New World

Lore & Background

New World is set in a fictional world during the 17th century Age of Exploration, on a fantasy island in the Atlantic Ocean known as Aeternum. Everyone who travels to Aeternum finds themselves immortal with no way to leave. The world is filled with resources to gather and enemies to face, from fierce creatures to rival players. The player can traverse this world by foot, on a mount (horse, wolf, or lion), or via teleportation between 'Shrines' located in all major settlements and different landmarks. It has a player-driven economy centered around gold coins.

Players may form groups of up to five members, join one of three factions (Marauders, Syndicate, or Covenant), gather raw materials from resource nodes, craft items, gain control over settlements, quest, explore the world, or fight other players or monsters. The gameplay involves no auto-locked targeting attacks, requiring a steady hand at aiming. With each level, hostile mobs are programmed with increasingly complex attacking behavior skill sets that require the player to counter using mana, stamina, and health with timed attacks, dodges, weapon blocks, retreats, or crawling stealth. Weapon skill tree choices include bow, hammer, hatchet, great axe, fire staff, life staff, musket, blunderbuss, spear, sword/shield, ice gauntlet, void gauntlet, flail, and great sword.

The character levels up personal attribute skills with diminishing returns, as well as weapon and trade skills. Trade skills are divided into crafting (weapon smithing, armoring, engineering, jewel crafting, arcana, cooking, and furnishing), refining (smelting, woodworking, leather working, weaving, and stone cutting), and gathering (logging, mining, harvesting, and tracking and skinning). There is also a camping skill for wilderness survival. Three quick travel methods exist, and mounts were introduced in the Rise of Angry Earth extension released October 2, 2023, adding horses, dire wolves, and lions along with a new Riding Trade Skill.

Reader's Guide

New World's significance lies in its status as Amazon Games' first major MMORPG release, arriving after the cancellation of two other PC titles (Breakaway and Crucible) and shifting development resources to this project. Its launch on September 28, 2021, set a record on Steam with over 700,000 concurrent players, though this overwhelmed servers and caused extensive queue times, with popular servers reaching a 25,000-person queue limit. Amazon responded by adding servers and offering free character transfers.

The game's business model evolved from an initially planned free-to-play game to a buy-to-play model with microtransactions for skins and housing items, a point of historical difference from subscription-based MMORPGs. A notable hardware incident occurred during the closed beta in July 2021, where high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards manufactured by EVGA were bricked while running the game, attributed to the absence of an FPS limit on menu screens causing GPUs to render over 9000 frames per second. Amazon implemented an FPS limit in response, and EVGA replaced affected cards at no cost.

Console versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, titled New World: Aeternum, were released on October 15, 2024, alongside updates for PC users. A television adaptation, 'New World: The Once and Future King', aired on December 10, 2024 as an episode of Secret Level. In October 2025, it was announced that Season 10 would be the game's last, with servers kept on through 2026, and the game shutting down on January 31, 2027.

Did You Know?

• New World was originally planned as a free-to-play game before switching to a buy-to-play model.
• The closed beta in July 2021 caused some EVGA Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards to be bricked due to uncapped frame rates on menu screens.
• The game will shut down on January 31, 2027, with Season 10 being its last.