YMMV / New World

• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the early issues the game had were the massive queue lines to log in, going in hundreds of hours of wait, and quickly reaching memetic status. Less than a year after the release, the servers became a complete ghost town.
• Good Bad Bugs: The exploit that looped characters inside the charge of the axe chop animation allowed to increase momentum ad infinity, which in turn allowed to cover huge swathes of the map in zero time, solving one of the biggest complaints of players: the enormous amount of time wasted on just running around empty space. As an added bonus, due to object clipping, it looked as if the characters were riding their axes like some sort of stick horse.
• Obvious Beta: The game quickly became infamous due to just how utterly broken and unfinished its release state was, with a plethora of bugs, poorly thought-out mechanics and even lacking the most basic precautions that have been in MMOs since the mid-00s. The issues were so severe and poorly addressed that over 90% of the initial playerbase eroded within eight weeks after the premiere, never to recover.
• Tainted by the Preview: In spite of Amazon's initial marketing-based hype, New World had a few problems going into it reputation-wise that had significant effects on the game's long-term health:
  • The big one is that Amazon has had an unfortunately very shoddy track record as a game developer: their previous titles under the "Amazon Games" development banner were Breakaway (a fantasy-themed sports game) and Crucible (a sci-fi Hero Shooter), both of which received decent budgets and marketing but were released to mediocre reception and ended up becoming rather embarrassing flops, with Breakaway never making it past its open beta before being cancelled a year before its tentative release date, and Crucible launching a closed beta, fully releasing in May 2020, returning to closed beta in June 2020, before being completely discontinued in October of the same year. Combined with New World being touted as an MMO — a type of game whose success is heavily reliant on long-term engagement — many were immensely skeptical towards Amazon's ability to maintain a game with long-term support considering that their portfolio consists entirely of stillbirths, with many seeing them as simply trying to use the company's massive financial resources to "buy" their way into success in lieu of actually making a game that anyone wanted to play.
  • One other detail giving people cold feet at the game's announcement was its premise, based around playing as colonists in 1600's America, fighting against enemies based on indigenous peoples, a very touchy sell in the 2010's. Reportedly, even the developers knew that this was a bad look, but their complaints of the game's insensitive subject matter fell on deaf executive ears, a result of "a pattern of executives neglecting advice from staff." While the Native American theming was phased out and the game shifted to a more fantasy-style Alternate History, the uncomfortable imperialist undertones still remained, lending to a further critique that Amazon was out of touch with what their prospective audience was looking for.
• Uncertain Audience: The general issue the game suffered from. Initially, it was made to cater to "hardcore PVP players", with there being little true story content, or PVE content. They then walked back on this due to players having issues with this, and focused more around the PVE aspect, while keeping a number of core mechanics the same. The result was that the game was split between being a PVP team MMO, and a PVE single-player experience, and neither were developed enough to satisfy people. "Hard core" PVP players were let down by the simple and not very complex PVP mechanics, while PVE players felt the content was too quickly recycled, and that too much of the PVE content was linked to the PVP experience.

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