The Preview of New World – an upcoming open world, fantasy MMO by Amazon Games Studios – went live on August 25th, allowing pre-order users, content creators, and alpha testers to get a glimpse of the game before it is launched for PC – No Amazon Luna version yet! The test build features a vast land of 12 zones, multiple outposts, towns, biomes, and quests to take you through them all. Though this isn’t on Luna (hopefully soon), we thought we’d give it a go!
As the title of the game suggests, New World is a game about colonizing a new world in 17th century in a parallel universe where the only residents of this unspoiled continent are monsters and demons. Since you have just landed on the New World, you are tasked with collecting resources, building bases, and protecting your claims.
Ideally, this is all done as part of an in-game community. Your clan will work together to build bases, collect resources, and ultimately declare war on other settlements, hence allowing you to expand your empire. To clear a spot for yourself in the New World, you will have to fight against NPC enemies, rival players, and even the elements of the world itself.
A bit of a grind, but fun
Since the game is still in alpha phase, there is not much to talk about when it comes to real gameplay or mechanics. As mentioned above, the gameplay revolves around collecting resources, building bases, upgrading gear, and laying siege with your clan to another clan’s fortress.
Like Dark Souls, the combat feels slow and methodical. You will need to keep an eye on your stamina bar that gets depleted with each attack and can be limited by the number of items in your inventory. One important thing to note is that the game is classless, which means you can equip any weapon you want as long as you meet the Main level requirements for that specific equipment tier.
Quests, PvP and PvE
At the moment there are only a few basic quests in New World that are fairly repetitive: go to an area, kill enemies, loot their items/resources, repeat. There are certain quests that are somewhat different but those are very few. The developers are aware of this and plan to expand the quests system to offer more variety to players.
As a huge MMO, PVP is integral in New World. You can flag for PVP in any base or settlement and find small pockets of PVP on the land in the form of clan quests that help you take over rival clans on the continent.
The PVE aspect is also very important. Just like players, the growing corruption in the world will strike your towns with raids as well. These raids have the potential to devastate your town. This makes defending your town from PVE raids extremely important.
A Beautiful New World
The world is stunning. Graphically, New World is very impressive and incredible. The day-night cycle looks great and the lighting and shadows are awesome. Players will surely enjoy the scenery and what the game has to offer in terms of looks. Sound design is also very top-notch. Surround sound, player screams, tree falling sounds, mining sounds, chopping sounds, etc. are all pretty great. Everything feels realistic in terms of sound. Just don’t spam block with a hatchet or life staff as it sounds a bit silly.
New World Preview has shocked many because it’s actually pretty good (considering Amazon’s track record) in virtually all aspects. Credit goes to developers for their effort. It’s difficult for an MMO to stand out nowadays with titans like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV dominating the genre, but New World appears to be in as pretty good shape as you can expect heading into launch.
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