Chris Wilson, the lead developer of Path of Exile, also commented on the launch of New World in an interview with YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes. He has a very clear opinion on the game. If it were his game, he would put it back into beta and force a full reboot.
Where does the boss see New World’s problem? In the conversation, Chris Wilson emphasized that he didn’t play New World himself. But he noticed a lot about the game and watched Hayes’ video, among other things.
He doesn’t see the big difficulty in any server problems or queues at the start. He himself has had catastrophic releases with such problems. What bothers him instead are the exploits that have eroded player confidence:
There was a consistent theme across many issues [von New World], which really annoyed me. And those were the economic exploits that were severe and too slow to fix. Rollbacks didn’t come at the right time and so on.
And that undermines the trust that people have in a game, because we play games to make progress, especially in online games. We play with friends to level up faster, farm more gold or get better items.
In a game where progress is literally how you measure what you’re working on, there’s an opportunity for someone to steal faster progress […] not fun.
How would he deal with New World now? Wilson would move the game back to beta. In the eyes of Chris Wilson, the economy in the game is so important that damage must be repaired in any case. Server problems can be fixed later with new servers, but a broken economy would always remain problematic.
If I was launching a game and there were so many issues, I would just roll it back to beta and do whatever it takes before doing a big wipe and launching a stable game, at where player progress is actually reliable and properly tracked.
Wilson gets a lot of encouragement from viewers
How is the statement received? Below the video, there are many voices agreeing with Chris Wilson.
Some others point out that while the economic issues were there, other things also caused New World to crash, including the boring leveling phase, lack of an endgame, balance issues, and bugs.
Also, others confirm that they left games like WoW or other MMORPGs because of economic problems. For example, some see the introduction of the WoW token as a problem because it allows players to buy anything with real money.
Is there also criticism of Wilson? A little. While most viewers agree that the economy is a big problem for New World, some wish Wilson watched his own game, Path of Exile, first. There will also be problems there.
The video also contains criticism for various update decisions and server problems. In addition, the game is not free of bugs. A bug that had been in the game for six years was recently fixed.
In the coming years, Path of Exile 2 will be a kind of expansion like Overwatch 2. Everything about it in the video:
Despite this, Path of Exile is an extremely popular game. On Steam, it only broke its player record of over 8 years ago in February.
What do you think of Chris Wilson’s statement? Would you like a wipe on New World too? Would saving the economy bring you back? Or what should New World change in your eyes?