Asmongold explains why Lost Ark could replace “boring” New World
Asmongold, Amazon Game Studios, Smilegate RPG, Twitch star and MMO streamer, Asmongold, hasn’t exactly held back when it comes to Amazon’s debut title, New World, but can Lost Ark make up for the struggling game’s sins?
Despite all of the hype that surrounded Amazon’s debut entry to the gaming sphere, New World has largely dropped off the face of the earth.
While Twitch behemoths such as Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek continue to call Aeternum home, fellow explorer Asmongold has mixed feelings about the MMO. Accepting that it is plagued by a slew of game-breaking bugs and exploits, the Texan-based streamer has spent over 500 hours exploring the universe’s emerald pastures, noting that “nobody plays 500 hours of a game they hate.”
In an exclusive interview with Dexerto, the self-professed “professional neckbeard” explained why he thinks New World is on a slippery slope, and whether or not Lost Ark will overtake it as 2022’s biggest MMORPG.
Amazon GamesAsmongold explains why “boring” New World is in decline
Describing New World as “boring,” Asmon firmly believes that the game’s dwindling population are just sick of grinding for little gain.
“The game is boring and repetitive, it’s that simple” he states. “There are a lot of features in New World that are designed just to waste your time. Teleporting around, the game takes a long time to farm, anytime you die your gear loses durability damage – there are a lot of these things that are just time extension mechanisms, and at a certain point people get bored of doing the same thing.”
“Until they released the most recent patch, the only way to progress in the endgame is just by mindlessly killing the same NPCs over, and over, and over for hundreds of hours until you’ll potentially get an upgrade. The crafting system in the game isn’t really much better. You have to craft, I don’t know, over 2,000 of something, and each time you craft it you have to farm out each material in itself.”
“The amount of time that you have to as just pure downtime in the game between moving from point A to point B, or between doing quests that are repeated throughout all the zones – it lost a lot of people in translation because of that.”
Noting that “it’s boring to just farm all the time and be running all the time. I think people want a more action-oriented game in general. As soon as people start feeling that vibe that the game is dying, I think a lot of people want to jump ship too,” he concludes, “that’s some of the big reasons why I think people are quitting.”
For many, the future of MMOs rests with the likes of Riot Games’ mysterious new title, or Smilegate RPG’s dungeon crawler meets open-world adventure, Lost Ark. The latter game’s beta won over the vast majority of its players, with many claiming it was “fresh air” after New World’s teething issues – but does Asmongold believe that Lost Ark will knock New World off of its already precarious spot?
“Lost Ark has a history of success in Korea, and also in Russia, and if you look at a lot of the growth for the game it’s almost all been positive, which is extremely unheard of for MMOs, especially nowadays.”
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“I think that Lost Ark does have a lot of potential,” he continues. “[Lost Ark] being an isometric game will put some people off, but I think if people can look past that and be able to appreciate the end-game elements of Lost Ark, then I feel like it could actually have a chance.”
There’s one major concern he has about the game, however. “The other issue with Lost Ark, however, is the potential with it being pay to win. If the game has any sort of things that you have to pay money repeatedly to get any sort of benefit the game, you probably won’t see it lasting for that long.”
Whatever the case, 2022 is set to be one of the biggest years for gaming in recent history, so it’ll be interesting to see how Lost Ark shapes up against some pretty stiff competition.
Either way, though, we can expect to see Asmon take to the spectacular shores of Arkesia when the game releases – whether he chooses to stay there, however, is a mystery for another day.