New World: Aeternum
Released: October 15th, 2024
Developer: Amazon Games
Publisher: Amazon Games
Systems: PC (as New World), PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S
New World: Aeternum came out recently, bringing the “hit” Amazon game to consoles at last. Thanks to confusing messaging, people have asked me if it’s a brand new release, an expansion, or some sort of retread. Simply put, New World: Aeternum is the console version of New World, which released on PC in 2021. That's it, really.
I’ll tell you the only thing you really need to know about New World - it’s an MMO.
Aeternum could easily have been called MMO: The MMO, it’s such an MMO. It’s about as MMO as an MMO can get, MMO’ing its heart out to MMO as hard as any MMO could MMO.
Admittedly, I’ve become very addicted to this game, but please do not take that as an endorsement. Aeternum is addictive because it is an MMO, using every MMO trick in the MMO book to get its hooks into a player the same way any MMO does.
It keeps you dangling, giving and withholding in a delicate balance to provide just enough dopamine to keep chasing it when said dopamine is taken away.
There are so many things to level up, so many ways in which you can feel invested, so many ways to sink your time to such a degree you’ll feel it’s wasted if you don’t sink more. So many ways to disappoint you, frustrate you, and leave you feeling shortchanged, all while promising more.
And of course, it’s all built upon a foundation of grinding, because it’s an MMO.
There’s a narrative element, but because it’s an MMO, it barely even matters. You’re on an island where nobody can die but everyone’s dealing with The Corruption(™) because of course they are. Modern videogames love their Corruption, after all. There’s also an angry man with a metal face over his regular face, and a bad magic lady called Madea (not that one).
Not much has been done to mask what an afterthought the writing is. Story arcs are breezed through without much development for the stock characters and you don’t even get dialog choices for flavor - talking to NPCs is a linear track where all decisions are made for you. The plot is such an obvious excuse that I just couldn’t muster a damn.
New Worlds has an “Age of Discovery” vibe - y’know, colonization n’ shit. Don’t worry though, because the game’s disclaimer makes a point of telling you it’s very diverse and sensitive. I mean, there have certainly been worse games messing around with this kind of setting. At the very least, the admittedly prevalent diversity among the cast was a savvy move.
Something tells me not every player would appreciate that though. At first I thought it was funny when my server was chosen for me and I received the message, “Entering Phoenix,” since that’s already one of my favorite things to do. I had to leave that server because the Global Chat was full of discussions about Romanian people and, well, players weren’t saying nice things.
I think it would be helpful if Amazon could provide a list of servers in order from least to most racist so we know which ones to avoid.
Anyway, there’s fishing.
Obviously there’s fishing, because it’s an MMO. There’s mining, and logging, and picking shit up off the floor. There’s crafting, loads of crafting, an MMO-sized amount of crafting. I’ve wasted hours doing all this nonsense, propelled by sheer compulsion. I’m not about to pretend I’ve had a terrible time doing it all, but this is nonetheless a cynical gameplay loop that’s been honed to arresting perfection.
I do have positive things to say though. No matter how calculating a game might be, it’s got to have some good qualities to keep me on the reel. I’d have been even more positive, however, if everything hadn’t been monetized to all fuck. Funny how that tends to immolate any goodwill I might be inclined to have.
The combat and character progression is quite enjoyable, possibly the only aspects of the production that aren’t more convoluted than they need to be. You start off picking an Archetype, determining the attributes and weapons you begin the game with. Archetypes aren’t ironclad classes and won’t lock you into any set path.
Improving stats is quite simple - when you level up, you only need to worry about putting skill points into the attributes that pertain to your chosen weapon, and each weapon will scale with either one or two stats. You want to use a bow? Go purely with Dex and you’re sorted. Until level 60, you’re free to respec and experiment at any time.
Up to two weapons can be equipped and their own upgrades are straightforward too. As you fight, your equipped weapon types will level up, allowing you to unlock various special moves and passive bonuses. Both weapons will get XP, even if you only use one. Again, that’s all there really is to it.
Every weapon is interesting in its own way and the cooldown abilities they get are pretty cool. The Great Axe, for example, can unlock an attack where you throw it to rip a hole in reality that pulls enemies in. It’s a ludicrous concept, especially for a pure strength weapon, but it’s fun. There are spears, muskets, elemental gauntlets, magic sticks, and all the ones I’ve tried are pretty entertaining.
Unfortunately, any weapon you use will give you an immediately poor first impression thanks to one issue - their sound effects are fucking terrible. Even the biggest, heaviest armaments will sound as impactful as a loving slap on the butt, with some just coming off like wet farts. It’s genuinely stunning to hear how bad they are for the first time. A blade bigger than an Alsation shouldn’t sound like a pair of scissors closing.
Naturally, your adventures are propelled by loot, with a whole bunch of offensive gear and wearable stuff being thrown at you as rewards for questing and crafting. There’s nothing Aeternum does here that’s really new - as with any RPG of this stripe, you just keep replacing your stuff with better stuff to keep making the Stuff Numbers go up.
Gear has a really nice aesthetic. You’ve got all sorts of fancy hats, cool masks, pretty dresses, and badass longcoats. You can recolor items, but as with too many RPGs, the colored dyes are super rare considering how transitory one’s gear always is.
You won’t be surprised to learn some of the coolest looking items are secured behind a paywall, but we’ll get to all that nastiness.
