New World
By Jeff Haynes,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
17th century tale with bloody combat promotes social play.
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New World
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Based on 2 parent reviews
Great game
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Great game
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What’s It About?
NEW WORLD is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that thrusts players into the role of an adventurer who sails across the sea from Europe to a mysterious island in the Atlantic home to monsters and magic. Once there, they join countless other players who have arrived and set up settlements with an aim to tame the evil forces that inhabit the land so they can make new homes and fortunes for themselves. As in most MMORPGs, players spend much of their time completing an enormous array of quests, which include fetching items, killing monsters, running errands, and meeting new non-player characters, among other activities. When not in battle, players will be engaged in crafting tasks, which require collecting resources and ingredients by chopping down trees, mining ore, hunting animals, and harvesting plants, then using the proper facilities to refine the raw goods into materials that can be used to make armor, weapons, jewelry, food, potions, and quest items. Virtually every action players undertake will improve one or more of their avatar's skills, and new quests, recipes, and abilities are unlocked as these abilities grow. While the vast bulk of the game can be played alone, some enemies are much more easy to deal with when adventuring with a larger group of players, and many activities require banding together with members of your chosen faction, sometimes taking on other players in battle.
Is It Any Good?
Amazon Game Studios has sort of just remade the wheel with its first major MMORPG, but it's done so in striking and effective fashion. New World is sprawling and polished, set in a stunningly detailed world and loaded with complex, intertwining systems that virtually guarantee you always have multiple quests on the go, new abilities you've just unlocked and want to experiment with, fresh gear to craft, and new achievements to earn. It's a fast-paced, nearly never-ending feedback loop of tasks followed by rewards. When exploring the world, you're rarely more than a few yards from a resource or animal that can be harvested, and landmark locations teeming with enemies are everywhere. There's so much to do that it's easy to be torn between quests and jobs and wind up sidetracked doing something other than what you planned. Players are free to swap between weapons and gear at will, which means they're never locked into a specific role or class and are generally allowed plenty of freedom in how they want to play. A handful of important features are missing at launch -- such as mounts (getting around Aeternum can take quite a while on foot) and native support for gamepads -- but these are likely to be added over time via patches.
But New World will live or die based on its community. The good news, though, is that it seems players are remaining enthusiastic and engaged. Wars between factions, the push and pull to wrest control of settlements, and the drive to band together in companies to take on some of the game's bigger challenges appears to be keeping players involved and happy to communicate and work together, creating their own meta-narratives atop the game's official stories. This community is bound to be what drives any long-term appeal New World may possess, but those interested in simply playing for the story Amazon has created are perfectly capable of doing so, since player-versus-player activity needs to be opted into (which means people can't make life miserable for folks who just want to be left alone). New World delivers about as much as a player could hope for from a brand new, non-licensed MMORPG out of the gate. It's modern, beautiful, surprisingly stable, and absolutely huge, with the promise of more content and features to come. Now it's up to the players to make of it what they will, crafting not just their own weapons and gear, but also their own stories and memories within the giant sandbox that has been given to them.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about screen time. New World is a massive game that encourages people to keep playing for months or years, so have you tried creating a schedule to manage how often and how long you play to ensure you still have time for non-gaming activities?
While New World isn't set in North America, the fact that it's about Europeans conquering a previously unknown land in the Atlantic in the 1600s can't help but evoke colonial themes, so what have you learned about colonialism in school?
Game Details
- Platform: Windows
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Available online?: Available online
- Publisher: Amazon Games
- Release date: September 28, 2021
- Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG)
- Topics: Magic and Fantasy , Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires , Wild Animals
- ESRB rating: T for Blood, Violence
- Last updated: October 12, 2021
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