We were fortunate enough here at Half-Glass Gaming to receive some beta codes for New World, the upcoming MMORPG developed by Amazon. This is part of the New World Creator program, which gives content creators resources for talking/writing about the game.
On Saturday, I finally had enough free time away from work and wedding planning to boot up the game and give it a spin. I enjoyed the brief introduction to the game’s real-time combat, journeyed into the open world of the starting area, mashed my left mouse button to kill some skeletons, and got a big error message that said “connectivity issues.”
I tried re-logging out and into the game, but that didn’t work at all. Maybe it was just my server; I created a new character on a new server, only to be met with the fact that everything was down and, due to technical difficulties, server maintenance was occurring on a Saturday afternoon.
I even tried a prayer to Jeff Bezos himself to make things better:
“Come on, Jeffrey, you can do it. Pave the way, put your back into it. Tell us why, show us how. Look at where you came from, look at you now.”
No dice.
Stability issues and online games go hand-in-hand like peanut butter and jelly, or tequila with salt and lime. MMORPGs, online shooters, action RPGs; virtually every type of connected online game has had issues at launch with latency, reliability, and connectivity. The difference with New World, however, is that this is Amazon, the company that provides cloud computing platforms to a wide variety of companies out there, including the one I work for at my day job. If there was one company, one man who could solve these issues, we’d honestly expect it to be Jeffrey Bezos, Jeffrey Bezos, Jeffrey Bezos, Oh!
Yes, I clearly finally watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside” this weekend while waiting for New World servers to come up.
Back on point… This is the unfortunate reality with online gaming in 2021: If you play at launch, you’re running the risk of not being able to play the game at all. I got in a couple hours on Sunday, and even though I wasn’t disconnected, I still noticed stability issues.
So the point I made in the title stands: If Amazon can’t fix server stability issues, who can?
