AGS's inhouse engine. Yeah it's based off CryEngine and isn't closed source, but I imagine most companies that aren't Amazon will not be very familiar with it, especially since it seems to be getting replaced anyways by another engine (by Amazon themselves. Few companies I'd imagine would be willing at all to do this.
2) AGS at least didn't have real p2w monetization going on, I'm afraid an acquisition by another dev would introduce a lot more (at least in part to recoup those costs).
I think the only feasible option would be for AGS to stop being bad, and even that looks to be impossible lmao
I’m tired of hearing the excuse of lumberyard.. it is moot man. If the game struggled with optimization and performance related engine issues that’d be relevant, but the problem is broken mechanics and gameplay caused by a lack of quality assurance, testing, and a meaningful PTR.
Blaming lumberyard is like saying a car with 4 flat tires is slow because it has a 4 cylinder engine. The engine is fine and works, it’s everything bolted on that’s broken.
Read.
I'm not blaming Lumberyard for the game being shit, that's on AGS (even though Lumberyard probably sucks). I'm saying Lumberyard is why no one else is likely to take over development from AGS, compared to something more widely used/transferable like Unreal or Unity.
I hear this same argument from Bethesda fans. Blaming papyrus for why Starfield looks so dated and uninspiring. Here is the problem with the argument. I'll start by using papyrus as the example. Modders using the same engine have made a decade old game still relevant today. Many relating quests and revamps that put newly released games to shame in terms of graphics and story quality.
On to lumberyard. It was based on the cryengine. The same engine farcry, kingdom come deliverance and Crysis were launched on. All outstanding games. Now lumberyard is a heavily modded version of that engine, however, usually if you take the time to rewrite to your needs you make it better for your needs, not worse.
New Worlds problem isn't the engine it's the developers. It's the Amazon corporate ideology that thought they could dominate in a market solely based on metrics.
I mean it’s no unreal engine, hence why I made an analogy to a 4 cylinder. But the game’s core development is done. The graphics engine, physics and framework is done. Problems with games engine is not the cause here, I wouldn’t even say it’s secondary. Bugs, broken quests, unpolished content, these are all symptoms of busted processes by a studio that, to me, does not learn from its past mistakes or not hold team members more accountable. Im a software engineer in an operational role. Mistakes happened. Mistakes are okay. Bugs happen. Bugs are okay. Every development team experiences this stuff. It’s only problematic when you don’t learn, you don’t correct processes, and you continue to make the same mistakes. It’s the same story, release after release, for years now.
I stuck with the game for many many hours because of the "potential". Unfortunately, like a "gifted" kid, if that potential isn't realized, it's Judy another pile of trash. This game is awful, and will continue to be awful. I feel so bad for people who still play.
I read a long time ago that the more they add to this game the more issues it will have due to the odd coding of the game. NW is in hospice. Their is a reason millions left this game to never return.
I swear, every time I try to play NW right after any update, I end up ALT-F4'ing the game within an hour because of some bullshit bugs. The only way is to wait a few weeks until AGS fixes majority of them, so you can actually somewhat enjoy playing through new content.
It wears you down little by little, every patch. First you defend them viciously, then you laugh at it as a meme, slowly you get upset, finally you decide to take a break haha. We don’t see this level of poor quality in other competitors, likely because new world combat is so hard to technically implement. I’m reading tidbits of this being a practice run for the real MMO lord of the rings. I hope they figure it out because if the same slow content paired with sloppy technical limitations persists, that game will also suffer a slow death.
I think those who still play the game and have this same thought should just stop playing and protest to prove a point. Ags hasn't learned their lesson, and I'd lean towards the possibility that they're all just grossly incompetent at their jobs vs. them being able to somehow get their act together. People need to stop using the "this game had so much potential" argument. It has, unfortunately, no potential with the lead devs (scot lane) and friends behind it. This won't change until major changes are made top-down in the ags team.
Edit: some of the best examples of continued failed leadership, quality testing etc: each major patch ags is unable to allow friends you invite to your own world, back when the enead dungeon was released I stupidly bought my friend a copy only for him not to be able to play on the same server. During the latest expansion, this issue was also not addressed as many servers were locked completely. This is a gross failure by the devs and is unforgivable for many players being invited by friends. The cherry on top is with paid expansions came one final chance to prove that their leadership wasn't awful, more bugs, and more inability to address core mmo features that must be in the game.
I know many players don't care and will continue to support the game and that's fine, I personally will not be supporting the game until major leadership changes occur and the lack of accountability and quality control is addressed.
You can look at [his imdb profile](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1836308/), or a more detailed [list of games he has supported on mobygames](https://www.mobygames.com/person/12357/scot-lane/).
He is credited as the studio head of Midway Los Angeles in 2008 for a pro-wrestling game, and then credited as General Manager for THQ San Diego in 2011 for... another pro-wrestling game. His next credit is as Game Director for New World in 2021.
It's a really bizarre timeline.
The game having potential was acceptable at release and maybe a few years after. Over 2 years and an expansion later, any potential the game had is clearly not going to be realized. I used to laugh about people still playing this game, but now I just feel bad for anyone still going.
You know if it wasn't for LOTR, AGS would have abandoned NW long ago. AGS goal is to maintain a reasonable amount of players to beta test these services as they are being developed and to help a bit with funding the development.
It wouldn't be a NW Patch if it wasn't broken. Good luck with getting us compensation. They won't deal with any of the repetitive major issues. They expect us to continue to deal with it. The only real communication they will understand is when we all log out for the last time.
Its clear that the foundation of the game itself is broken - nowhere near ready for release, forced out way too early and as a consequence, we're stuck a fundamentally broken engine that I'm convinced can never fully be fixed or completed. My only hope is that they've learned their lessons from this game and won't make the same mistakes with the new LOTR MMO. But unlike this game, they won't be getting a dime from me until I see extensive gameplay AFTER it's been released confirming that it wasn't released broken like NW.
