Amazon’s sandbox MMO New World instantly become one of the most-played games on Steam when it launched this week (briefly the most), and some of those 700,000 ‘players’ even made it through the server queues to actually play. The devs have been scrambling to meet demand ever since and continue to open new servers, in the past 24 hours opening over 100 new New World worlds. They’re also exploring the possibility of increasing the capacity of individual servers.
Within the past day, Amazon Game Studios have opened 58 servers in the EU Central region, 49 in North America East, 11 in North America West, and 8 in South America. They’d opened more before then, too. You can track all the additions in this forum thread.
“Our main priority is resolving long queues,” they said on Twitter last night. As well as opening new worlds to help, they say they “are performing tests to increase the capacity for all worlds.” They also plan to offer free server transfers to let people move around once things settle.
One tool which might help you pick servers is New World Status, an unofficial website made by fans which roughly tracks server populations, queue lengths, and estimated queue times. Many have no wait to get in so hey, check those out! Some have estimated waits of only a few minutes. Some estimated waits are a few hours. A couple are pushing a day. Then good grief, the European server Annwyn has a queue greater than the server’s entire capacity and an estimated wait of over 59 hours.
Fans have also created the website Streamers On New World. It tries to track Twitchfolk playing the game and estimate the impact their presence has on servers, so you can follow your favourites or avoid their followings.
We’d like to tell you more about what the game’s like but, uh, our intrepid explorers have largely been in queues too.
If you want to study up while waiting, hey, maybe you’ll learn something from our best New World weapons and best New World builds guides.