Video Game / New World

New World is a massively online multiplayer game developed by Amazon Games.

You're a sailor aboard a ship commanded by Captain Aldous Thorpe, seeking a mysterious island supposedly located in the Bermuda Triangle. Suddenly, a massive storm engulfs the ship, and you wake up stranded on Aeternum - the island captain Thorpe was looking for. After battling several zombie pirates and finding Thorpe not just insane and obsessed with finding a mysterious box he accuses you of stealing, but also possessed with mysterious power, you discover that you're now immortal - as is everyone and everything on the island.

Tropes present:

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• Applied Phlebotinum: Azoth, a source of magic that is blue, glows and can be used in crafting magic items and teleporting between shrines located all over Aeternum.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The leader of the Syndicate faction, whom you encounter in Weaver's Fen, is a certain Theophrastus Bombastus - better known as Paracelsus. He goes by Dr Theo in the game, though.
• Big Dumb Object: The Obelisk in Everfall. It's as large as a skyscraper, frozen mid-explosion and you can find a note speculating that whatever happened to it must have woken up the Ancients swarming the area. Its base hosts one of the game's dungeons, the Starstone Barrows.
• Came Back Wrong: The Lost (zombie pirates) and the Withered (ordinary zombies) apparently lost their minds and some of their body integrity over time. One of the notes even mentions that when the local fishermen found a Withered woman tangled in their net, they had to Mercy Kill her.
• Campbell Country: Brightwood, with its very much Non-Indicative Name. It's gloomy, full of sickly green fog and populated by ghosts and New England Puritan zombies.
• Common Tongue: Everyone apparently speaks English, with only a handful of characters having an accent (although, curiously, not the African and Korean characters you encounter early on).
• Death Is Cheap: Canonically no one can die on the island, but that doesn't mean you will always come back the same way after death.
• Dem Bones: The Ancients are skeletons infused with powerful magic.
• Downer Ending: Almost any quest where you have to go look for someone almost always ends with you finding them Lost or Corrupted and the quest ends with you informing the quest giver of their friends or lovers terrible fate.
• Evil Is Visceral: The Corruption covers the area in what appears to be viscera and tentacles, Red and Black and Evil All Over.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The Angry Earth, a tribe of dryad-like characters who are not at all happy with people entering their azoth-infused groves.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game had some pretty rough bugs regarding gameplay and stability during its life, but two particular bugs early on were so severe that the game had to be paused:
  • In October 2021, it was discovered that it was possible to type HTML code in the in-game chat, which could be used for a variety of exploits, including displaying images of NSFW content, kicking players in the server, as well as spamming code that tricked the game into thinking they completed a quest, showering them with gold. That last exploit in particular was of such concern that the game's wealth exchange had to be paused while Amazon was finding a fix due to the risk of completely shattering the game's economy.
  • November 2021 saw the rise of a duplication glitch applied to trophies (granting players passive bonuses when placed in their houses), causing their monetary value to tank. Once again, gold exchange had to be frozen while the devs were correcting the critical error.
• Ghost Pirate: The first kind of enemies you encounter are the Lost, who are crazed undead sailors.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Ebony Hawk story, which you piece together by doing missions for Constable Oakes. Turns out that in order to escape the island, the captain of the Ebony Hawk performed a Human Sacrifice. Not only it didn't work, but also the village of Sleepy Tallow ended up cursed and haunted by the ghost of the sacrifice, First Mate Klaus.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Humans are for the most part the good guys of Aeternum. The Ancients and Angry Earth are bad but heavily territorial (William Heron's notes that you retrieve for his quests mention that Ancients attack humans indiscriminately, but leave the animals alone). The Lost edge closer to evil but are for the most part just bad due to being mostly made up of mindless zombies and the only way to become one is to lose hope and give in to despair, hence the name. The Corruption though demonic monsters out to destroy all life on Aeternum, to the point they are enemies to everyone including The Lost and Angry Earth, unlike The Lost the Corruption is an organised evil making plans for who knows what unspeakable acts.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Corruption Crawlers and some of the Ancients lack legs, crawling on their hands to get you.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Mostly true, although the journal of Constable Oakes from First Light mentions that her son Aethelgard aged normally. Aethelgard himself left a letter that he couldn't stand seeing his mother suffer and wandered off somewhere, probably becoming one of the Lost inhabiting the province.
• Last of His Kind: Yonas Alazar is the last Soulwarden. And when you first meet him, he's very dismissive of your attempts at pulling a There Is Another.
• Occult Blue Eyes: Yonas Alazar's left eye glows blue, and he's not only immortal (which isn't that special on Aeternum), but also immune to the effects of corruption that warped a part of the island's inhabitants.
• Pet the Dog: Simon Grey was an arrogant jackass, and his own men considered him an idiot, but at least he left orders for people to take care of his dog, Barkimedes.
• Planimal: The Angry Earth include elk and bears composed of tree branches and rock.
• Power-Up Food: The Cooking skill allows you to create various stat-boosting dishes, in addition to Hyperactive Metabolism food rations.
• Really 700 Years Old: Some of the island's human inhabitants hail from the Roman Empire, like constable Maecia from Everfall. Yonas Alazar's journal notes are dated 1060 AD, and in Roman numerals, meaning he spent six centuries or so in retirement before meeting you and arrived on the island even earlier.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The most noticeable feature of the Corrupted are their glowing red eyes.
• Speaking Simlish: Using emotes and casting spells has your character spouting gibberish, with some phrases ripe for mondegreens.
• Swamps Are Evil: Weaver's Fen, full of half-sunken houses, zombies, ghosts and alligators, not to mention blight-spreading mutants.
• Take That!: Yonas Alazar, the last Soulwarden, has nothing but contempt for the factions and will happily tell you at length why they all suck.
• Walk, Don't Swim: The player character can't swim and has to walk under water. They can't breathe underwater either, and their Oxygen Meter is far from impressive.
• Wutai: Ebonscale Reach is an exception to the general 17th century European architecture of other areas, going with Chinese architecture instead.