The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our (sometimes) monthly gaming column. At long last, New World is out and we've been diligently grinding our faces off to answer the question: Can Jeff "mountains of cash" Bezos make a decent MMO?
On 28 September, Amazon Games released its first serious, big-boy-pants-on video game: New World. Why does this matter? First of all, it's Amazon. Not content with anything short of global domination, Jeff Bezos' e-commerce and cloud computing juggernaut has had a sticky start with gaming – two titles prior to New World, Breakaway and Crucible, were scrapped – and people would love to see the venture fail. I would love to see the venture fail.
Secondly, New World is an MMORPG. That's "massively multiplayer online roleplaying game" to the untainted. As far as game development goes, it's hard to think of a more complicated and ambitious genre, especially as this has transpired to be Amazon's "debut" outside of the mobile platform.