Amazon has been working on its big-budget MMORPG for quite some time now. However, with everything that’s going on in the world, it seemed a delay was inevitable. What we didn’t see coming was another delay. They already pushed it back in July 2020, aiming for a Spring 2021 release date, but that doesn’t appear to be happening now.
The game is now shooting for a release on August 31st 2021, and while I doubt they’ll want to delay again – if it’s happened twice, it can happen again.
That being said, I’m not foaming at the mouth like a typical CyberPunk enthusiast would have been at another delay. If anything, though, those gamers should have learnt a lesson. Delays are there for a good reason; it’s not bloody finished yet.
With all that’s going on in the world, I’m sure Amazon are eager to get this into the hands of all the gamers who are stuck at home. Alas, their developers are also stuck at home, which really slows down the creative process. I’d rather it came late and right than now and broken.
What Amazon Had to Say
Last August we held a Preview Event with the goal of sharing our progress while collecting as much feedback as possible. We invited hundreds of thousands of players to experience New World. Your feedback and gameplay experiences validated our thoughts of what improvements and additions we needed to make. Since then we’ve polished the combat system, added quest variety, expanded weapon and armor variety, added fishing, expanded the map to include a new region Reekwater, overhauled our crafting system, and continued to add mid-game and end-game content.
We’ve been hard at work on compelling end-game features we believe are important to include at launch. These features won’t be ready for the Spring timeframe that we had communicated. With that in mind, we will release New World on August 31, 2021. With this extra time we’ll be able to add these substantial improvements while polishing and fine tuning the whole game before we open Aeternum’s shores to the world.
We’ll continue our Alpha in the months to come and expand testing by standing up EU servers on March 30, 2021. Our Closed Beta will begin on July 20, 2021. If you’ve pre-ordered New World, you’ll have access to the Closed Beta Test.
New World Development Update – News | New World
What’s Next?
Early playtests of the New World were promising, and I certainly liked what I saw. However, we’ll have to wait until the end of March to see what’s going on in the Alpha, then in the Beta in July. Fortunately for me, I’m still hooked on Elder Scrolls Online anyway, and I’m in no rush to switch.
