New World

Oh, MMOs, where should I even begin with them. My favorite game genre, yet one of my least played ones in the last years. I've sunk about 150 hours into New World over the past 2 months, which is the reason for the drought of other posts lately. It's a huge game, and I've not had enough time to experience everything it has to offer, but I feel I'm ready to give my thoughts on it regardless.

New World was off to a massively successful start, becoming one of the most played games in the world for about a week with around a million consecutive players. It was partly due to this that I went to give it a try, as this really seemed to be the best opportunity I was going to have to play an MMO in the nearest years. I don't think I was mistaken, but it wasn't all I had hoped it to be.
New World seems to not be entirely copy-pasted from the standard themepark formula, offering choice on where to go, what to do, and not binding you to the usual quest mill to max level. You're not forced to make the annoying class selection at the start when you have no clue who you want to be playing, and thus saved from having to run through the levelling process again if you want to change who you are. You're really going to have this one character, and commit to this one character, and that's wonderful. Similarly wonderfully, the economy seemed to be doing relatively well. Crafting and resources were well thought out as to not leave any lower ranking resources useless, and encouraging returning to lower level zones at least somewhat, if only to farm the resources there. The market was lively and there was no sign of gold inflation on the horizon. Combat was also a breath of fresh air, feeling quite weighty with staggering and blocking, and only having two hotbars of three skills each - one for each weapon. The design decisions seemed to be done quite well, so I kept playing.

The more I played, the more I started to notice problems crop up. And I don't want to complain about the login queues or the initial supposed plethora of bugs. They didn't worsen my experience, and I believe they were easy enough to avoid. Not that the login queues will be a problem anymore. At this rate, 90% of the players will have left by the end of the year, and that's more than you could chalk up to just the usual post-release decay.
But as I was saying... One of the things I initially loved about the game was that even during the levelling process, the game was never too easy. It was simple to get in over your head and get yourself killed to monsters. While that difficulty theoretically never went away, there was one large oversight. As you explored the open world, the game showered you with quests and things to do. It was great, but those quests had rewards, and being the completionist I am, I wanted to complete all of them. 20 hours into the game, I was far overlevelled for all the content I was going into, and for the rest of my 130 hours, that sweet difficulty that kept me from getting bored was gone.
And yet, why was I doing them? I could skip them, go for the harder, more fun quests and areas. The rewards I was going to get from the higher level quests would overshadow whatever I was getting now anyways. I didn't stop to really ask myself this until I had maxed my level and the game goaded me towards the end-game content. ... I think I didn't want to do whatever the end-game had planned for me. The quests, despite their repetitiveness and simplicity, were more interesting. I got achievements, and got to watch the map and other progress bars slowly become more complete. The end-game was already being streamlined into the most efficient speedrun-like grinds for better equipment or gold on the PvE side, and I didn't have interest in the PvP, it being either dominated by guilds picking their favorites into the organized matches, or whichever side brought more people. Filling up those achievement bars was the most fun I was going to have, and I sat down to think if that was good enough for me.

On the other side, the game wasn't static for 2 months. It was getting updates at a brisk pace, and it had to do something to fix the issues that were cropping up the more people played. But as they fixed one problem, another cropped up, and I am not convinced that they could stop this huge bleeding of players that was happening. While they surely massively exceeded their initial popularity requirements, I'm not sure that it's going to be bringing in enough money soon, and I genuinely worry about Amazon cutting funding from it.
To return to the previously posed question, the content grind was not good enough for me. Not in this state of the game. Not when the future is so uncertain. While New World was a very refereshing MMO experience, and definitely better than most other MMOs I've tried in the past several years, it wasn't unique enough to keep my attention further. I don't regret the time I put into it, but I do wish to refrain from investing any more, until Amazon proves they can stabilize the game while continuing to provide meaningful updates. I will be returning in the future to check up on how it is doing, and perhaps even returning to play if I find things well improved. As for if I would recommend New World? Tough question, but probably so if you like MMOs, especially themeparks, and it is not dead by the time you read this.