New World opens some fresh servers to celebrate its reworked game start

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They've added quite a bit since release, it turns out.

Amazon games' MMO New World has opened up a suite of "Fresh Start" servers, letting you kick off a new character on an untapped server where there're no long-established players from the game's first year. The new servers come alongside an entirely reworked early game experience for the game, requiring less travel and grouping quests closer together along with requiring far less grinding.

The rework also has a "huge improvement to the overall pacing," says the Amazon Games team. New World also recently released Brimstone Sands, a big expansion update with lots of Egyptian and Ancient Roman-themed action.

"It’s a great opportunity for new and lapsed players to experience all that has changed over the game's first year," said Amazon Games. Amazon games has also posted a video to YouTube—embedded above—highlighting what's new in the past year.

That new content includes a boatload of new expedition dungeons: Tempest's Heart, Barnacles & Black Powder, and the Ennead, alongside mutator versions of old expeditions and a group finder for them. That's also not really including the new weapons, which are a bit like New World's classes: the Greatsword, Void Gauntlet, and Blunderbuss weapons are all new, and have new abilities to go with.

New World has plenty of lapsed players, who may or may not remember that their one-time purchase of the game lets them go back whenever they please. It was a massive success at launch, selling a ton of copies and hitting a high of nearly a million players on Steam, but that high collapsed over time into a steady daily top concurrent count of about 15-25 thousand. Since the release of the Brimstone Sands in October that number has popped back up to 50-60 thousand, and a recent Twitch drop campaign saw peak concurrent numbers return to over 100 thousand.

You can find New World on Steam, where it's 50% off until November 8th. You can also go find their official website, newworld.com.

Good spot, Eurogamer.

Jonathan Bolding
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.