New World: Aeternum Open Beta Early Access Impression

The combat is almost there, adding a few more skills while taking away some cooldowns to make things stay snappy and fresh enough to find an audience.

Sensibilities in video games change frequently as time goes on.  Gaming genres have had to grow and adapt to survive, particularly if they want to keep hold of players. This is all especially true with MMORPGs.  With this in mind New World: Aeternum tries to revamp itself and inject fresh life into the game.  There are some aspects where the game succeeds, but many systems feel like they lag behind modern sensibilities.  Still, with a great premise and snappy combat to be found there’s some improvements, but ultimately this still follows the templates of older MMOs.

In New World: Aeternum players find themselves as a member of a passenger ship searching for the mystical entrance to the mythical world of Aeternum.  A holy man books passage with the ship to bring a magical box to the world.  This magic is hunted by a malevolent force that corrupts the ship’s captain into an undead called the Lost.  The ensuing struggle causes the ship to capsize and the player washes ashore in Aeternum.  In Aeternum, everyone lives forever and various parts of humanity’s ship-faring societies have banded together over the millennia to create a largely industrial age society.  A malevolent force whispers in people’s ears slowly driving them mad and turning them into the undead Lost.  Many people have been on Aeternum for hundreds of years and still go to combat with the finery from their era.  It’s pleasant to see how well medieval knights and blunderbuss wielding pirates blend into making Aeternum feel interesting to explore.

The player meets Grace O’ Malley one of the more endearing NPCs to meet in Aeternum.

This premise is very interesting and there’s a lot of work put in to making the world feel organic.  This is only skin deep though as NPCs, by-and-large, drop in and out like flies, with only a few leaving any impression.  Most provide amusingly voiced worries about the Lost and tell the player to collect something.  Too much of the plot involves characters that are dumb to their surroundings and just send the player to go understand and fix everything.  Much of the agency boils down to fetch quests.  The zones themselves are well designed and fighting through guardians and exploring the area can be fun.  Reaching quest objectives can take a while due to how large the scope of everything is and how slowly the player moves by comparison.  Luckily, there are fast travel points dotted around the world that can be unlocked to make returning to town and back to a quest a bit easier the second time around.

Charging through an enemy compound in New World: Aeternum feels great.  All weapons feel responsive and basic attack animations are very fluid.  It is all action-packed, with players dodging to mitigate damage.  Searching nooks and crannies for hidden caches of resources guarded by an enemy or two is fun.  What drags things down is the older style MMO trappings.  There’s only a few skills on a cooldown for characters to cycle through while dodging and restoring health requires recharging, which prevents the game from feeling as fast as it feels like it wants to be.  Swapping gear is as simple as equipping it, while skill trees are attached to individual weapon types, so everything feels very open.

A lovely view of an enroaching pirate ship that players fight off.

There’s a double-edged sword at play with the crafting mechanics as well.  There’s plenty of resources around to choose to gather; however, it takes a very long time to collect enough to make it worthwhile.  Thousands of boulders will be picked for basic stone to have levelled mining enough to begin collecting any interesting minerals that create gear pieces better than quest rewards.  On top of mining there’s, logging, herbs, elemental motes, and much more to parse through and decide what to collect.  Making things more frustrating is that some of these resources are rare, and collecting large quantities of them even more painstaking waiting for it to respawn.  At times, it feels better suited to just ignore the whole thing and focus on fighting, due to the time-sink of it all.

Players can also buy and decorate a house in any major city in Aeternum.  There’s a decent variety of furnishings, most of which are loot drops and the whole process does a fine job playing at interior decorator for those so inclined.  Storage sheds are often just outside the houses and keeps everything a player drops off there for free, which makes dropping off the large quantities of resources collected a bit more manageable.  There’s also a reputation score that increases with each city in Aeternum.  Reputation comes from doing any quest; story, side, or town project and leads to minor increases for that city.  At best it leads to minimal gathering time increases, or a discount in crafting fees.  Since gathering speeds stay glacial and crafting fees are nearly non-existent, these reputation upgrades don’t feel like they’re amounting to anything.  With the Early Access, there wasn’t an opportunity to fully test out the PvP system or joining in a party due to the limited amount people running around the vast open world to interact with.

A musket ball to the face is just what the Lost ordered.

New World: Aeternum runs really well on a PlayStation 5.  Loading is snappy, there is no noticeable lag to speak of, and it feels comparable to a well-running PC.  There’s a bit of fine tuning overall with the user interface.  Since the menus were built for a mouse, there’s a cursor that uses the analog stick to move around.  It takes a little time to get used to this, but otherwise the controller feels right at home with the action combat.  The audio and feedback touches that pipe in through the controller are welcome flourishes that make things more lively while playing.

However, the game does look a bit dated, being held painstakingly back on the character models.  Speaking with an NPC for a story scene leaves facial animations in the uncanny valley and the NPCs never stop moving, so after dialogue completes they keep making exaggerated movements until the player continue the scene with a button press.  Voice acting is jarring, but a constant source of enjoyable amusement, some of the voice actors are trying so hard, but the accents they are directed to take cause an inadvertent chuckle every time.

New World: Aeternum is looking to reinvent itself and stay relevant while new titles constantly vie for attention.  The combat is almost there, as only a few skills to use and everything being on a cooldown prevent things from feeling snappy and fresh enough to find an audience.  Fans of story or crafting will find themselves dealing with long slogs through fetch quests and waiting times to complete motions that could easily be shortened.  As a “reinvention” New World: Aeternum falls a bit flat, but it’s a decent MMORPG experience made fresh for consoles, things hold up well enough for those looking for a fairly familiar experience to take a look.

Disclosure: This article is based on a build of the game provided by the publisher.