TYFP

New World currently has a very unique culture of players. It’s playerbase already has its own internal politics regarding the economy and PvP, as well as faction rivalries, and episodes of cross faction politics that rival some Game of Thrones scripts.

New World has yet to officially release.

In many MMOs released in the past, player paradigm before and after beta exists, however the number of players in MMOs of the past pales in comparison to how many people have been exposed to the current game through level cap, let alone the amount of people who have either played or watched the first 100 or so hours of content unfold. AGS’ game in Beta crushed the entire ‘Just Chatting’ category on twitch. An entire category fell to New World. In this current open beta test, its rivaling world class free to play games on steam player counts.

New World is breaking new ground in game development, perhaps not in terms of graphics, or game systems; its not the first game to incorporate any of it’s current main features, however no other MMO beta has been in this unique situation before.

The game is yet to actually be released, and has so far, had 5 official delays and 5 major test phases, some marked by severe problems either in gameplay, but at least one major in player behavior.

In January 2020 it had to scrap its entire PvP system due to overwhelming player killing by high level players. The current debate on the forums and social media groups is PvP scaling, not surprisingly revolving around a small number of people wanting to be able to use levels and gear to easily defeat newer players, and the others recognizing that in a game where territory control requires people of all levels to participate want the scaling system to remain intact.

And I reiterate, the game hasn’t even been released yet.

What this means for the player base and player culture moving forward is anyone’s guess. New players will likely experience the game as released and be fine with the system rules, limitations, and rewards; while those in Beta may mourn their loss of older features. This happens in every beta, but it doesn’t seem likely that any other beta has broken as many player count records as New World has.

In current MMO’s it doesn’t take very long for an active and dedicated player base to build a comprehensive wiki about a game. But I’m pretty sure this is the most complete wiki for the most unreleased game in history of MMOs.

The one thing I am hopeful for is that the sheer amount of people who now have first hand experience and expectations of this game are not able to taint the release for players joining after all of this tumult.