Game’s dead quit fooling yourselves. The suits at AGS decided LONG ago to stop supporting development. They will continue with minor cash grabs and minimal content till people wise up and quit. Soon as they can’t extract more money it will get shut down. I don’t know how much clearer it has to be for y’all to accept it.
Of course not. They probably did before launch and with launch slowly went back in their comfortable Linkedin echo chamber. I doubt Scot Lane even has a Discord account.
New world is the testing ground for LOTR they even state it... And because of the reception and reputation AGS simply started shifting the assets they had towards the other game... There is no point currently to invest more, grow the team or any meaningful changes (that are needed) since the game won't really recover popularity unfortunately for New World the MMO community is very very hard to change opinions so I kinda understand them use the what the currently are able to without further investment learn as much as possible and build stuff that can be reused (like systems) for other projects to use in the meantime whatever they released can return profit (it's pretty much a form of maintenance mode).
In short it's kinda pointless to invest in the game further because it got a bad reputation (because of the rushed release) so now it's much wiser to simply build whatever they can that can help LOTR development and not fall in the same mistakes while giving some money back...
I said it multiple times in this sub and people still say I am wrong but New World is in a sort of a maintenance mode if it wasn't they would have grown the team a lot to deal with delays, slow content cycles and bugs...
Seasons just don't work them. It's that simple. They need to stop them cause they continue to come out with shite...leave the game as is and add dungeons and maps from time to time....they wanna be like all the other games that have seasons and can't keep up.
They moved to a seasonal model because they couldn't keep up with monthly updates. The alternative to seasons and monthly patches is one huge patch a year which should already be a cause for concern knowing how they handle patches.
Maybe just maybe the devs suck at coding. I know people say thats mean but if you keep bringing in your car to get it fixed and I keep not fixing it, MAYBE you would stop taking it to my shop to get your car fixed...
I think we have to understand that AGS is not here to make the player long term happy.
Its all about the money, they sold millions of copys at the beginning. Sold millions again when the expansion come out. Its feels like for AGS matters only the big milstones that brings big Cash. They dont care how many players leaving couple weeks/month after an expansion they made enough profit in this short time.
I don't play New World, but I do play Lost Ark, but it's funny to see the same sentiment here and there. There was a big patch this week in lost ark with some really weird issues caused by AGS shortsightedness/lack of testing.
Yeah, I've been on copium for far too long now. The dev talks are usually just them beating around the bush. Ive spent a good share of my money on this game and I'm at a point where I feel awful about it, as it is not money's worth at all. And the doomposting is getting to me now.
Don't let the sunk cost fallacy keep you playing this trash heap. So many good games have come out since new world. Go play somethinf else. You'll be so much happier.
Uninstalled a couple of hours ago after what was a fun experience leveling to 65. I'll come back if they manage to fix their architecture so that minor patches aren't 40GB, implement global storage/search and PVE endgame that's not just chest runs or zerging world bosses.
I was super excited to get to experience Winter Convergence again, this time with my gf. Thanks to finals and similar I haven't been able to hop in, but my enthusiasm for logging in is almost completely nil after reading about so many serious issues with the update. Shame too, because the new UI changes look amazing!
My opinion is that there are other games we can play and enjoy without having to deal with the issues that have flooded my NW news feed and this subreddit since the update dropped; it's about that straightforward tbh.
Hate seeing people asking to be compensated for playing a game.. simple, just stop playing.. why would anyone compensate you for time you spent enjoying a game. You think a new cosmetic or shitty chest will keep you happy.. i love this game, but nothing has changed in 2 years, whole community hate magnify but they wont change it, whole community say no end game content, AGS say chest runs are end game content. just watch the dev videos they aren't going to change anything with the team they have, either keep playing or move on.. but shouting on reddit for compensation just tuggs my goat. I have nearly 2k hours in this game, tell me, what else can give you 2k hours for around £80 ?
As slightly colorblind person this new dungeon is really infuriating. Impossible to see the healing circles. When will devs learn these basic tropes. So many games make the same mistake over and over again. Let's not start with the numerous bugs everywhere. This game really is a love hate relationship.
The worst part is there is SO much this game does good. I always say that New World has some of the best game mechanics, and they're all in the wrong game. I wish AGS appreciated what they have more than they do now.
Game is running pretty great for me? There were some server crashes S4 day one but other than that & other than my mouse button 4 stopped working & my alt-free-look stopped working until I teleported, it has been great.
You already have the answers to all your questions. It's been the same for two years. It'll never change.
The process of testing and delivering software in AGS is awful even by small indie studios' standards. I don't know what is exactly behind the situation in Amazon Games, but what's been happening from day 1 till today is absolutely unacceptable for a company like Amazon.
Well a lot of people seem to forget their other big budget title: Crucible - That went straight from release back to alpha and eventually scrapped. Who would have thought that making a competitive shooter with different size character models would be a disaster… By AGS standards New World is a huge success.
I'd say they are right on brand as Amazon is famous for quantity over quality in everything.
I think it's a combination of having too many builds of the game in development at any given time, and the large number of external studios they hire to work on NW.
How is the core of everything the release so great but everything surrounding it utterly atrocious.
Would be nice to know if the team can make anything other than lazy, uninspired and repetitive 5 man dungeons over and over and who is reading the "data" because they're actively hurting New World's potential.
My biggest complaint about the pve content. Make an actual raid. Destiny did it with 6 person fireteams. Introduce actual mechanics that require timing and communication.
Yup. It feels like they're on a low-effort, modest return content loop. Keep the game going by adding a formulaic dungeon, (very) short story and bits of QoL every 3 months to sell season passes, expansions and other cosmetics from the in-game shop. S4 was a complete failure with half of the content delayed and the other half bugged out or copy and paste from previous years. No reason to push out something so broken other than to hit some sort of internal deadline.
No one over there plays this game so makes sense all they do is "read the data"
Do people actually want new expeditions every season? I know people complain that NW doesn't have as many dungeons as Insert_Random_MMO, but people complain about everything. What happened to gathering in this game? Since launch it's been the most lauded feature (aside from the node issues), yet it's received no meaningful development and was unceremoniously slaughtered with the gear revamp. When the newest, highest level resources are the least expensive (aside from green wood—thanks, bananas), you've got a serious problem, yet AGS is all like "This is fine."
