With New World: Aeternum, Amazon Games is bringing its action RPG MMO to consoles after several years exclusively on PC. This new version of the game is essentially a relaunch for the title, making many quality-of-life improvements and including a brand new onboarding process, ensuring new players get off on the right foot. At Summer Game Fest Play Days, we were able to check out Aeternum's earliest moments, and while it's far from perfect, we found ourselves falling into the typical action RPG rhythms very easily.
MMO titles are typically quite complex affairs, and while New World: Aeternum is no exception, it seems to have been translated quite effectively for play on a controller. After selecting a character archetype (we went for the Musketeer), we found ourselves going through pretty standard tutorials, teaching us basic attacks and defensive manoeuvres. All your basic melee strikes are on R2, with the other shoulder buttons reserved for special, class-based skills you'll unlock as you progress. After acclimatising ourselves to the controls, it all felt pretty natural on a pad, and we slashed our way through the game's first steps with ease.
With an introductory cutscene out of the way, the demo placed us into the main map, where a couple of friendly faces helped get us acquainted with some of New World's systems. Some slightly shonky voice acting aside, these characters seemed fairly well written, and are ultimately still part of the game teaching the player. The way you level up, earn skills, and so on all seems very straightforward, and the Ul is relatively intuitive, save for some slight confusion amid the menus.
We learned about how missions work — essentially the same as in every other game ever — and about hunting wild creatures for resources. Using these materials, you can trade for other goods, cook meals, or craft new items. Again, it all should be pretty familiar stuff if you’ve ever engaged with this type of title.
So, the gameplay works well on a controller, which is half the battle with bringing an MMO to consoles, but it’s frankly nothing we haven’t seen before. As we engaged with simple bad guys, dodging and dishing out pain, we couldn’t shake the feeling that New World: Aeternum may struggle to set itself apart from the competition.
To be completely fair, playing an MMO for 25 minutes is hardly grounds for full judgement. We only sampled one class, for example, and each of them has access to a whole suite of combat skills we haven’t yet seen. This is one of those games that’ll only start to really shine once you’ve invested a good chunk of time — and the MMO elements weren’t fully present in our demo.
From what we have played, it seems like a fine action RPG, but our concerns remain as to whether it’ll truly be able to stand out from the pack. New World: Aeternum will need a lot more investigation before we can know for sure.
New World: Aeternum is coming to PS5 on 15th October, 2024. Are you interested in this one? Let us know in the comments section below.
Comments 10
Why you refer all the time to MMO? Isn't that converted MMO game to regular Singleplayer RPG and MMO part is "dead"?
I think you misunderstood what are you playing. It is just regular game for consoles.
Off topic: There is new system software update just came on my PS5, 1.2gb in size.
Edit. https://blog.playstation.com/2024/06/13/ps5-players-will-soon-be-able-to-join-discord-voice-chat-directly-from-their-console/
It's discord upgrade basically
New world.. same as the old OLD world
@REALAIS What are you talking about? It's the same MMORPG that exists on PC but now it's on other platforms. Why would you think they've redesigned it as a single-player game? To be honest, I have no interest on this game so I have been following it, but I just googled around a bit and nothing suggests any change.
@Matroska Open Youtube Playstation, find New World Announce Trailer and read description. Open World Action RPG...
Go to Steam, and check why New World has 10% Overwhelmingly Negative Recent reviews.
New World community expected some news about future of game and updates etc, but they announce RPG New World on consoles. They took everything MMO have and repackaged as RPG. I dont know how you can't find info in internet.
How it would not be suspicious, that nowhere is written MMO in anywhere where is mentioned PS5 version/console version.
@REALAIS You are joking right? The fact that there’s going to be a beta at some point on consoles is proof enough it’s still an MMO. I don’t know how you can’t find that info on the internet.
@Kiefer-Sutherland if you say so. Presentation of game in Summergamefest and as I mentioned in Playstation video nothing points to it as MMO which would for example throw gloves towards FF14 as example.
As far as I can tell from reading the official New World website and a couple of others (digital trends, GameSpot) it does NOT look like the MMO aspect has been stripped from the game. There is a bit of talk about changes in the game to make it easier to "solo" the content and a revamp to classes and combat to make it more palatable to console users.
But nothing actually says NEW MMO FOR CONSOLE either.
MMO or action RPG seems to be splitting hairs as the full abbreviation since forever is MMORPG. So in New Worlds case it's an MMO(A)RPG. Calling it an action RPG doesn't disqualify it from being an MMO.
Anyway I played it for a bit on PC was into it for a couple of weeks then fell of it. Just wasn't that interesting of a game.
Another big focus for us was making Aeternum a single-player experience all the way through," Verafaillie said. "In other MMOs, you're sort of forced to do endgame raids with other players. We have endgame raids too that will require other players, but we've also added new repeatable solo trials that will let players continue to improve their gear if they prefer to go it alone."
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