New World: Aeternum Brings the MMO to Consoles with Cross-Play; New 10-Player Raid Coming

At Summer Game Fest 2024, Amazon Games announced New World: Aeternum, which brings the MMO originally launched on PC in September 2021 to consoles.

New World: Aeternum will be available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X (with full cross-play) on October 15 for $59.99. It includes the full base game and all previous updates, such as the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion. PC players who already own New World and Rise of Angry Earth won’t have to pay anything more. All console players who pre-order the game and all existing PC players who log into the live servers from now through October 14 will receive the complimentary Azoth Stalker wolf mount. There’s also a Deluxe Edition, priced at $79.99, and it comes with an exclusive Bear amount and armor skin.

Christoph Hartmann, Vice President of Amazon Games, said in a statement:

New World: Aeternum is the culmination of years of focused development combined with input from the dedicated community of players who’ve already carved a path in the original New World on PC. Listening to player feedback is fundamental to how we make games, and we know New World: Aeternum delivers on the promise of a fresh and compelling New World experience that players can enjoy together across platforms.

Wccftech was recently invited to a press presentation ahead of the announcement where the developers stressed that the game has been fully optimized for console. It will sport complete feature parity with PC, in addition to combat action optimizations, controller accessibility options, a console-friendly user interface and user experience, target locking, aim assist, and virtual cursor.

The visuals have also been enhanced, as you can glean from the gallery of new screenshots embedded below.

Amazon Games also clarified what kind of additions existing New World players can expect to find at launch. Those include a new cinematic introductory experience, upgraded onboarding for new players, improved quest flow, enhanced in-game cinematics, revamped story dialogues, the introduction of character archetypes (the game previously did not feature any classes, allowing players to freely mix and match weapons as they wished), the first 10-player endgame PvE raid, end-game solo trials, a Gear Score increase, the ability to swim, and a large-scale PvP zone. I inquired about the endgame PvE raid. Unfortunately, the team couldn’t share much yet, but they did slip it would feature three challenging bosses for player groups to tackle.

After a big launch with nearly a million concurrent players, New World only averages between 4 and 6K concurrent players on Steam. Clearly, Amazon hopes to revive interest in the MMO with New World: Aeternum, partly by adding console players and cross-play.