Amazon Games released New World last week, a classic Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. It’s noteworthy for two reasons. First, the fact that Amazon Games actually released a finished, fully-functional game. Second, New World soared to the top of Steam’s player list, boasting a million players on launch day.
The popularity has led to major server issues for the online game, including queue times of several hours for the original servers. On September 30, Amazon Games released a statement that they were “frankly surprised by just how many adventurers washed up on Aeternum’s shores.”
Since then, they’ve more than doubled the number of servers and increasing server capacity. That’s great news for incoming players. But for those who started early, those original servers still rapidly fill up.
We are implementing a new feature to indicate if a world is full.
You can check if a world is full on the server status page!
🧭 https://t.co/ApBPXyPC90 pic.twitter.com/ai8GzNmQ1y
— New World (@playnewworld) October 2, 2021
The next solution is to prevent new characters from joining those older servers, by disabling character creation. As of October 1, full servers will be grayed out with a message saying character creation has been disabled to prevent overpopulation.
You’d think by 2021 we’d have figured out MMO launches by now. On the other hand, having so many players wanting to play your game is a good problem to have.
According to Steam’s player count stats, New World still has over 900,000 players at peak each day. It’s currently only available on Steam, and rated T for Teen with Blood and Violence (online interactions not rated).
