In February, Bloomberg wrote that "Amazon can do anything but a good game." Ten months later, judging from the performance of "New World", Bloomberg's statement seems to have been fulfilled once again.
If you want to choose this year's most surprising game, "New World" must be on the list, before the start of the test, no one thought that Amazon, which has been practicing in the game industry for 8 years but almost no grain, can come up with such a high-quality, and popular MMO game, and after the game is officially launched, I am afraid that few people can predict that "New World" can lose nearly 90% of players in two months, and quickly "cool down".
According to SteamDB, Amazon's New World is expected to sell two to five million copies, and its simultaneous online number of people peaked at 913,000 on September 30 this year, surpassing V's two gods, Dota2 and CS:GO, to become the game with the highest peak number of online users on Steam in 2021. Today, New World has only 104,000 people online at the same time every day.
At the same time, as a major reason for the success of "New World", "live broadcast", the audience's enthusiasm for the game is also rapidly cooling, according to TwitchTracker data, on the same Amazon Twitch, the average number of viewers in the "New World" division in the past 7 days is only 6755 people, and the average number of viewers in each live broadcast room is less than 20 people, only 19.6 people. Whether it is the number of live broadcast rooms or the total length of time that netizens watch, the "New World" partition on Twitch has fallen by about 80% in the past two months.
For reference, at the beginning of the game's launch on September 28, the number of viewers in the "New World" section on Twitch was as high as 970,000.
As early as September 27 this year, Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Game Studios, said in an interview that "New World" will be a big hit game, "to bring Amazon games to new heights." Although from the perspective of Amazon's game history, this sentence is still true even today, for the failure of such a blockbuster game, the game official still needs to sum up the lessons.
Recently, Scot Lane, the game director of New World, was interviewed by PCgamesN and showed us the state of the game's post-release team from a behind-the-scenes perspective, part of the reason for the game's failure, and the subsequent development direction of "New World".
Part of this article comes from an interview with PCgamesN.
The game should be in the EA, and the informal version
As early as July this year, during the testing phase of New World, the game did not set a frame limit on the menu interface, coupled with evagana's ancestral radical drive, resulting in many players' graphics cards being burned out. From the author's afterthought, this may have laid the groundwork for various bugs after the game was launched.
After the launch of "New World", Amazon's lack of operational experience in this large-scale MMO game was also completely exposed. As a world-renowned cloud service company, the popularity of "New World" when it was launched clearly exceeded Amazon's imagination, and the game exploded instantly, once becoming a "queuing simulator" in the mouth of players.
After that, the game is a small problem, THE UI jam, character invincibility and other bugs and optimization problems emerge in an endless stream, and even the emergence of game mechanics loopholes, resulting in serious inflation in the game, so that Amazon directly shut down the in-game economic system for a whole day. But then the derivative problem re-emerged, according to the comments on Steam, many players unknowingly bought items swiped by other players on the official exchange using BUG and were banned by Amazon.
Regarding the various problems in the early stages of the game, Scot Lane said that the experience of "New World" will be an opportunity for team learning, and admitted that due to the many problems in the early days of "New World", it was blamed on the team's lack of manpower and experience, during the testing stage, as well as after the launch, "the team was tired of solving various bugs in the game, but ignored the communication with the players and understood the real needs of the players".
Of course, after the game was launched, as a small number of Amazon games, this problem was also solved. Scot Lane said that for the update of the game's subsequent major versions and daily maintenance, "as long as the game is alive, these will be the team's first priority". Taking the game's latest December update as an example, Amazon has set up a team of "game engineers, designers, and artists" dedicated to the development of the December update content, which is different from the team that is usually responsible for the daily repair of the game.
As for the most important work of New World at present, in Scot Lane's view, it is still "the daily maintenance of the game", Scot Lane said in an interview, "we have made some mistakes because of too big steps", Amazon has invested a lot of resources in the testing of the game and PTR (test clothing) servers, "we have invested a lot of energy to ensure that the player has a great game experience, but when we can't reach this it will be painful."
