This weekend there’s an open beta (details on getting into it in that link) running for New World: Aeternum, which is a kind of re-launch of New World. To be honest it’s all a little confusing to me but as best I can tell, owners of the PC version who have not purchased the expansion can access the early areas of Aeternum for free. Owners of New World and the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion (currently $30 on Steam) get the whole Aeternum kit & kaboodle for free. It sounds like your existing characters carry over but I may be mis-understanding that. On console, of course, it’s a new game with a full new game cost ($60) which honestly feels a bit steep to me, but then there’s no subscription or anything so maybe I’m just getting cheap in my old age. There is cross-play but not cross-progression, so if you decide to buy on console and PC you’ll have 2 separate accounts, which is unfortunate and odd since you will be playing with folks from other platforms.

I’ve played New World on PC, but not the expansion, and not for a long while and if I understand it things have changed quite a bit. So I decided to try out the Open Beta and chose to do it on Xbox.

I was, honestly, pleasantly surprised. The game played nicely with a controller; for me it was arguably more fun than when I used to use mouse and keyboard. When you create a character you pick an archetype which seems to just set your starting equipment. I picked one that uses a big-assed sword and a blunderbuss and that was quite an enjoyable combo. The intro is quite a bit different; a lot more cinematic and it feels more like an RPG than a straight-up MMO. But in the open beta at least you could definitely see that it was an MMO because the world was PACKED full of people to the point where doing quests was a challenge since mobs were dying as fast as they were spawning. And the chat was totally toxic; first order of business was to mute all the channels.

The basic game loop was what I remember: gather materials, craft a skinning knife, hunt boars, make food. Same first steps as it used to be. Then hunt zombies. Your character levels up but so do your weapon skills. All of this will be very familiar if you played the original game. I don’t know if the strong guild-based gameplay is still there, where a realm will hold territory and have to level up crafting stations and such. I’d need to research that since it was one of the reasons I quit playing as a primarily solo adventurer. But Amazon is billing this as a game you can play solo so maybe that stuff is gone?

Honestly I didn’t spend a huge amount of time playing. I installed the beta to re-assure myself this wasn’t a game I needed to pay attention to, but that backfired and I actually find myself having fun and thinking maybe I will pick it up, or if I go PC pick up the expansion. I’ll probably play again later in the weekend once the initial mob moves on so it isn’t quite so crowded. Heck maybe I should install the PC Open Beta while I’m at it and see how that feels. $30 for the expansion is a lot better than $60 for the whole game on Xbox or PS5!

But yeah, if you’re curious I’d say check out the beta, which is why I’m chucking this rough-draft of a blog post out into the world. I want it out asap so folks still have time to try it.

I DID play in the closed alpha on Xbox and that was pretty horrible (I was under NDA so didn’t say anything) but they’ve made a LOT of improvements since then, which is quite encouraging. And as I mentioned I found combat using the controller was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to playing more at some point.