I’m a big fan of vivid, saturated colors, and this game loves them as well. There are some incredibly pretty and vibrant environments that become especially pleasant depending on how the sunlight hits them. Animations are sadly not as good, with characters moving stiffly or flapping about with few facial expressions to speak of.
I like the fishies. I wish you could do more with them than merely craft and use a few rare ones as trophies, but they look neat. I want to keep a big tadpole as a pet.
The grinding is everywhere. From chopping down trees to tanning leather, every act has its own leveling system that requires a ton of repetitive chorin’ and lengthy animations to unlock stuff. The fact you have a separate skill for logging and woodworking should tell you all you need to know.
Yup, it sure is an MMO!
As part of its addictive loop there’s always something to grind for, always something that’s out of reach. The carrot of a payoff is forever dangled, and forever it shall be. Just a few more hours and you’ll be able to mine that glowing ore you keep seeing!
There’s a cute rhythm minigame where you play music to get temporary passive buffs. The tunes are great, the different instruments sound lovely, but even that involves a grind of leveling and upgrading.
None of what I’m saying will surprise the average MMO player because Aeternum is as distilled an MMO as a game could be. Nothing less and certainly nothing more. It’s got all the PvP, raids, factions, and systems upon systems that you could find by picking any other MMO at random.
It does that really shitty thing such games do where resources and enemies are offered on a “first come, first served” basis. Finding some rare trees and watching as other players get in first and chop them down is disheartening. Shooting an animal and having some opportunistic fuckface run up and skin it before you get there is just plain bullshit.
If you have to kill a certain enemy on the map, you will either benefit from other people around to help fight it, or get there after it's already defeated, which means you’ll be waiting an unknown amount of time for the bastard to respawn. This is made worse by how there explicitly isn’t enough for everyone.
Then there are all the little ways in which the game is simply being a dick.
Unreasonably convoluted fast travel, towns with individual instead of universal storage chests, resource/currency fees for everything from crafting to selling, daily limits, currency caps, massive activity cooldowns, just a parade of arbitrary penalties and petty restrictions. Y’know, MMO bullshit. Because it’s an MMO.
All the waiting and tedium likely isn’t considered a problem by the designers, since feeling cheated is part and parcel of getting stuck on that dopamine chase. Plus, I can only believe Amazon’s executives are getting off on making customers compete for resources. Something tells me that watching others fight over scraps is their kink.
Speaking of what makes Jeff Bezos’ boner dribble, Aeternum’s full of microtransactions.
It’s sadly not a shock that the most exotic and fun cosmetics are paywalled. Some outfits cost vile amounts of cash obfuscated by a garbage premium currency. There are mounts, but if you want to ride all but the most basic of animals, you’ll need to pay. The ratio of in-game to premium mounts is fucking grotesque, so extreme that I’d say almost all the available ones require real money.
Any game that’s monetizing transmogrification, by the way, is acting like a total cunt.
If anything is going to stop me playing, it’ll be all that nonsense. The discouragement of knowing you’ll never play enough to get the really good shit does a good job of souring an experience. Given how microtransactions are an ableist concept designed to target certain types of people, as a neurodivergent person I have to stop playing games like this anyway once the temptation to spend becomes too great.
It’s fucking sad that you can get so into a game you need to stop playing to protect yourself from it. Even sadder is just how normalized such malicious games have become.
Of course there’s a battle pass with the usual free and paid tracks, since no amount of money is enough for the vampires running videogames into the ground. You’ll be constantly reminded of the pass’ existence with pop up notifications, as everything you do relates to its progress in some way.
I think I’d have been a lot more positive about some of the things Aeternum was doing if it wasn’t all being done in such dedicated service to evil.
Also if it wasn’t completely broken.
Aeternum crashes so much you’d think it was doing so by design. It can’t last even a couple of hours without crashing, and sometimes it’ll do so even more frequently than that. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a big budget game randomly melt down to this degree, not even one made by Bethesda. It’s almost comedic, but falls just short of amusing due to it being fucking aggravating.
If you’re going to have the nerve to charge sixty bucks and grasp for hundreds of dollars more, you should at least have the requisite scrap of decency to provide a game that isn’t borderline defective.
Less severe issues are abundant. I’ve been stuck between the transition from dialog to gameplay, unable to speak or move. Animations can break completely, various actions might randomly stop before they’re completed, and voice lines can go missing. A recent patch only seems to have made things worse.
One “fun” bug saw the game start with absolutely zero UI or HUD loaded. This not only disabled aiming reticles and onscreen information, but every single menu as well. Interaction prompts wouldn’t load, and without them I couldn’t do anything except attack. Not sure I’ve seen a game do that before.
Despite the backing of one of the largest corporations in the world, New World: Aeternum is ultimately an “also ran” of a title that does far too little to stand out and pretty much relies on the Amazon brand for attention. Without the novelty of the name, there's nothing to give it an edge.
It’s got pretty environments, the combat is decent, and I admittedly became quite addicted to it. It’s specifically designed to be addictive though, so that on its own cannot be taken as a sign of true quality. Not only that, the calculated gameplay loops in effect are ancient psychological tricks, nothing Amazon Games could take credit for innovating in the slightest.
I really wouldn’t have minded getting sucked into the compulsion loop if it wasn’t there solely to exploit me for cash, but that’s the motive, isn’t it? It’s always the fucking motive. New World: Aeternum is just another game that does nothing to deserve its asking price but has the insulting nerve to try and charge even more on top.
I’m so tired of this manipulative garbage. I can't wait to stop being addicted to it.
4.5/10