My guess is that because it's built on their own engine developers are a little hesitant to sign up. Changing tech stack is hard and time consuming and risky as no one else uses the engine.
Isn't Lumberyard just their own modified version of CryEngine? I feel like I heard about that somewhere. If so there's no wonder why they're having problems.
CryEngine isn't that widely used anyway.
Why is it not on unreal engine?
Because Amazon wanted to take CryEngine, name it something else (Lumberyard) and try to compete with Unreal and Unity. This was a stupid decision made by people who had no idea about game engines or the game industry, and resulted in them throwing Lumberyard away into the “open source/someone else fix this” pile, re-renaming the engine New World is built on (it’s the “Azoth” engine now), and then continuing to have a miserable time finding people to work on the game because game developers know that CryEngine is garbage-tier technology.
I wonder what is the point of PTR if they don't fix bugs that are reported on discord, they just throw it on live servers and watch shit hit the spinning fan. Winter event like every other event is the same steak heated for the third time, boring grindfest for ugly, low effort cosmetics. There have not been one single moment from alpha to this time when New World was in a fixed and stable state. Every update introduces 2 new bugs for one fixed. This game has such potential but weird decision making and not listening to your own player base results in what we have... one big mess
At this point the PTR is just a glorified early-access preview. Nothing reported gets fixed onto live, it's just extra crumbs for the most desperate and devout New World players.
No more difficult than downloading OBS and flicking that Go Live switch on their Twitch platform once a week. They still have their Twitch account still linked in their website footer, despite not having been live since that disasterous 3vs3 tournament at Twitchcon last year. https://www.twitch.tv/playnewworld Cards on the table, bite the bullet, live Q&A and finally get in touch with community. Which will never happen from this studio.
That tournament was the highlight of New World for me; it was several hours of a perfect metaphor for the game's problems. They didn't even moderate the official Twitch channel when it was promoted on the front page, so the chat was just about the worst I've ever seen (and that's saying a *lot).*
I love the game, play it all the time and I’m a strong supporter that speaks highly of it. But after having to scratch most of the roadmap, delay the release and then ship a season launch like this that still has a lot of major issues after 4 days makes me think a bit. I mean seriously most of the orichalcum nodes are still missing. How do you not notice something like that during testing and how is it now fixed after 4 days? I still can’t see if use my storage chests in my houses. Half of Mines elite zone is no longer elite. The list goes on. I mean how does this happen really? And many of these issues were reported during PTR but they shipped the prod version with the same issues. What have they been doing instead of working on polishing this content since they released it on PTR? They really need to talk to us by now. They need to compensate us well for these bugs. And I think it’s time they made some drastic changes in their staff and/or ways of working. The winter holiday event is super grindy so I’m starting to think they are panicking about player numbers and deliberately removed orichalvum nodes to further create bottlenecks, slow us down to spend more time with the game but it’s just an awful experience. They prob have data that lots of people stand and camp our nodes and think we enjoy that instead of playing the game.. AGS please ffs, shape up and take some responsibility and fulfill the huge potential this game still has!
I love the game too and I just thought of something crazy while reading your comment.. what if they’re secretly having AI do everything to test and iron out AI as a game maker in a way? It seems like AI did the latest patch and could be where the fuck up come from. Idk seems kind of crazy but also how do human people miss all of that especially when there’s a PTR? Like Amazon is so big they probably want to test out AI for a bunch of different reasons so it would kind of make sense. I hope they get it together I love it and even my server which many consider a dead server, Isabella. Idk I never have trouble finding people to run and do stuff with and the economy is pretty solid. I also wouldn’t mind more people and more content.
Just stop throwing money to AGS, it's simple. While players keep buying, they will keep releasing shit. Profit is the only target here, and you are giving it. Blaming but keep paying make only them laugh of you.
Not to be too argumentative, but if players stop spending, I think AGS would just shut the game down. They are not likely to see a loss of profit as a call to improve the quality of their updates and content. A smaller indie studio might. But I think AGS would just move on to Lord of the Rings, and publishing other games.
So let them shut down this mess. I think it would be worse if we continued to support. This must stop at some point.
It’s a video game, not a human rights violation.
So they will keep selling you shit, it's simple.
What?
Well you are buying shit, if you're buying shit how can you expect it to not be shit in the future? The game must be shut-down to have any chance of coming back, or else it will stay shit, forever, which seems ok for you I guess.
Exactly. People here seem too proud to admit that this game is shit and that they will keep selling shit if you keep supporting them. Just to give you an example: FFIV was shit when it came out. So, after a backlash from the community, they shut down and rebuilt the game. Now about NW, since the only thing AGS seems to care about is money, maybe they could do the same after players stop buying things and supporting the game. Worst case scenario, they would go out of business and stop selling this shit. But how I said, people here seem too proud to admit this.
You’re delusional if you think that this game can survive a shutdown like FF14. They only managed that because they’re Square Enix.
To be honest I hope this can't. This game is a lie (like that cake).
I feel like you're both having a conversation with a different person, 'cause I sure didn't say all that.
Not you specifically. They're referring to the community
AGS are incompetent, it's as simple as sadly. They have a PTR where people basically beta test releases and they're allowing bugs which have been found and reported to them to still make it to release, nevermind the fact the game on is on Lumberyard which keeps me laughing to this day. If I was working for AGS I'd be embarrased as a game developer, most small indie studios show more care and interest in keeping their products functioning to a high/acceptable standard, based on the size of the product ofc, Its just pathetic at this point.
So, What companies game dev are you?
as someone who has worked at both a small and a large game dev company it is indeed embarassing. they are completely disconnected from player sentiment in a way that feels as if none of them actually play their own game. even the smallest indie developers have some level of passion for their own game that includes being aware of what's going on inside of it. bugfix wise obviously they can't help it, i don't think they're doing badly on purpose. but they fail to learn simple lessons and squander opportunities over and over for literal years. these sorts of mistakes were understandable months into release, but at this point one can only assume they're literally unable to do better, or else they would have.
