Ultimately, New World: Aeternum is a fantastic MMO, building on the foundations of the greatest games of yesteryear. However, after 60 hours, I’m just not sure if I’ll be returning to the shores of Aeternum anytime soon.
After putting nearly 120 hours into Throne & Liberty, I wasn’t sure I was prepared for another MMO.
However, mere minutes into Amazon Games’ New World: Aeternum, I realized just how lucky gamers truly are today.
First thing’s first: New World: Aeternum is another visually incredible game; arguably the best-looking MMO on the market today. While it lacks the jaw-dropping vistas of Throne & Liberty, the attention to detail, the lighting, and the atmospheric weather conditions all make it a complete package.
If it wasn’t an iron node, a tasty rabbit, or a hulking bear distracting me from my quests, it was getting lost in the pleasure of exploring one of the game’s many beautiful biomes.
Each area felt like its own world. Unique architecture filled the streets, new flora dotted the grounds…New World: Aeternum is a visually stunning game.
That same attention to detail, the undesirable urge to stop and just think “wow, that’s neat” continues throughout much of the title.
New World: Aeternum’s classless system allows for complete freedom in character progression and development. Weapon disciplines are spread across 15 unique weapon types, allowing players to explore any avenue of combat at any given time.
Different attributes affect specific weapons, so some combinations will be more synergistic than others, depending on your character’s build. No matter what players choose, exploration of New World: Aeternum’s combat is every bit as fun as it is diverse.
This is especially effective when attempting to utilize enemy weaknesses. For instance, one should use bludgeoning weapons against skeletons. Having an arsenal of options felt rewarding and worth the struggle to learn different weapon disciplines.
Even toward New World: Aeternum’s final moments, I was switching to weapons I had never used and still enjoying every swing, punch, or spell thrown.
Weapons in New World: Aeternum are improved through use, with combat providing experience points directly toward progressing with equipped weapons, so it’s not tied to character level. With enough patience and dedication, one can master it all.
New World: Aeternum pioneers in its attempt to revive the stagnant MMORPG combat formula, delivering a fluid, responsive, and more challenging combat system than the traditionally sluggish nature of tab-targeting alternatives.
As a result, this title shares more in common with action RPGs than it does with any MMO; New World: Aeternum is as rewarding as it is punishing. It requires a careful balance of offense and defense, with abilities requiring very precise timing between animations to truly excel in combat.
Despite this, combat does admittedly feel very limiting compared to other MMO games. Characters can only equip six abilities at once (three across both a primary and secondary weapon), but it’s the backbone of the combat philosophy.
Even basic combat against grunt enemies, which you dispose of freely while doing yet another fetch or kill quest, can be troublesome. It’s as if one sees every problem as a nail, and one only has a hammer.
Rather, New World: Aeternum is more about precision, timing, and the careful blocking of enemy attacks between swapping weapons.
Its constant balancing act may feel shallow and boring to some, but it’s very much the opposite.
Even after reaching max level and mastering my Great Axe, I was still finding ways of optimizing my approach to combat. Between improving the timing of weapon swaps to benefit from buffs and effects applied from previous abilities to learning the earliest opportunity animations allows for swapping weapons, it provided a steep learning curve that rewards dedication and skill.
New World: Aeternum’s combat system is the crown jewel of the entire experience, and one of the best combat systems the MMO genre has ever seen.
New World: Aeternum’s narrative is fantastic, with beautifully crafted new cutscenes and characters spicing up the earlier hours. However, I wish I could say the same thing about the quest design – levelling to max level has never felt such a chore.
New World: Aeternum takes the run-of-the-mill, uninspiring, and largely uneventful tropes of MMORPG quest design and turns them up to 11.
Every single quest has every objective marked on the map. You’re either killing something, fetching something, or delivering something, and no thought is required for any of it.
Despite many of the side quests offering promising story segments and opportunities to learn more about the breathtaking setting, everything becomes a blur as you plow through yet another quest.
Your brain moves into autopilot. You don’t need to focus or think. You simply open the map, run to the nearest quest objective, and finish it off.
Much of this is amplified by a quest flow which is completely contrary to every modern MMO I can think of. I lost count of the times I had completed an area and walked 200 yards up the road, only for another quest to take me back to the area I had just finished.
Once or twice, user error, something I missed, or perhaps I approached the town from an unintended direction, but it happened from start to finish. Many of these areas are complex dungeons or deep caverns, requiring a lot of time and effort to fight back through that was, more often than not, not rewarded enough.
That’s not all.
Many of New World: Aeternum’s quests fall victim to another MMO trope from yesteryear – including spawn times. I cannot believe in 2024 I am standing around waiting for a five-minute respawn timer on a boss with 15 other players.
I was caught napping on that one. It was on a beach, black as night, with fog filling the air and a brooding atmosphere, it was an immersive sight like few MMOs can deliver. I missed the boss spawn. It was killed within five seconds and I didn’t get a hit for the credit.
There are worse things in a game than being distracted by awe-inspiring environments, but this was one of countless quests that required far too much time due to archaic spawning mechanisms.
It’s a stark contrast to practically every aspect of the game’s design, with each element feeling fine-tuned to near perfection. I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t now.
One such element approaching perfection is New World: Aeternum’s fantastic crafting system, one that has no modern contemporary that comes to mind.
Spread across 12 unique refining and seven production crafts, it’s an expansive system that coddles the rest of the game in a warm embrace.
Dedicating time to any of the crafts offers huge payouts, frequently. Providing expanded quest rewards through the skinning of enemies or gathering of rare resources, and rewarding exploration when mining high atop unexplored cliffs.
New World: Aeternum has everything a life skill addict would want.
I often found myself returning to trodden ground. Disappointed, I was unable to skin the hides of my latest questing victims through neglect of my Tracking & Skinning ability. Equally, I was elated when, even toward the mid-parts of the game, I was able to craft worthy weapons for my character.
I sunk a lot of time into the Trade Skills system of New World, but I don’t feel I have even scratched the surface. If you desire more than simple PvP or PvE end-game in an MMO, New World: Aeternum’s crafting system offers endless hours of rewarding venture.
Speaking of end-game content, New World: Aeternum’s is, well, confusing. It’s not the first MMO to focus on the economic and political intrigue of player-owned towns, cities, and locations, but much like every MMO before it, it makes no effort to entice players to its biggest draws.
Even at the end, as I finished the story and hit max level, I did not understand how any of those complex mechanics worked. Was it worth diving into high-end Company play? Did I want to commit to investing a lot of time into controlling areas of the map?
It’s like having a shop with no sign or opening hours, just hoping to fuel business through passerby curiosity alone. Obviously, it’s something the community nurtures, but when asked, nearly everyone will tell you to run endlessly through areas doing chest runs – which is about as exciting as it sounds.
New World: Aeternum’s dungeons offer a worthwhile alternative, with complex puzzles and challenging boss battles. However, to truly appreciate the game’s array of end-game systems, high-level Company play is a must.
Ultimately, New World: Aeternum is a fantastic MMO, building on the foundations of the greatest games of yesteryear. However, after 60 hours, I’m just not sure if I’ll be returning to the shores of Aeternum anytime soon.
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