'New World' continues its quest to confuse and anger its player base

By any standard, Amazon's New World is one of the most successful MMOs to come along in quite some time, bringing new fire to a genre that has quietly dwindled over the past few years. However, its stubborn player base continues to find fault with some of the game's systems, and now New World is getting review-bombed for a controversial difficulty tweak that the developers didn't mention in the patch notes.

According to the negative reviews — and many, many posts on the New World subreddit — most of the frustration is due to an undocumented spike to high-level enemies in the recent "Into the Void" patch. Players who once breezed past level 60 content are now finding themselves outmatched by even basic foes, which is forcing them to team up with other endgame players to grind out these challenges.

Curving the wrong way — Several fans in the game's subreddit have said that this recent patch brought several deleterious changes to New World, to the point that they feel that solo play is no longer viable past a certain point. This is compounded by the fact that New World has been losing players steadily, with the player peak down by almost 100,000 since Into the Void debuted, which means that solo players have limited allies to team up with.

Over the weekend, developer Amazon Studios made a forum post that attempted to explain the reasoning behind this change, as well as acknowledging the fact that they didn't deliver "proper context" on the design logic that underlies it. "Our goal is to have a variety of areas that players can go to for crafting materials and gear," it reads in part. "But with new gear and equipment, we want players to be challenged."

Let the bombing commence — While Amazon has made it clear that it will continue to work on New World's endgame to try to deal with these issues, some fans are taking it upon themselves to express their frustration by review-bombing the game on Steam. Apparently, their goal is to get New World's overall status reduced to "Mixed" from its current state of "Mostly Positive." While we don't condone review bombing here at Input, perhaps Jeff Bezos could spare a few million to hire some data entry grunts to counter the negative influx. Now that's capitalism, baby!