Amazon’s New World has launched, and as with many a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, it launched with some pretty annoying bugs. Bugs like being told you have to wait a week for your character to respawn after dying or, on the other end of the mortality spectrum, your character suddenly becoming impervious to most forms of damage. You know, fun stuff.
Launching an MMO, especially one that’s drummed up as much attention as Amazon’s New World has, is a daunting and often unpredictable task. No matter how many players you manage to cram into alpha and beta tests, there’s just no telling what’s going to happen when you open the door to several hundred thousand hungry players. New World launched yesterday to massive queues and servers so crowded that Amazon had to open several dozen new ones in the North American region last night to deal with the overflow. Now imagine sitting for hours in a queue, finally getting to play, and then encountering a game-stopping bug for which the only solution is rebooting the game and getting back in the queue all over again. That’s what has been happening with the respawn timer bug.
Normally, when you die in New World you are given a choice of several different places to respawn, such as settlements or camps. Those affected by the respawn timer bug, like Twitch streamer Bobsvids, faced a bit of a wait.
While I fully support an MMO that requires you to wait a week to respawn after you die (do better), I can see how many would view this as unreasonable. Folks like the ones creating multiple threads in the New World forums and Reddit about this very issue.
Fortunately, there is an easy fix. Just restart the game, and you’ll be able to respawn as normal. You won’t really have to wait a week, unless that’s how long the login queue is.
Rebooting is also the answer to the immortality glitch. Players battling other players, one of New World’s major focuses, are discovering that they can’t be hurt by most conventional weapons. In most cases I’ve witnessed, they can still be hurt by area effects, ranged damage, and damage-over-time effects, but everything else just goes right through them. While this sounds like a great deal of fun, it also flies in the face of the game’s spirit and makes those getting murdered by immortal opponents very sad.
Again, to rejoin us mere mortals, an immortal player must simply reboot. While part of me wants to urge these players to hold on to their superpowers as long as they can, it really is bad form and could ultimately be considered an exploit, which the developers might start spanking players for once they’ve got this whole launch thing figured out.
These two silly bugs and the laundry list of known issues posted in the forums aside, New World’s launch has gone surprisingly smoothly on my end. Once I was done waiting in queue for an hour, I spent a lovely evening wandering through the wilderness. Particularly impressive was the Windsward settlement, where hordes of players gathered with nary a hitch nor crash. Well, none for me at least. Plus I made excellent use of the game’s crawling mechanic to find myself a cosy seat by the fire.
By, in, whatever. What do I care, I am obviously immortal.
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