Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees In Its Games Division - Aftermath

Goronmon@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 167 points –
Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees In Its Games Division - Aftermath
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They made New World and were supposedly working on a LOTR MMO.

Didn't New Worlds turn into a ghost town month after launch?

Yeah it cratered pretty hard, but they have been adding content to the game. Launch was a buggy clusterfuck.

I played at launch and yeah the bugs is what drove most people away. They were exploited pretty hard, there was like a 4 or 5 day period there where 3 seperate dupes were discovered and they didn't do any roll backs

Not entirely well versed in the New World Saga but from what I've heard and read here's roughly what happened:

  • The dev team was developing a hardcore always-on PvP MMO, which is fine but not for everyone
  • Playtest rolls around and the devs get back player numbers you would expect for a hardcore PvP MMO
  • Speculation: the higher ups really don't like the projected return on their investment given the abysmal (for their ideas) player numbers and force the Studio to pivot to PvE content
  • At this point the entire game has been designed around PvP and the devs now have only ~1 year to somehow shove PvE content in there
  • Launch comes and since the devs had to spend all available time on forcing in PvE content what is present is buggy and doesn't fit the game mechanics
  • Ensue several months of panicked back and forth patching of the game by the devs, making the entire mess worse because everyone is pissed by one change or another

To be fair, a lot of the game breaking launch bugs that hurt the game for me were with PVP (specifically, the instanced wars). I do know there were others but those PVP bugs are what I'll always remember. The lag, the broken healing, the hatchet exploit, and a few others.

I bought new world, never actually played it, I had tried the beta and said well this seems cool and got it then never played it at launch

Might wanna get to it eventually before Amazon shuts it down