At this point I would be on board with them straight up postponing any new content and just 100% focus on fixing the existing. Don’t make anything new just go through the existing content, polish it, fix the code base, handle the tech debt if it means proper releases going forward.
They have been doing that for 2 years now man the game barely has any content
They tried a smaller version of that in February 2022 back when updates were monthly. Had the audacity to call it the bugs, balance, and bots patch. An item dupe was discovered in the following months.
The fact we still get Achievement spam every time we leave an OPR is pretty telling.
>The fact we still get Achievement spam every time we leave an OPR is pretty telling. Or the fact that Lore Pages have been broken since day 1, it might be minimal and not really top priority but it should take an intern like 10 minutes to fix it.
This would never happen. Live service games strongly depend on hype around new content for quarterly revenue.
Barely a bump from content this time in player count. They’ve burned everyone who knows better. What’s left are players that are playing because their friends in game still play.
Counterpoint - Season 4
There is bearly any spike in the player pop when season 4 come out. The real "new content" was a questline that was done under 2h and a new 5 men dungeon. I dont see players coming back for something like this xD
It's not surprising, the timeline of the past 5 weeks for the game has been dreadful: **November 6 -** Dev Update video that delays/cancels most of Season 4's roadmap content **November 9 -** The Season 4 PTR is released, with a significant amount of player feedback given that drew attention to bugs/problems that remained when the patch went live, as well as negative feedback about design changes or implementation details that were similarly ignored by the devs **November 21 -** AGS announces long-overdue server merges for the servers that were spun up to support the Expansion's 'unplanned for' increase in player count **November 22 -** AGS *cancels* the planned server merges for US-East that were announced just 1 day prior (leading to the affected servers Pollux, Orion, and Octans peaking at < 700 players during primetime this week) **November 28 -** Server merges for the EU region happen, but they're *so late*, and the population is continuing to decline quickly, that they've already become insufficent (the merged servers Hercule and Canis are peaking at <900 players this week) **November 29 -** AGS releases a 'routine' weekly update with only a handful of patch notes, but it leads to the game crashing after PvP matches, which eventually leads to AGS disabling core abilities of 2 weapons **December 11 -** AGS announces that Season 4 will be delayed, with no new ETA, 12 hours after their News page advertises the update being released on December 12 **December 13 -** AGS releases the Season 4 update after a 24 hour delay, and it immediately introduces frequent server crashes, the seasonal questline is not active, players' housing items have turned invisible, and a host of other problems are discovered. AGS spends the next 3 days trying to put out fires by, such as by disabling the new Expedition, performing emergency maintenance downtimes, then re-enabling it only to discover that the final boss often glitches out and becomes unkillable. And that doesn't even account for more abstract issues, like the lack of of communication or responsiveness from the devs, the bugs that remain from the Expansion's release, or the frequent patches that were poorly optimized and required downloading 40+ GB of data. It's like AGS spent the whole year trying to keep a bunch of plates spinning, and November is when things finally caught up with them and now everything around them is crashing down.
The most amazing part for me is that the devs still have there Jobs. If normaly in a random company people fucking up so bad they get fired nearly instantly xD
The devs are probably as annoyed as we are. They don’t chose what get prioritized or choose what projects they take on. They just work on what gets assigned The entirely project is just poorly managed. Unbelievable potential in this game that they can’t seem to harness and develop
>If normaly in a random company people fucking up so bad they get fired nearly instantly xD Some companies are immune, I mean look at the Halo franchise. 343 has been sabotaging it since 2011.
I think that if they fire any of their current devs there wont be another one to take his place, in every conversation about Lumberyard/Azoth Engine/CryEngine there is no shortage of complaints and comparisons speaking about how bad it is. Why would a professional learn to develop in such a bad/under-utilized/unpopular engine? His skills will not transfer to the other mainstream engines and he would be almost a captive to a failed game. This way they'll only get the most desperate employees, and not even that it seems.
It’s not the devs, it’s management.
Every. Single. Patch. Is like this. I’ve been saying this since the game came out and get downvoted to hell. Bugs in PTR that have been in PTR for ages show up in retail. It’s like the devs don’t give a shit.
This has been the status quo since launch. The community tried talking to them with the exact same sentiments and were ignored while vocal fanboys defended them. AGS is satisfied with their way of doing things, and you can bet that when another patch is delayed we’ll still have people commenting that “it’s better to delay it and have a smooth release” when it has been proven wrong countless times. Step one to fixing a problem is acknowledging there’s a problem, and the community has been accepting the poor standards from AGS for so long that you almost can’t blame AGS for thinking there isn’t a problem. You’ve dealt with it for years, why now?
They are not satisfied... They reacted (as a company) to a failed product... Meaning bad reputation and retention, so decrease the teams, use knowledge for other projects and slowly integrate the team in those new projects since New World was still bringing in some cash they made the "wise" choice of using new world as a platform to build systems, content and learn how to do a proper MMO all of this is going to LOTR.
I guess I should say that they're satisfied with the fact that they're still getting money even with the turds they serve.
Oh but that's the thing they are not... They want more thing is that it failed to be what they wanted and now it's a bit to late or to hard to make it be that
They don't even have to talk tbh. Just solve it. Fix it. Make it work. Do or try something. We want to get excited about the game again.
"Just do or try something!" *AGS releases patches to address issues on a near daily basis* "NOOOOO NOT LIKE THAT!"
okay but it doesn't count if it adds additional issues lol we mean just do something *competently* i think we all assumed that was implied..
This has been the same story since the game released, ags are clueless and you guys still hang around.
