04 | October | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Yesterday saw the launch of The Rise of the Angry Earth expansion for New World.

The Angry Earth comes to New World

Rise of the Angry Earth is the first paid content expansion since the launch of the game about two years back. The expansion will set you back $30 on Steam, but what does that get you?

From the expansion page, this is the story description driving the changes:

First Light has fallen. Once a welcoming place for newcomers to Aeternum, the lands have been overtaken by the fury of the Angry Earth. No one is certain what has become of the people and villages that once populated the area, and a deadly bramble has kept all but the most intrepid from attempting to find out. This abundance of earthly powers has awakened the mighty Beast Lords, a new possible adversary facing the people of Aeternum… but with them also comes a boon – the secret to taming and riding animals.

For those who want bullet points rather than narrative, the high level peek is as follows:

Mounts – You will be able to ride at last!
Level Cap Increase – Bumped from level 60 to 65, with trade skills and faction gear increases as well.
New Artifact Gear Tier – What comes after purple and orange gear?
New Weapon Type – The Flail! Not at all a metaphor I am sure.
A Zone for the new levels – The now little used zone of First Light has become the Elysian Wilds.
New Expedition – A dungeon called The Savage Divide,
New Heartrune Ability – Primal Fury, which no doubt goes with the wild animal theme of the expansion.

And if you prefer something more visual, there is the official launch trailer.

Amazon is ramping up its promotions to bring attention to the new expansion. Prime Gaming has a new reward with in-game goodies you can collect. They have also turned on Twitch Drops in order to incentivize streamers to stream the game.

The drops run between October 3rd and 10th, with a new item being added on days one through five. Here is the list of items.

Day 1 – October 3 – Drops: Call of the Wilds Flail, Call of the Wilds Mount Attachment Skin, and Mossclad Helm (4 total hours watched)
Day 2 – October 4 – Drop: Mossclad Vambraces (6 total hours watched)
Day 3 – October 5 – Drop: Mossclad Boots (8 total hours watched)
Day 4 – October 6 – Drop: Mossclad Cuisses (10 total hours watched)
Day 5 – October 7 – Drop: Mossclad Thornvest (14 total hours watched)

Now the question is how much will this revive the fortunes of New World?

Back in September 2021 the game launched and saw over 900K concurrent players on Steam. However game issues and exploits and poor handling of both saw player counts decline quickly. We always expect that initial peak number to fall off, but when a few months later the title was managing around 20K concurrent, that meant a large part of the initial player base had walked away.

That made for dead servers and a long string of server merges until there were just one or two servers per region. Which, in turn, has made queues an issue with every content update.

The first night saw concurrent players jump up into the 50K range, and I expect that will be topped when we hit the weekend and people have time to devote to the expansion. The question will be how long will the new content sustain that boost and will enough of the installed base of players be lured back to the game to boost New World’s financial fortunes?