New World: Aeternum drops you on a supernatural island with no supplies, no allies and no class. What it asks in return is patience.
Trailer, via New World: Aeternum.
Shipwrecked on Aeternum
Amazon Games built New World: Aeternum around a single premise: you are an adventurer shipwrecked on the island of Aeternum, and everything you have, you make. The island has been the source of fantastical legends for thousands of years, and the game treats that history as material rather than backdrop. Aeternum’s mysteries run as deep and dark as its history, and the story sends you into the ruins and wilderness to uncover the secret truth of the island and its millennia of strange inhabitants.
That is the shape of the thing. It is an open-world MMO, played in third person, built for multiplayer, co-operative play and massed online armies. It is available on Xbox Series X|S, PC and PlayStation 5. It is not a small game, and it does not pretend to be.
Classless Combat and Supernatural Forces
The combat system is the game’s sharpest idea. New World: Aeternum has no classes. You channel supernatural forces or wield deadly weapons in real-time combat, and the game lets you fight alone, with a small team, or in massed armies across both PvE and PvP. The choice of how you build is yours, and so is the choice of how many people stand beside you when you use it.
That flexibility cuts both ways. A classless system means the game never hands you a role and never tells you what you are. For players who want a clear answer about what their character is for, that is a long walk to a short drink. For players who want to fight, forage and forge on their own terms, it is the whole point.
The loop the game describes is broad: fight, forage, forge. Endless opportunities await among the island’s wilderness and ruins. That is a lot of verbs, and the game means all of them.
Beauty, Danger and the Island’s Bounty
Aeternum is sold as a place of danger and opportunity at every turn, and the game is honest about the pairing. The island offers beauty and horror in the same frame, and it expects you to use all your skills to take advantage of its bounty and survive its horrors. The supernatural power running through Aeternum has changed all the rules, and the game leans on that idea rather than treating it as flavor text.
In such a land, your destiny is whatever you make of it.
That line is the game’s thesis, and it is also the source of its central problem. A destiny you make yourself is only as interesting as the tools the game gives you to make it with, and New World: Aeternum spreads those tools across a very wide surface.
What the Open World Costs
The scale is the issue. Aeternum is an MMO with PvE and PvP, solo and group play, gathering and crafting, and a mystery plot about an island’s millennia of strange inhabitants. That is a lot of game, and the parts do not all pull in the same direction. The combat wants you in the thick of it. The exploration wants you to slow down and read the ruins. The crafting wants you to stop and forage. The game rarely decides which of these it wants most, and the result is an experience that is generous rather than focused.
None of this is a failure of craft. The systems work. The island is built to be explored, and the third-person perspective keeps the fights readable at every scale, from a single duel to a massed army.
The Third-Person View
The camera sits behind your character, and that choice does real work. Massed PvP battles stay legible because you can see the field around you, and the wilderness reads as a place you are standing in rather than a map you are scanning. It is the least glamorous decision in the game and one of the better ones.
The problem is that the game’s ambition is horizontal. It gives you more instead of deeper, and after the first dozen hours the difference starts to show. Aeternum rewards the first pass through a region and then asks you to do it again somewhere else.
The Verdict on Aeternum
New World: Aeternum is a good MMO that could have been a great one. The classless combat is the strongest argument for it, and the shipwreck premise gives the whole thing a clean, legible start. The island is a real place with a real history, and the game treats its mysteries as worth uncovering.
What holds it back is the same thing that makes it large. The game never commits hard enough to any one of its pleasures to make that pleasure the reason to stay. It is a game about making your own destiny that keeps handing you more destinies to choose from.
That is not a fatal flaw. It is a reason to play New World: Aeternum slowly, and to decide early what you want from it, because the game will not decide for you.
Key facts
- Title: New World: Aeternum
- Developer and publisher: Amazon Games
- Release year: 2021
- Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PC, PlayStation 5
- Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Adventure
- Modes: Multiplayer, co-operative, MMO
- Perspective: Third person
- Critical score: 7.6/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 7 outlets)
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