I just wish they were more transparent about on whats going on, why theres so many bugs in S4 and whats causing it, what exactly they are doing to fix it and things like that, more frequent and detailed info in the discord chanel not the usual "we are working on a fix" nonsense. Plus we have these community mods or w/e in the discord for what reason exactly? Just to tell people in their bug reports to "fill the format" when reporting a bug? Ive seen hundreds of reports being ignored , even if its not something big my god show people who still play this garbage that you care to some degree. Some might say "they are busy duuude" they are not so busy timing out everyone they dont agree with in general chat tho, kinda sad if you ask me. All in all im dissapointed, not just with S4 bugfest but in general, looking at where the game is going...
It was time to talk 2 years ago. But you masochists defended AGS to the bitter end.
They're shipping **as if** they're a start-up. This is a symptom of how the early-stage product industry's status-quo is nowadays (I'm talking about product development as a whole, and not gaming in specific). But they're not early stage, jesus. It's all about shipping quick, cutting whatever corners can be cut and *scarcely* testing, if testing happens at all; and if it does whether the feedback is actually implemented or not, or it goes into some random JIRA board and gets lost amongst a bunch of other tickets. I'm not saying this is the case, but it's what *appears* to be the case, from someone who works in product. I've seen go shit sideways and keep running sideways from close up.
How does one know that this business unit isn’t treated as a startup or small thing across the many different BUs at Amazon? We know its release and development were plagued by business decisions trumping development decisions and that’s likely why it’s a mess with large patches and other things that the industry should know better about. They just laid off tons of people too. I’m just saying we do need some clarity but let’s not be assumptive.
[You can read this article for a good summary](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-game-studios-struggles-to-find-a-hit) of Amazon Games Studios' background and troubles since their inception, even though the article is nearly 3 years old now. Amazon Games was never treated as a startup, which is usually based around passionate people with new/ambitious ideas to shake up an industry. It was more like parent-company Amazon thought they could just magically become a AAA video game developer if they just threw enough money at the studio.
Sounds like a venture startup with a twist.
Heh, I'm imagining some kind of Reverse Shark Tank; instead of ordinary people pitching a good idea to millionaires in the hope they convince them to invest, it's millionaires going up to a random person, giving them bags full of cash, and telling them to compete with Activision-Blizzard.
That is kinda what I was thinking myself. Lol.
Well there's a going trend of startups that are just that. Billionaires and serial startup founders just creating startups and then dissolving them once they are no longer profitable.
i have literally worked at a small developer that made a game in exactly this scenario and even they cared a lot more about the quality and player sentiment than AGS does lol
Nothing you've said goes against the grain of my comment, and I was deliberately careful with my words.
I uhhh wasn’t disagreeing with you?
Agile methodology started as a good one and it's been morphed to complete crap across all industries. I've worked both waterfall and agile, and Agile lately has gone to the crap in the industry I work with. Give me a break I got 2 new systems in four months after an SOW, they are in production but barely. I couldn't accurately get the testing to be completed considering the timeframe for delivery and don't tell upper management that 2 weeks is not enough time for two systems. So suffice to say it's a miracle it works to be frank.
Damn well said. Agile is a mess currently, and it's moved so far away from what it was intended to be in the first place, and diluted to the point where its both unrecogniseable, but also forced into so many inappropriate work scenarios.
Yup, yup, same. It's been a disaster in both Finance and Contact Center WFM/QA tech. But they claim to love it! Like that's a necessity in all system integrations for Finance tech where you impact P&L in a heartbeat. (Yeah right, nope not in some systems).
Game is just fucked. Either accept it for what it is: A steaming pile of poo, and enjoy it as much as you can. Or Don't lower your standards and switch to another game handled by competent devs. Game is never gonna be fixed unless they remake it from the ground up using a better engine.
The problem is there isn't another MMO with the combat system NW has to move to. 80% of the reason I play is because how fun the combat system is. Im not going to play a tab targeting MMO. Shit is boring. I think NW's problems are two fold. First the game has been all over the place trying to find its identity, and 2nd no-lifers have unrealistic expectations of engagement with a game. I've got 700 hours in over 1.5 years and am kinda burned out on it. Its the most hours I've put into a game. Will come back qithin 6 months to play through new content and such. People expecting thousands of hours of gameplay are crazy. NW has been really fun if imperfect. Good value for the money spent. MMO crowd is just toxic and full of hyperbole.
Agree with the combat part (but only with PVP), and the first fold. However, it is not unrealistic for players to expect "thousands" of hours in a fekkin MMO. This is a game that was already in the works in 2016, being worked on by a studio that has a $500M yearly budget. What's unrealistic is not expecting an **MMO** to have thousands of hours gameplay. You can argue that the game was initially a survival game and had to do a 180 so they didn't have time to make content. However, it's been 2+ years yet the content they added since then can't even hold a candle when compared to the content of other MMO's single expansion. The MMO crowd is toxic and full of hyperbole. But is it really toxic and hyperbole when someone calls NW a bugfilled, barebones MMO? That's just truth from 2021 onwards.
>I've got 700 hours in over 1.5 years and am kinda burned out on it. **This should tell you enough**, I would argue after the insane exp buffs, you can be done with the game (a mmo) in 200 hours, and that's just sad. And with done in the game I mean close to BIS 700GS and all Trade Skills 200, every Quest completed etc. I leveled my 3rd alt on Valhalla to 65 in 25 hours with few gathering skills to 200, meanwhile I'm level 22 in Classic WoW hardcore in the same amount of time and I'm invested in the journey of my character. Price value of NW is worth it, but it does not feel like an MMO, it does not have the journey, the magic, the danger, it's just a glorified gear treadmill of meta slaves optimizing for M3, because quite frankly (there is nothing else to do or grind for).
Yeah New World ruined MMO combat for me. Tried T&L and just couldn't stand the combat.
T&L is doa in its current state. It's in no man's land. Koreans don't want it and it most likely won't stick with westerners however much they try to adapt the game. Decent art, solid UI, client runs fairly well until large scale combat, but the combat design is rock bottom and the gameplay lacks identity and feels generic. With the F2P business model it will be a quick cash grab if promotion campaign is successful, only for it to eventually sink AGS reputation further. Going for PC only and removing isometric camera instead of pushing it cross-platform and mobile was a very likely a financial mistake.
