Amazon Games Devs Reflect on Two Years of ‘New World’

28.09.2023 - 17:31 / amazongames.com / New World

Hi everyone! Here we are, two years to the day after launching New World. The Rise of the Angry Earth expansion is right around the corner, and we have so much on the horizon that we plan to share with you all, but first I’d like to take a moment and reflect on the past two years.

It has been an immense privilege partnering with you all on New World. From the beginning, it was an ambitious project to create a massively multiplayer RPG experience set in the beautiful, intriguing and open world of Aeternum. I’m thankful to Amazon Games for believing in and committing to the vision for New World, and supporting us while the game evolved along the way. One of Amazon’s guiding leadership principles is “customer obsession,” and the way in which the company and my entire team positively embraced that principle with our players is, I believe, a big part of what makes New World truly special.

A year and a half before New World launched, it was an entirely different game. It’s well documented that New World began its early life in development as a PvP-focused Survival-Crafting MMO. But in the spirit of “player obsession,” we engaged early and often with our community well before launch and learned a lot about what players liked and also where they perhaps wanted a different direction. I know this type of engagement isn’t uncommon in game development, but it’s incredibly rare for that community interaction to effect such profound, ongoing changes to a game like those New World has seen. We frequently showed the data around what fans truly wanted to Amazon leadership and they continually supported us.

It’s staggering to look at the sheer number of features and content we’ve added to New World since launch. It is no easy feat adding so much while running a live game. The team worked hard to add weapons like the Void Gauntlet and Greatsword to give more choices in combat builds. We also added content like the Tempest Expedition that put the final seal on Isabella’s story, and reworked the main story quest line to highlight the narrative, improve quality and introduce solo trials to call out a few highlights. If I listed everything we’ve added and improved in the past two years, this would be a really long read!

I’m deeply proud of the team—at the Amazon Games Orange County studio and beyond—that brought New World to life in such grand fashion and continues to evolve it into the game our players desire and deserve. On behalf of the entire team, I wanted to extend a sincere thanks to our amazing community of players: your passion and feedback are equally as deserving of praise for the game that New World is today and also for the exciting future ahead of it.

And now I’d like to extend the opportunity to my team to