NEW WORLD

An MMO worth attention for its combat and PvP wars

- Tyler Wilde

Earlier versions of Amazon’s MMO nagged players with thirst and hunger, but now a sip of water just replenishes a little health. Not much is precious to this team: if it isn’t working it gets cut, or revised. The survival systems didn’t make it, but you can still camp and cook up buffs.

New World’s action combat system is one of the few exceptions. Amazon is committed to making you physically connect swords and arrows with your targets—no clicking once and watching ‘X hits Y’ scroll by in the chat window.

It’s impressive that hit-detection works as well as it seems to in 100-player battles. A few times an arrow or bullet whizzed by me because the shot threaded a gap in whatever animation I was in the middle of. If one of my shots failed to connect, I had to assume the same thing happened, even if it appeared to hit its mark from my far-away perch on a fort’s battlements. (And I didn’t expect to hit much at that range, given that my arrows had to arc perfectly into squirrelly players.)