New World reviews plummet after chaotic launch

Amazon’s blockbuster game has been bombarded with furious reviews after some players were faced with 100-hour-long wait times.

Amazon has been roasted after a chaotic launch of its flagship video game.

New World, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game similar to World of Warcraft, finally launched on Tuesday night for Australians after a series of delays.

It had initially been announced in 2016 but had been pushed back several times since then.

It is one of Amazon Games first products but the launch was plagued with issues.

On gaming platform Steam, New World’s user review score has plummeted from the coveted “overwhelmingly positive” status – reached after well received public beta testing periods – to “mixed”.

Reviews for the game have plummeted after a chaotic launch.

The problems centre on delays in accessing the game.

As of Wednesday morning Australian time, nearly half of the people wanting to play were stuck in queues waiting to join.

“I’m 16 but I will pass my queue position to my children one day so hopefully they can play,” one user wrote on Reddit.

According to a website tracking New World server status, there were nearly 428,000 players online versus around 420,000 waiting in queue.

“Position in queue 12,532. Average wait 101h 52m 18s,” one Steam review of the game said.

“Imagine wanting to play a game you purchased on release day,” wrote one Twitter user.

“New World’s launch is a complete disaster. Twelve hours between queues, ‘maintenance’ and errors.”

Others were more scathing of Amazon.

“Imagine being a trillion-dollar company and the world’s largest hosting provider and your marquee game (the one thing that can save your flagging development arm) is launched with a max server cap of 2000 people. The complete ineptitude defies all logic and reason,” another review said.

A third review said, “Amazon owns AWS, the biggest server farm in the world, they host Netflix, Facebook, Twitter and Twitch. Yet they can’t spare enough server capacity to launch their flagship game. Very disappointed.”

9H queue for this?! pic.twitter.com/QyZhqL5uAJ

— Blaxxter (@Blaxxter) September 28, 2021

New World, which is only available on PC, had been tipped to be one of the biggest games of the year, gaining a huge interest during its beta testing where concurrent players on Steam peaked at nearly 200,000.

Amazon Games has issued a statement following the launch issues.

“We understand that some players are experiencing lengthy queue times and we are working hard on a few things to address these issues,” it said.

“We are continuing to stand up additional servers and expand the capacity of our existing servers once we have properly tested these changes.

“Our sole focus right now is to get everyone logging on and playing quickly.”

Originally published as New World reviews plummet after chaotic launch