The time has finally come. New World semi-restart under the New World: Aeternum banner is here. Regular readers of this column will remember that my first impressions of the new launch experience and general gameplay improvements were quite positive, but now that I can play Aeternum about my existing characters, I’m afraid my feelings are much more negative – and I suspect many veterans New World players feel the same.
In short, Aeternum contains serious missteps around endgame rewards, monetization, and a (lack of) new content. Let’s quickly go over all the ways this update is serving PC players, long-time fans, and casual players badly.
The biggest problem surrounding the Aeternum The relaunch is how existing fans have been neglected in recent months, and instead of trying to mend fences, Amazon Games seems to be doubling down on that neglect.
The relaunch is accompanied by the Trials of Aeternum event, which rewards weapon and armor skins and transmog tokens for completing in-game objectives… but not for existing characters. Only characters on the newly introduced “standard” servers can participate in the event and earn the rewards, which means you have to throw a new character on a new server to participate – and you can’t transfer your old character to the new servers .
Honestly, I find the skins quite disappointing, so it’s not the end of the world if you miss them, but it feels bad, especially in the context of everything else that’s happened in the past year, and it’s just unnecessary. What potential harm could there be from allowing older servers to participate in the event? It seems that those of us who have remained loyal to the game through all its trials and tribulations are being punished for that loyalty.
It’s a shame to also miss the flow of new players, because no one in their right mind is running on older servers at the moment. I was looking forward to using my time and experience in the game to help people; I was planning on running groups of newbies through Amrine with my healtank build. That’s not possible now.
It’s clear that the developers want everyone to re-register on the new servers to get everyone on the same page, and my existing server already looks pretty sparsely populated, but there’s no way I’m leaving my current house.
I’ve logged nearly seven hundred hours on two level 65 characters. Both are well-equipped and have maxed out gathering skills, maxed out almost every weapon skill, and two intricately decorated houses each. I will not abandon them. I would consider creating a new character to replay the story, or to play with a friend, but starting from scratch? That’s not going to happen.
Speaking of playing with a friend, I was trying to convince one of my best friends to play New World so we could play together, but that’s getting a lot harder now as the price of the PC version of the game has now increased significantly to accommodate the automatic bundling of Rise of the evil earth. It’s still available as a separate upgrade for people who own the original PC version; however, $60 for the new base game plus ROTAE and Aeternum is a heavy barrier to entry for a curious fan. (Editor’s note: We originally incorrectly stated how pricing now works; the PC Aeternum now automatically includes ROTAEhence the price change equals the console price.)
But what about the new content? The flagship features are the new FFA PvP area in Cutlass Keys and the Hive of the Gorgons raid. I have nothing against these features, but since I’m neither a PvP fan nor a hardcore raider, they don’t do much for me.
Considering that one of the key selling features of Aeternum for veterans the difference in gear score was larger, I also find it disturbing that these two activities are the main content that awards item level 725 gear (although it is apparently still possible, albeit slowly, in other PvP formats and territory invasions). All other PvE content, especially casual content, will be limited to ilevel 700 or less.
It makes sense that the new content will be more satisfying, but make sure it’s the only The way to consistently get above 700 is demoralizing. It makes all other content feel a bit pointless, which isn’t great for a game that has always struggled with sticking to the endgame. I wish we could see a return of the Umbral Shards system that allowed us to upgrade items to the equipment cap; that would allow players of all sizes to slowly earn their way to 725, while the raiders and FFA fighters get the fast track. That would be a fair compromise.
But that’s not where we’re at, and not only does existing PvE content not provide any path to 725, it’s now effectively fewer worth more than before Aeternum as elite chests no longer have a chance to drop transmog tokens. This obviously sucks, since transmog tokens were already so hard to obtain, but I don’t think this makes transmog token availability even the most serious problem.
The chance of a transmog token, no matter how small, was a reason to keep running endgame content, even if you were already too smart for it. It gave you something to look forward to, even if you’d already run a dungeon or elite area a hundred times. Now that has disappeared. When a game struggles to hold the endgame, such as New World Historically, it’s not a good idea to remove one of the key chase items that kept people consuming content.
One of the characteristics of Aeternum I was most excited about the repeatable endgame versions of the main story’s solo soul trials, but the rewards for them prove seriously subpar. Soul Trials gear ends at ilevel 675, something that will only be relevant to newly introduced level 65 characters and barely even that. You can easily get better equipment during chest runs. You also get a paltry amount of 25 gold per completed trial.
Soul trials are also time-bound; there are only three available each day, and each provides rewards once. This would be reasonable if the rewards were good, but that is not the case.
It’s strange because the only trial I’ve run so far has been quite challenging, even for a character with an average ilevel of almost 700. That’s good! Challenging solo content is why I play this game. But it doesn’t make sense that this is so much less rewarding than just a chest run.
In short, there’s no reason to ever do soul testing unless you really want to revisit that moment in the story. Pretty much anything you could do in this game would be more rewarding.
I also had some hope that the Cutlass Keys revamp would provide decent content for a mostly solo player like me, but the new “main story” missions are just a few short breadcrumb missions to introduce the raid and FFA area. That leaves only a handful of side missions, mainly of the ‘kill 10 rats’ variety. I’m pretty sure some of them are also just upscaled versions of the old Cutlass Keys quests.
It’s a bizarre contrast that there is so much marketing going around Aeternum was about promoting it as a solo, story-driven game, but the actual content of the update is perhaps the most difficult point away of those things in the history of the game. The overarching goal seems to have been to get everyone into the new raid and PvP map. It feels like Amazon is starting to shift towards a ‘raid or die’ approach to the end game.
Another little thing to note is the ongoing issue of my characters’ faces. For most of 2024, my Syndicate character suffered from a bug that made her face look like the grandma from a horror remake of Little Red Riding Hood. Aeternum updated all the character faces, and the good news is that she no longer looks so monstrous… but it’s still not exactly her old face, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the new one.
However, I have no such ambiguity about my Covenant character. Her new face definitely looks worse than the old one, and I resent having it forced on me. If the studio wanted to update the faces, it should have just added new ones and given people the ability to re-customize their characters. A barbershop has been requested forever anyway. If I force the change on everyone, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
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Ultimately, though, players like me are not its target audience Aeternumfor better or for worse. From the start, the innovation has been about attracting new players, and its success or failure will be measured by its ability to do that – and then by its ability to retain those players in the long term. But I have concerns about that too. My complaints about the endgame and rewards will also affect new players, but not immediately.
As unhappy as I am about all of this, I still want to see it New World recover and look forward to a bright future. As the archives of this column will show, I was a pretty avid fanboy of this game until recently, and I’d like to be one again.
There is good to be found in it Aeternumlike I said when I talked about the beta. The improved performance and smoother animations feel great. The changes to make PvP matchmaking fairer should be a boon to those it affects. In my opinion, New World still has the best combat and core gameplay of any MMORPG on the market, by an impressive margin.
But there needs to be a serious course correction around things like endgame rewards, and soon for that too New World loses all the new players it just won. Keeping people around after leveling has always been the biggest struggle for this game AeternumThe company’s changes seem to be making the problem worse, not better.
Aeternum in the New World is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers unravel those secrets to bring you in-depth coverage of all things New World, at launch and beyond.