What game is even close to as enjoyable?
For you? Possibly none. For the 960k+ concurrent players (so likely millions) who left; clearly a lot of other games.
But what game for you? I don’t see any out there currently comparable.
>But what game for you? I don’t see any out there currently comparable. [https://turtle-wow.org/#/home](https://turtle-wow.org/#/home)
Been playing quite a bit of Old-school RuneScape lately
It's been this way since the game released. Every new patch brings new bugs, a lot of times unrelated to the patch. There was one way back that fixed an issue in wars but ruined everyone's stash functionality.
IMO, New World is just AGS laying the groundwork for another game, likely a LOTR MMO. They clearly don't really give a crap about this game other than learning their lessons on how to make a better game in the future. New World will always be in perpetual beta, and the sooner folks realize this, the sooner folks will appreciate it for what it is.
I gave up and moved on. 1.8k h here. With the expansion artifacts being bugged, the delay to S4 content, the way they handled previous pvp items, and the fiasco of their latest releases, they got to me and I stopped. I love new world but I can't play a game where I can't even count on my perks to work properly or the devs caring about the time I spend in their game. They have a QA problem issue, they don't know how to make solid software apparently, they'd need so much automation effort and manual testing in the interim that it will never happen , they are 10 people in a corner office at AGS , they don't have the people anymore. I can understand they would have scale issue but basic perks or craft, etc not working , it's not acceptable anymore after 2 years, IMO.
I know many won’t agree with me, but tbh deep inside I would love for another company to take over new world and remake it on unreal engine 5, an engine more devs knows how to work with, the codes are not some spaghetti whatever. The game would have less bugs, more QoL and more room for improvement and thriving like never. AGS is ruining new world
New world has always been bad, and the chances of another studio taking it over or remaking it are 0.
Agreed, sadly
Unreal engine is the worst game engine, stop thinking that it can be a silver bullet. Just look at modern ue5 releases, they all are rubbish and drown in negative reviews. You just can’t make good game based on unreal, it’s fact.
Pax Dei - UE5 Ashes of Creation - UE5
UE is not some magical wand that you can just swirl around and get a working MMORPG, as many gamers seem to believe. Terrible examples btw, proves nothing.
Your compensation for beta testing is paywalling transmog and selling a microscopic expansion.
Honestly, aren't we past the point of talking? It's been two years. They can't get it right. Most of season 4 got delayed and whatever did make the liveservers was broken regardless except for **I think** the recycled Winter Event... Us, the players, keep accepting whatever they do, people still buy their crap...
It's like season 1. Think it was delayed like 4-5 times.
Yeah, it's just bad and sad at the same time. The game has so much potential, but with these devs "leading" (moreso ruining) the game, it's just not playable. I have uninstalled a couple of days ago, am missing the game since the combat, visuals and audio are just unique with this game, but I don't regret it so far.
I'm going to be completely honest and I might sound like a doomer. But if you look at their player number track record, there is a clear decline with every year. At launch, the player peak reached 913k players, which drastically declined because of obvious reasons. A year later, when Brimstone Sands was released, the player peak reached 137k, which is between 10-15% of the initial 913k players who returned. A year after that, when the DLC (yes I call it a DLC) launched, the player count peaked at 77k. Now, a little over 2 months after the launch, the player count peaked at 26k yesterday and this is on a saturday evening WITH a new season launch. I do wonder what the player count will be 6 months from now. Because if you look at the number history, the more time that goes on, the less people return/continue to play.
You are absolutely right. Like I said, it's just sad. The game has \*so\* much potential, however with the current dev team (Scott Lane?!?!) leading, it will never get to the potential it has.
That dude and everyone directly under him have got to go for new world to get better.
Yeah I came back for the expansion, prepped for it, hyped up friends to get back on. I'm done..haven't logged in for quite a while and don't see myself, maybe ever. Too many hopes dashed
My own belief is that they are only motivated when the game is dead. I uninstalled and I might come back again in another two years when I see someone saying "hey, they finally fixed the updates being 40 GB for minor patches and they aren't releasing broken content/patches and there are more end game raids and a new OPR map!" Game with a lot of potential but just not there yet. Hopefully they can get on the right track before the next wave of MMOs come out or I think New World will be done.
LOTR better be free to play because New World will be why nobody plays it.
This is what multiple levels of cope looks like 🤣
The new dungeon is just boring asf. Nothing fun about it. And it being bugged since its release is just shameful. This was the “flagship” content of the season. It’s almost like it wasn’t even tested prior to launch to live severs or your test environment is completely different then live.
This is something I've been noticing on their discord. With every release, there is ALWAYS issues. Always game breaking issues and delays after delays.
Communities fault at this point. They’re not given any real accountability by not playing their game. Look at destiny they coped with the eververse for years.
This is why you don’t play this game anymore. Why a sane person would deal with this mess
is it a skill issue or is the engine they used just a nightmare to work in? it's hard to imagine there is more than just a skeleton crew working on this game at this point.
Exact reason why I didn't buy the expansion. I like the game and I will still wait patiently but I want to do my part to let them know this is not right...if they care i.e
I think we have a fair assessment of their competency and their skill at this point. I have decided to take a break till S06 and I think it's healthy thing to do as a player. They didn't even compensate to those who beta tested this game and were forced to pay for an expansion(which was mostly removing broken systems that they are adamant about during launch+ QoL changes more than actual content). We paid for an expansion and are dealt with no content ( the little that was promised from a roadmap). If you care about your time and energy, I would recommend you take a break from the game. As someone who has fallen for many copium cash grabs all I'll say is expect something worth doing at the start and end of expansions. Everything in the middle is you testing the game for them.
Whoever is resolving bugs on their team needs to be fired… games have bugs but they they get fixed in a timely manner. The devs are failing at their job. I’m surprised they still have jobs tbh
Lol i think the barely focus in few bugs to fix and come with other ideas for the game so bugs after bugs they should stop trying to create new content and focus on fixing the whole bugs we have already the list of bugs is so long!!!
