New World”s second spring holds opportunities and dangers

The “Fresh Start” servers promise a clean break from the legacy of New World”s release problems, but also give cause for concern.

We MMO players can be a fickle lot. We”ll happily be on fire for a new online role-playing game for the first few months, only to succumb to increasing grumbling and eventually absolute indifference because the drop seems completely stale.

It has become our routine and, given the often glaring flaws in many an endgame, not surprising. Nor is our willingness to give the old love another chance when the next big expansion hits, complete with unexplored lands.

In the case of New World, however, this is only partly true, for at the moment it is not the rugged beauty of the sulphur sand desert that lures thousands of adventurers back to Aeternum. Rather, it is the promise of an unencumbered new beginning.

In this article we summarise for you the exciting opportunities this new beginning opens up and why it is already overshadowed by some problems and potential dangers.

Free from legacy issues

The so-called “Fresh Start” servers are by far the biggest player magnet for Amazon”s MMO right now, as a look at the current server utilisation reveals: Ten out of ten of the most visited servers in Europe run under this new label.

Behind this is not a special game mode that completely turns the game concept upside down, but simply a complete reset to zero hour. Because it is not possible to transfer to these servers, it is as if New World had just been released – and in a much more usable state than at the actual release.

Here, players are hoping for the launch they would have liked to have experienced back then: without exploits, dupes and player trading being shut down for weeks because of it. Without guilds that make a fortune from the territory taxes and whose market and PvP power based on them distorts the server balance in the long term.

Of course, territory ownership and taxes remain as mechanics, but the current Brimstone update makes sweeping changes to these systems. All tax revenue now goes into a large pot from which territories receive a fixed share depending on how many upgrades (up to 39) have been made.

Amazon hopes that this will lead to a more balanced balance of power as well as to an increased attractiveness of those areas that guilds have so far regarded rather neglectfully. The attractiveness of these areas depended heavily on how many players lived and crafted in the corresponding city, which in turn depended on the area level, the resources available and, not to forget, the homeliness. Who likes to live in a swamp?

Only slight signs of use

If you ask the players who have been enjoying themselves on these new servers since 02 November 2022 what they like best, they unsurprisingly name the experience of conquering a “brand new” world with so many like-minded people. Without entrenched economies and empty level areas.

Seeing vast fields of campfires outside the gates of the starting cities again, because the early main quest teaches you the camp mechanics here, brings back pleasant memories of the exciting first hours in September 2021.

Many are also rejoicing over the elimination of access keys for the group dungeons as well as the handy group finder, which can be used to assemble a battle-ready squad within minutes. Co-operative questing is still criminally not officially supported, but at least it adds a little more MMO flair.

In addition, the Brimstone update fundamentally revises the game experience during the first 25 of 60 levels, which reinforces the impression of a real fresh start. Nevertheless, “brand new” must of course be written in thick inverted commas, because one aspect cannot be reset by new servers.

Unlike really freshly released MMOs, New Worlds has all mechanics decoded down to the smallest detail and documented in written and video form. This can lead to awkward situations where new or unread players are already scolded in the first dungeon for not being familiar (anymore) with basic game tactics.

(Ir)Rational Fears

If, instead, you talk to the stock players on the “old” servers, whose world revolves not around exciting first steps but tedious striving for perfection, you hear various worries.

They have invested thousands of hours in their characters and naturally don”t want to give up all this progress in favour of being freed from old burdens. Especially since Amazon had assured them time and again that most of the gold they had swindled had been erased.

Nevertheless, there are of course churns, as can be seen from declining activity and the removal of all transfer and character creation stops on legacy servers.

This fuels the feeling that one”s own home server could now die out even faster than feared. An effect that is only dampened at the moment by the fact that the new servers are so full that some newcomers do stray to the old worlds to avoid the queues that keep appearing.

In view of the flattened XP curve and the fact that the first player has already reached the maximum level after 18 hours on a Fresh Start server, it shouldn”t take long until the game experience on both types of servers is equalised. As soon as this happens, at least one highly interesting question will finally be answered: How much damage have the release problems actually done?

On the basis of the political and economic situation on the new servers, time will tell whether and how much long-term damage the “Old Worlds” really suffer. Should glaring differences become apparent here, they could indeed soon be considered a discontinued model.

Editorial conclusion

Although less than half of the quest and level experience has been reworked so far, New World is already experiencing a second spring on the Fresh Start servers. The new and returning players are especially excited about the chance to check out the raised quality of the game in the company of many like-minded people, instead of being surrounded only by end-game characters.

As soon as the romantic pioneering phase is over, however, it will become clear whether Amazon”s MMO has really become better at retaining its players in the long term. In a healthy online role-playing game, all available worlds need the constant influx that the New Beginning servers are currently enjoying.

There is a danger that the measures will work to the disadvantage of the existing fan base and that neither the new area nor all the detail improvements will be enough to save New World from another downward spiral. This could tempt the developers to ramp up another wave of zero-hour servers at the latest when the rebuilding of the quest system is completed, and thus fall into a volatile cycle of (server) death and rebirth.