Lone wolves will be taken seriously, but PVP remains the focus
In addition to summarizing the team's mistakes over the past few months and the focus of work, Scot Lane also discussed the current status of the game after the December update "The Void Gauntlet" and the focus of Amazon's operation of New World in the short term from the perspective of developers, and answered some questions about the game mechanics that players have always been concerned about.
Regarding the problem of high repeatability and lack of attractiveness of player feedback late-game content, Scot Lane said that the content that players experience after completing the level is only a small part of the game mechanics, "Players naturally want more, and we must do better."
At the same time, New World will also improve the pre-game mid-game experience, providing better gameplay content for single-player players. In general, New World will continue to explore the future direction of the game according to player feedback and opinions.
As an MMO game, PVP is naturally the focus of New World. For the game's PVP system, Scot Lane said that it is happy to be able to meet the needs of some players in the December update, in the short term, New World will continue to add weapons and equipment to the game while meeting players' expectations, and prevent too strong an impact on the game's ecology by timely balance adjustments.
"Balanced adjustments and new weapons are what we want to do throughout the life of New World."
In addition to new weapons and equipment, the territory system is also an important part of the New World PVP mechanism. Scot Lane said in an interview that the territory system existed early in the development of New World, and that a large part of the reason for adding war mechanics to the game was to make the territory system more fair and interesting.
And the war system affects the game's social system, Scot Lane thinks "it's cool to limit unions to relatively small sizes so you can get to know everyone, just like you would make friends in real life." ”
But as early as last month, due to the decline in popularity of "New World", a large number of new servers that Amazon quickly created in order to solve the problem of long queues to log in became ghost clothes, and a developer named Kay in the official forum of the game said that "New World" was about to merge servers. However, Kay also said that the territorial distribution problem faced by the joint service "still needs additional tests."
As for the subsequent opening of new servers to allow players to re-expand in the New World, Scot Lane said that the official has noted the feedback of some players, but the discussion on this issue is currently far away. In short, no new clothes will be opened in the short term.
However, Scot Lane, while cutting off some of the players' thoughts, also drew a big pie, he said in an interview that at present, players only see "part of the game map", Amazon has no restrictions on the size and assumption of the entire world, and also promises that "server hardware and number are not a problem", "New World" will grow with players.
New World is still young
At the end of the PCgamesN interview, Scot Lane also talked about the problem of new players in the game, although the game is high and low, but from the expression of Scot Lane, it is not difficult to see that Amazon still has a longer-term plan for "New World".
As an MMO online game, although the game has attracted millions of players to pay, but due to the early reputation of the game and the long-term bad reviews of players on Steam, the "ordinary version of 149 yuan, deluxe version of 188 yuan" paywall will inevitably limit the influx of more new players.
At the same time, New World imposes strict restrictions on the characters that players can create, and each server can only have one character per player. It is difficult for new players to obtain, and old players cannot create trumpets, and the "aging" phenomenon of the entire server will inevitably become more and more serious.
But in response to This, Scot Lane said that the current game does not increase the level cap, directly and rudely let all players liver the game plan. Combined with the game's December update, PVP is no longer limited by equipment levels, old players can not crush new players, players can buy or trade equipment levels, but also affected by life skills and other Watermark related, these adjustments are not difficult to find that the official is more inclined to adjust the PVP to give players the motivation to continue to experience the game.
In response to PCgamesN "What other changes are in the making?" Asked, Scot Lane said that while the game still doesn't have mounts, players may move faster in the future, while there are plans to give players access to their equipment inventory as they run. And the studio will continue to optimize the game's map and mission system according to the discussion and opinions of the game forum and Reddit netizens to enhance the game experience.
Combined with Amazon's history in the game industry, GameLook regrets the cliff-like decline in the number of players and attention of "New World", but from another aspect, Amazon may also need to go through this.
Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Game Studios, once said: "Create 2-3 AAA service games to attract millions of players and keep the game up and running for more than 10 years." Scot Lane also said in this interview that the entire New World team is humble about the achievements of the game.
When the grand ideal meets the fledgling team, a momentary failure is inevitable, Amazon's game dream has just emerged, as Scot Lane repeatedly emphasized, Amazon's team and games will gradually become stronger in communication and run-in with players.
····· End ·····
GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
Global vision / depth is material