It might not break new ground but the online RPG is catnip for anyone who’s been drawn in to an online multiplayer extravaganza
I’m back in one of my happy places: loitering in an hours-long queue, twiddling my thumbs, waiting to log on to the overloaded servers of a massively multiplayer game. Soon enough I’ll be back inside Amazon’s latest video game, New World, where I’ll be mining ore veins, skinning animal pelts and turning over 10 ghoul heads to a featureless character who promises a reward of experience points and a longsword juiced with a modest dexterity bonus. It’s been a long time since the mid-00s apogee of this genre, when countless World of Warcraft facsimiles broke on to the scene, eager to replicate its runaway success. (Warhammer Online, Tabula Rasa, The Matrix Online. All of them failed, it was a bloodbath.)
The business model was declared dead as studios pivoted to the Guild Wars or Destiny multiplayer format – a few hub zones populated by the spectres of thousands of players that you scarcely see or hear. This makes New World, the first game from Amazon Games since its shooter Crucible crashed and burned spectacularly last year, hilariously out of date. And yet, this RPG has managed to reinvigorate a rich, dormant genre, one that had been left to ferment for decades as the well ran dry. The numbers are mind-boggling. New World racked up 650,000 concurrent players upon release, making it the most played new game on Steam and one of the true surprise hits of the year.
Continue reading...https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Originally posted in the guardian.