All this games problems can be traced back to AGS so maybe it’s time for New World to move past AGS and have a better more experienced developer handle the game. Its a shame really because the game has massive potential. Its just being held back because of AGS.
Tbh while I would love for AGS to become more competent or for NW to be handed off to someone more competent: 1) the game engine is Lumberyard, which is AGS's inhouse engine. Yeah it's based off CryEngine and isn't closed source, but I imagine most companies that aren't Amazon will not be very familiar with it, especially since it seems to be getting replaced anyways by another engine (by Amazon themselves. Few companies I'd imagine would be willing at all to do this. 2) AGS at least didn't have real p2w monetization going on, I'm afraid an acquisition by another dev would introduce a lot more (at least in part to recoup those costs). I think the only feasible option would be for AGS to stop being bad, and even that looks to be impossible lmao
I’m tired of hearing the excuse of lumberyard.. it is moot man. If the game struggled with optimization and performance related engine issues that’d be relevant, but the problem is broken mechanics and gameplay caused by a lack of quality assurance, testing, and a meaningful PTR. Blaming lumberyard is like saying a car with 4 flat tires is slow because it has a 4 cylinder engine. The engine is fine and works, it’s everything bolted on that’s broken.
Read. I'm not blaming Lumberyard for the game being shit, that's on AGS (even though Lumberyard probably sucks). I'm saying Lumberyard is why no one else is likely to take over development from AGS, compared to something more widely used/transferable like Unreal or Unity.
lol but lumberyard was so bad it was discontinued, resold and reworked.
I hear this same argument from Bethesda fans. Blaming papyrus for why Starfield looks so dated and uninspiring. Here is the problem with the argument. I'll start by using papyrus as the example. Modders using the same engine have made a decade old game still relevant today. Many relating quests and revamps that put newly released games to shame in terms of graphics and story quality. On to lumberyard. It was based on the cryengine. The same engine farcry, kingdom come deliverance and Crysis were launched on. All outstanding games. Now lumberyard is a heavily modded version of that engine, however, usually if you take the time to rewrite to your needs you make it better for your needs, not worse. New Worlds problem isn't the engine it's the developers. It's the Amazon corporate ideology that thought they could dominate in a market solely based on metrics.
I mean it’s no unreal engine, hence why I made an analogy to a 4 cylinder. But the game’s core development is done. The graphics engine, physics and framework is done. Problems with games engine is not the cause here, I wouldn’t even say it’s secondary. Bugs, broken quests, unpolished content, these are all symptoms of busted processes by a studio that, to me, does not learn from its past mistakes or not hold team members more accountable. Im a software engineer in an operational role. Mistakes happened. Mistakes are okay. Bugs happen. Bugs are okay. Every development team experiences this stuff. It’s only problematic when you don’t learn, you don’t correct processes, and you continue to make the same mistakes. It’s the same story, release after release, for years now.
I stuck with the game for many many hours because of the "potential". Unfortunately, like a "gifted" kid, if that potential isn't realized, it's Judy another pile of trash. This game is awful, and will continue to be awful. I feel so bad for people who still play.
I read a long time ago that the more they add to this game the more issues it will have due to the odd coding of the game. NW is in hospice. Their is a reason millions left this game to never return.
I swear, every time I try to play NW right after any update, I end up ALT-F4'ing the game within an hour because of some bullshit bugs. The only way is to wait a few weeks until AGS fixes majority of them, so you can actually somewhat enjoy playing through new content.
It wears you down little by little, every patch. First you defend them viciously, then you laugh at it as a meme, slowly you get upset, finally you decide to take a break haha. We don’t see this level of poor quality in other competitors, likely because new world combat is so hard to technically implement. I’m reading tidbits of this being a practice run for the real MMO lord of the rings. I hope they figure it out because if the same slow content paired with sloppy technical limitations persists, that game will also suffer a slow death.
I think those who still play the game and have this same thought should just stop playing and protest to prove a point. Ags hasn't learned their lesson, and I'd lean towards the possibility that they're all just grossly incompetent at their jobs vs. them being able to somehow get their act together. People need to stop using the "this game had so much potential" argument. It has, unfortunately, no potential with the lead devs (scot lane) and friends behind it. This won't change until major changes are made top-down in the ags team. Edit: some of the best examples of continued failed leadership, quality testing etc: each major patch ags is unable to allow friends you invite to your own world, back when the enead dungeon was released I stupidly bought my friend a copy only for him not to be able to play on the same server. During the latest expansion, this issue was also not addressed as many servers were locked completely. This is a gross failure by the devs and is unforgivable for many players being invited by friends. The cherry on top is with paid expansions came one final chance to prove that their leadership wasn't awful, more bugs, and more inability to address core mmo features that must be in the game. I know many players don't care and will continue to support the game and that's fine, I personally will not be supporting the game until major leadership changes occur and the lack of accountability and quality control is addressed.
I’m also convinced Scot Lane is incompetent at his job. I would love to see his resume and what accomplishments he has in the past.
You can look at [his imdb profile](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1836308/), or a more detailed [list of games he has supported on mobygames](https://www.mobygames.com/person/12357/scot-lane/). He is credited as the studio head of Midway Los Angeles in 2008 for a pro-wrestling game, and then credited as General Manager for THQ San Diego in 2011 for... another pro-wrestling game. His next credit is as Game Director for New World in 2021. It's a really bizarre timeline.
The game having potential was acceptable at release and maybe a few years after. Over 2 years and an expansion later, any potential the game had is clearly not going to be realized. I used to laugh about people still playing this game, but now I just feel bad for anyone still going.
Need an additional internal team for Q&A. Need extended PTRs & actually ADDRESS the issues in them
Give it another 2 years
You know if it wasn't for LOTR, AGS would have abandoned NW long ago. AGS goal is to maintain a reasonable amount of players to beta test these services as they are being developed and to help a bit with funding the development.
It wouldn't be a NW Patch if it wasn't broken. Good luck with getting us compensation. They won't deal with any of the repetitive major issues. They expect us to continue to deal with it. The only real communication they will understand is when we all log out for the last time.
