Footage of Amazon’s MMO New World has been leaked online. The nine-minute video shows one of the closed beta players exploring a grassy area of New World in what is clearly an early stage of play.
The leak was originally posted on, of all places, PornHub. This video was posted online by the YouTube channel Less than Epic (via Reddit). The leak gives us an insight into some of the game’s core systems. The game plays from a third-person perspective, and boasts some typically MMO features, such as an abilities bar running along the bottom of the screen, and numbers spilling out of any enemy that you attack.
In terms of play, however, the game evidently takes as much inspiration from survival games as it does traditional MMOs. There’s a strong emphasis on harvesting resources from the world to craft equipment, while actually creating an item will require you to use certain tools like tanning racks for animals skins and forges for extracting metals.
Combat, meanwhile has a more action-y flavour about it. At the start of the video, the player is stalking a bison, shooting at it with arrows. When passing through an area of tall grass, however, the player is ambushed by what appears to be an undead creature. Hitting an enemy seems to come entirely down to the player’s own aiming skill, while your level and abilities will determine how much damage you deal.
There are some things we don’t see in the footage. Building structures is one, as New World will supposedly feature an almost entirely player-built world. We do get a brief glimpse of a castle with banners hanging from the walls, but whether that was constructed by players or not is impossible to know. The other is how guilds, or “companies” as they’re known in New World, will work. The idea is that, much like Rust, players will be able to form (and break) their own alliances. But we only see one player for the duration of the video, so we can’t tell how rigid or loose that system will be.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the video comes toward the end, when we get to see the map of New World. This shows off a big chunk of the available environment, and there’s also a Legend in the bottom left that describes the environment types. These include Forest, Grassland, Highlands, Marsh, and Shrubland. There are also icons for Windmills, castles, and Crests with surrounding coloured pools that I would assume represent faction territory. Here's an image of the map.
It’s good to finally see the game in action, even if it is from a leak. I am concerned that New World lacks something unique to make it stand out from the MMO crowd. The whole survival and crafting fare is hardly new, and there are plenty of games, multiplayer or otherwise, that do this sort of thing in a less generic manner. That said, perhaps the game will be very different once scaled up to Amazon’s goal of 10,000 players per server.
