About three months after its initial launch, Amazon's MMO New World has been through a lot of ups and downs. The game was a smash hit after release, but players soon ran into a quagmire of glitches, confusing game design, and absent features. At what could be a turning point for New World, a director at Amazon Games shared his thoughts on what went wrong.
Scot Lane, New World game director at Amazon Games, has shared his insights about New World before. However, this time he's looking back at the mistakes that have been made to try and figure out how things declined so quickly. He also has some thoughts about what the team could do to make things right.
According to Scot Lane, the single biggest mistake Amazon made with New World was moving too quickly. Specifically, he brought up the monthly updates, but New World also had a rather hectic birth. Players from around the world flooded in to explore what seemed like the first new blockbuster MMO in years and Amazon's servers were overwhelmed, which is why it took so long for New World to get server transfers. Of course, once Amazon had doubled the servers and started allowing players to swap between them, new problems arose.
The first version of the gold duplication glitch wreaked havoc across New World, leading the developers to turn off server transfers less than 24 hours after implementing them. Apparently, the developers have been focused on stamping out bugs ever since, especially bugs with a similar potential to destabilize New World's economy. Keeping an economy viable in a world with unlimited trees but limited coin appears to have been more difficult than Scot Lane expected. The game director stated that the constant bug alerts were quite frustrating, as they forced him to focus on addressing glitches and exploits instead of focusing on improving the gameplay experience.
More recently, Scot Lane reports that the New World developers realized that the economy was being threatened by more than just gold duplication bugs. A number of small tweaks to how resource-gathering works were packaged into the game's Void Gauntlet update. These changes reduced the amount of honey and milk gained from apiaries and cows, respectively, both to help control the amount of these items in the game and to encourage players toward adventuring.
Apparently, milk and honey are versatile cooking ingredients and making them so easy to find was making players less inclined to go out and gather resources for themselves. Scot Lane went on to state that New World is improving daily and players can soon look forward to more activities and new weapons, though he declined to give details.
Source: IGN