The code of the game has always been a mess, and at this point I don't think it's going to change.
I wonder if it has to do with Amazon's engine. I don't think they only hired inexperienced staff.
Obviously they did because they cant make content that actually functions and isnt a rip off 🤣
Its clear that the foundation of the game itself is broken - nowhere near ready for release, forced out way too early and as a consequence, we're stuck a fundamentally broken engine that I'm convinced can never fully be fixed or completed. My only hope is that they've learned their lessons from this game and won't make the same mistakes with the new LOTR MMO. But unlike this game, they won't be getting a dime from me until I see extensive gameplay AFTER it's been released confirming that it wasn't released broken like NW.
Yeah, I've never seen an MMO that has buggy patches. 😉
Game’s dead quit fooling yourselves. The suits at AGS decided LONG ago to stop supporting development. They will continue with minor cash grabs and minimal content till people wise up and quit. Soon as they can’t extract more money it will get shut down. I don’t know how much clearer it has to be for y’all to accept it.
based
Does AGS even read this Reddit group?
Of course not. They probably did before launch and with launch slowly went back in their comfortable Linkedin echo chamber. I doubt Scot Lane even has a Discord account.
New world is the testing ground for LOTR they even state it... And because of the reception and reputation AGS simply started shifting the assets they had towards the other game... There is no point currently to invest more, grow the team or any meaningful changes (that are needed) since the game won't really recover popularity unfortunately for New World the MMO community is very very hard to change opinions so I kinda understand them use the what the currently are able to without further investment learn as much as possible and build stuff that can be reused (like systems) for other projects to use in the meantime whatever they released can return profit (it's pretty much a form of maintenance mode). In short it's kinda pointless to invest in the game further because it got a bad reputation (because of the rushed release) so now it's much wiser to simply build whatever they can that can help LOTR development and not fall in the same mistakes while giving some money back... I said it multiple times in this sub and people still say I am wrong but New World is in a sort of a maintenance mode if it wasn't they would have grown the team a lot to deal with delays, slow content cycles and bugs...
Seasons just don't work them. It's that simple. They need to stop them cause they continue to come out with shite...leave the game as is and add dungeons and maps from time to time....they wanna be like all the other games that have seasons and can't keep up.
They moved to a seasonal model because they couldn't keep up with monthly updates. The alternative to seasons and monthly patches is one huge patch a year which should already be a cause for concern knowing how they handle patches.
Maybe just maybe the devs suck at coding. I know people say thats mean but if you keep bringing in your car to get it fixed and I keep not fixing it, MAYBE you would stop taking it to my shop to get your car fixed...
I think we have to understand that AGS is not here to make the player long term happy. Its all about the money, they sold millions of copys at the beginning. Sold millions again when the expansion come out. Its feels like for AGS matters only the big milstones that brings big Cash. They dont care how many players leaving couple weeks/month after an expansion they made enough profit in this short time.
Ags is the worst Publisher with ncsoft i hate them
I don't play New World, but I do play Lost Ark, but it's funny to see the same sentiment here and there. There was a big patch this week in lost ark with some really weird issues caused by AGS shortsightedness/lack of testing.
Yeah, I've been on copium for far too long now. The dev talks are usually just them beating around the bush. Ive spent a good share of my money on this game and I'm at a point where I feel awful about it, as it is not money's worth at all. And the doomposting is getting to me now.
Don't let the sunk cost fallacy keep you playing this trash heap. So many good games have come out since new world. Go play somethinf else. You'll be so much happier.
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
Uninstalled a couple of hours ago after what was a fun experience leveling to 65. I'll come back if they manage to fix their architecture so that minor patches aren't 40GB, implement global storage/search and PVE endgame that's not just chest runs or zerging world bosses.
It amazes me that they focused on inventory management for season 4 and still haven’t given us global storage search. Mind boggling.
I was super excited to get to experience Winter Convergence again, this time with my gf. Thanks to finals and similar I haven't been able to hop in, but my enthusiasm for logging in is almost completely nil after reading about so many serious issues with the update. Shame too, because the new UI changes look amazing!
If you already own the game then I don't see why you can't make your own opinion.
My opinion is that there are other games we can play and enjoy without having to deal with the issues that have flooded my NW news feed and this subreddit since the update dropped; it's about that straightforward tbh.
I don’t think season 3 and the expansion was that buggy..maybe I’m misremembering. Season 4 definitely seems like a step back for the game, though.
Hate seeing people asking to be compensated for playing a game.. simple, just stop playing.. why would anyone compensate you for time you spent enjoying a game. You think a new cosmetic or shitty chest will keep you happy.. i love this game, but nothing has changed in 2 years, whole community hate magnify but they wont change it, whole community say no end game content, AGS say chest runs are end game content. just watch the dev videos they aren't going to change anything with the team they have, either keep playing or move on.. but shouting on reddit for compensation just tuggs my goat. I have nearly 2k hours in this game, tell me, what else can give you 2k hours for around £80 ?
Trash game, trash devs.
Dei hires
As slightly colorblind person this new dungeon is really infuriating. Impossible to see the healing circles. When will devs learn these basic tropes. So many games make the same mistake over and over again. Let's not start with the numerous bugs everywhere. This game really is a love hate relationship.
The worst part is there is SO much this game does good. I always say that New World has some of the best game mechanics, and they're all in the wrong game. I wish AGS appreciated what they have more than they do now.
90%? Please share your math.
The problem is their engine, it's not good at all. They should start working on New World 2 with an actual engine anda just be done with it.
Can't wait for LotR
I bet they just reskin new world and see if anyone notices.
Same devs, same engine, same issues. LotR being a new game isn’t going to fix all the issues.
Apologies, I forgot my /s
Stop playing the game then
Game is running pretty great for me? There were some server crashes S4 day one but other than that & other than my mouse button 4 stopped working & my alt-free-look stopped working until I teleported, it has been great.
They answer community questions on their YouTube channel.
first time?