Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

New World, Amazon Games’ Age of Exploration MMO, arrives in May

Gabe Gurwin
By
Amazon New World MMO
Amazon

Amazon Games’ hasn’t exactly seen much fruits of its development labor thus far, but that will change next May with the release of its MMO New World. The news was revealed during The Game Awards on December 12, and it represents the biggest step yet for an Amazon venture that has remained surprisingly underground since its inception several years ago.

New World is set during the 17th century in the Age of Exploration, with magical and haunted elements on an island called Aeternum. You’ll go up against enemies on the island, including fellow players as well as the local “legions,” and you’ll have the opportunity to craft your experience as you see fit.

Recommended Videos

Amazon Games is building New World as a large-scale adventure with enormous battles between players, and there will be up to 100 players fighting at once in special fortress siege battles. You will not be using MMO-style combat like we see in games such as World of Warcraft, but something that offers a little more direct control, and both solo and team-oriented players will be able to forge a path and thrive in the game. Despite taking a new approach to the genre, the game’s development team is made up of veterans from several online games, including World of Warcraft and Everquest.

Amazon New World MMO
Amazon

“Our team has been working tirelessly to create a deep, immersive world that delivers challenges and surprises at every turn, and we’re so excited to reveal a bit more of it today,” Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann said in the announcement.

New World will release in May 2020, with a beta taking place in April. You can pre-order the game through its official website, and those who pre-order will be given access to the beta as well as a special amulet, emote, guild crest set, and unique Expedition One title. It’s launching via Steam, so it appears any potentially rumored streaming service Amazon is planning to launch will not be ready before the game’s release date. We previously spoke to the game’s creators about how it’s making use of Amazon’s cloud services to aid in development and scale. A Lord of the Rings online game is also in the works.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Gabe Gurwin
Gabe Gurwin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…
One year later, New World’s never-ending MMO grind is just fine
Character using lightning in New World.

It hardly feels like much time has passed between now and last October when I dropped over 170 hours of my life into a new pirate-themed MMORPG with a suspiciously colonial-inspired backdrop. When it was still relatively new (pun intended), Amazon Games Studios’ New World promised to be a whole bunch of things that a “modern” MMORPG like Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft usually isn’t. It combined gameplay loops often seen in survival sandboxes -- for example, foraging herbs and crafting your own potions -- with a perpetual PVP battleground that determined the quality of life for all players on a server. It also promised many “old school” sensibilities like minimal fast travel and punishing combat where simple trips across the map were both expensive and treacherous.

Granted, New World really struggled to make any of these individual systems work well, and very little of the game was that much fun to play. Its combat system was thoroughly limited and repetitive, with very little changing between levels one through 60. What made the experience enjoyable was also often what made it feel so disjointed -- namely, the player-vs.-player contest for the map, which influenced elements as basic as how much it would cost to repair gear after a battle. Some people really love that sort of bare-bones, down-to-the-wire experience, but frankly, I couldn’t get past how unintuitive it felt. I walked away from New World feeling like it was mostly just OK -- a decent experiment with some pretty cool ideas that ultimately succumbed to its own emphasis on grind.

Read more
Marvel World of Heroes is the next AR game from Pokémon Go studio
marvel world of heroes announcement niantic

A new augmented reality game from Niantic is on the way, and this time it's being created in partnership with Marvel and will feature plenty of iconic faces from the comics. The game was announced today during Disney & Marvel's games showcase and has a 2023 release window.

MARVEL World of Heroes | Announcement Teaser

Read more
Dune Awakening is an open-world survival MMO set on Arrakis
Character from Dune Awakening looking at a sandstorm.

The popular Dune series made an appearance at Gamescom 2022. Unlike past games under the series' umbrella, this new title, Dune Awakening, is taking a step away from the real-time strategy genre and presenting fans with a new open-world survival, massively multiplayer online experience by Funcom.

Dune: Awakening Announcement Trailer

Read more