After four delays over the course of a year and a half, Amazon’s MMORPG New World has finally launched. Given the company’s failure to successfully launch titles in the past or even see their development to fruition, the release of New World was initially not greeted with much excitement. Then the game’s closed beta began in July and feedback from testers was predominantly positive, with the open beta in September confirming that there was growing player interest in New World. Some estimates anticipated that half a million people would be ready to play on launch day.
New World servers launched first in the European Union, then South America and Australia, and the East and West Coasts of the United States got their turn a few hours later. News from other parts of the world didn’t bode well for US players waiting to jump into the game, with people reporting queue times of days and not hours due to server capacity reportedly being capped at 2,000 people each. The situation was not helped by the fact that many gamers eager to start playing New World crowded onto EU servers to get a head start.
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The best bet to get into New World without an excessively long queue time was to be ready as the game launched in a specific region, refresh repeatedly, quickly pick a server when the list became available, and not spend more than a few seconds on character creation. The lucky few who pulled this off got into the game after a queue of only 20 or 30 people. Everybody else has had a harder time, with many still sitting in line hours later. Taking the time to create and customize a character is almost guaranteed to add hours onto the wait, and Reddit is currently filled with players expressing their frustration and sharing memes about the situation.
By the time New World servers launched on the West Coast, the last to become available, New World had already reached over 600,000 players, and people were greeted not only with outrageously long wait times to get into the game world, but many reported getting kicked from the queue or being unable to get past the game’s menu. Once inside, some players have experienced game-breaking bugs, like being unable to interact with the world due to keyboard inputs not being registered. This results in players needing to exit the game, only to find themselves back in the queue.
Understandably, many people are unhappy with the situation after having spent money on New World and eagerly anticipating the game’s release. Some players feel that Amazon, which operates one of the world’s largest server platforms, should have better anticipated launch day server loads after the betas. For now, whether New World’s first day has been inexcusably rocky or not, the only thing to do is wait for Amazon to increase server capacity, perhaps add more servers, and for the initial player rush to subside.
New World is available now on PC.
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Sources: SteamDB, Windows Central