New World user reviews on Steam have seen a massive slump recently and all of it started with the release of the game's first big update, which was supposed to be a good thing.
Major updates in video games often end up revitalising the player base as they offer fresh content and possibly a new spin on the old goodies. This was not the case with New World as the first major update, named Into the Void, ended up being another force that drove players away from Amazon's MMO.
While it added new enemies and a weapon to go through Aeternum with, there were countless undocumented changes . Some of them were positive but the worst ones attempted to hide here as well.
The worst changes came in the form of making the already weak endgame New World had even more of a chore. Those hoping to raise their gear score through conquering enemies found that the drops in the elite zones had been severely reduced while the mobs gained a massive amount of health and started hitting like trucks.
Players who attempted to cap their gear score through crafting found that experience needed for the maximum level in trade skills had been nearly quadrupled while only the higher tier crafting provided increased experience. This resulted in the crafting method being extremely expensive due to the cost of crafting T5 items and even with their boosted experience, you still needed to craft more of them than you did before the 1.1 update.
Overall, Amazon Game Studios did nothing to improve the endgame that players complained about and only stretched out the existing one, through the increased grind and higher costs.
To top it off, the devs released a forum post that sounded tone-deaf and promised "updates in the coming months". None of this sat well with the players and the result ended up being only 24 per cent positive reviews out of 4,646 that appeared on Steam after the infamous update.
