I wanted to like New World, I really did. But, only a few minutes after loading the program, I was subjected to gratuitous identity politics hectoring that quickly eroded the anticipatory excitement that I had built up for this new MMO.
During the character select screen and subsequent gameplay, I found more examples of jarring, shoehorned political correctness that made me feel unwelcome, and ill at ease. It is clear that someone with authority at Amazon Games decided to inject their MMORPG with a radical leftist worldview.
Let’s start with the loading screens that introduce New World to the player.
New World MMO Pushes Diversity is Our Strength Claptrap
I’m not a big fan of woke video game studios that place trigger warning type disclaimers on the loading pages of their games. Red Hook Studios did this with the Darkest Dungeon. The game is the game; let the players find out for themselves. Stop holding their hands. How they should feel about the game is not your concern. It is up to the player to figure out what the game is to them — not the studio.
Let’s analyze the first paragraph in more detail:
New World is a work of supernatural fiction about cultures from around the world banding together to fight for the fate of humanity.
The First Paragraph
Of course it’s fiction, that goes without saying. New World is certainly fiction as it in no way resembles any of the real world supernatural elements that existed in the 1400s or even today. Missing is any reference to the Roman Catholic Church and the very real supernatural battle between good vs. evil, and Almighty God vs. the fallen angel Lucifer. Somehow their experts either forgot or willingly omitted thousands of years of scripture, prophecies, mystics, miracles, plagues, and apparitions and replaced it for insipid Hollywood supernatural fiction.
The fake supernatural elements that Amazon cooked up for New World pale in comparison to the actual ones that exist in our world. St. Padre Pio one revealed that if humans could see the supernatural dimension, the demons that inhabit earth would be visible and their great numbers would blot out the sun in the sky.
The most important part of the the paragraph, the final part where it is revealed that the entire premise of New World is that cultures will assemble from all over the world to band together to fight for the fate of humanity. Not once is this lofty premise ever mentioned in the promotional copy of the Amazon Games New World website. The powers that be wisely hid this preposterous notion from the public because I suspect the marketing department knew this woke language would turn off potential players and negatively impact pre-sales.
It’s only after the player has installed the game and logs on, does player realize that New World MMO is based on a multicultural fantasy where all cultures are equal with each other. The shaky premise of New World is the virtual world equivalent of a COEXIST bumper sticker. It’s woke, neo-Marxist, anti-Western civilization propaganda.
The New World that I thought they were making was about a Spanish sailors aboard a Spanish ship finding an uncharted island full of strange wonders and interesting enemies. I did not sign up to save the world with other cultures. What Amazon Games did was bait and switch.
The Second Paragraph
What I really find especially disturbing is the following disclaimer:
The New World team consulted with experts and our diverse workplace on the depictions of the cultures we’ve drawn from, and will continue to do so as we add more in the future.
Every historical video game requires a modicum of research to create. This is a motherhood statement. Why even brag about this?
I can only speculate but the purpose of this obsequious language is to immunize Amazon Games from the wrath of woke video game journalists and the ravenous Twitter outrage mob. So far the only culture I have seen in New World is a Hollywood version of Spanish culture that looks more at home in Pirates of the Caribbean films than it does in actuality in the 1400-1500 A.D. time period.
Who are the Experts Amazon Games Hired?
Amazon Games claims that they hired experts to consult on the cultures within their virtual world. In order to evaluate the credentials and political leanings of these so-called experts, I scoured the lengthy credits for any mention of expert historical, religious, and cultural anthropological consultants but found none. Amazon Games has the bravado to boast about their experts but fails to mention them.
It’s very obvious that Amazon Games was terrified that the woke video game press and the Twitter outrage mob would criticize them, so they included this disclaimer to pre-emptively ward off the woke press. Sure enough, in 2019 far left gaming website Polygon article by Colin Campbell took Amazon to task with all the predictable objections to their upcoming MMO.
The article was predictably entitled: Amazon’s questionable MMO has you colonize the ‘new world’.
One paragraph from the article, perfectly epitomizes the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Christian mindset that has infected academia and their legion of zealous foot soldiers in the press:
But New World is also a sanitized re-enactment of the European colonization of the Americas and elsewhere. It’s a manifestation of the great white fantasy of virgin territory and new beginnings. The game treads unwarily into a Heart of Darkness-like country of racist imperialism.
I doubt that Colin Campbell knows anything about American history or Western civilization that he didn’t learn from watching Netflix, his Marxist professors at college, or Wikipedia. Campbell is perpetuating popular falsehoods concocted by radical Marxists such as Howard Zinn and others.
Territorial expansion and conquest is not unique to Europeans. Conquest, murder, slavery, rape, piracy, and theft are permitted and even commanded in the Muslim faith but Campbell would never mention that as it would erode his thesis and anger his intersectional allies. The indigenous peoples of the Americas also did the same as they also engaged in human sacrifice, torture, and inter-tribal slavery. Of course, this is never mentioned by the left as it doesn’t fit their demonic narrative of white male Christians of Europeans stock being the source of all evil on this planet.
I believe it was articles like Polygon’s that put the fear of God into Amazon Games. So they pivoted from a Spanish conquistador MMO to a stealthy squeaky clean EPCOT Center MMO where all cultures band together to save the world.
We Consulted with Our “Diverse” Workplace
This part of the statement is pointless, preposterous, and shallow. I find it hard to believe that the average Amazon Games developer has any knowledge about 15th-16th century Spain, Europe or the Americas. This throwaway statement is ludicrous on its face and exists only to showcase the world “diverse” as a dog whistle to stimulate the ears of grievance hungry progressive journalists and their own woke employees.
If you are going to base your MMO on real world cultures that existed 500 years ago, asking your millennial employees for their input is stupid, irresponsible, and a recipe for disaster. Just because you have a certain skin pigmentation doesn’t make you an expert on history, race, or cultural anthropology. This trite statement is completely absurd and is simply corporate posturing and virtue signaling concocted by the apparatchiks in their diversity and inclusion department.
The real fiction that Amazon Games has created is the Pollyannaish pipe dream of cultures setting aside their differences and coming together. That my friends, will never happen on planet earth.
Cultures We’ve Drawn From? Right…
Upon closer examination the only culture they have drawn from is a counterfeit Hollywood representation of Spanish culture during the Age of Exploration. If New World is the result of consultation, Amazon Games was hoodwinked by their so-called experts and they should demand a refund from them.
The reality is that the only culture that is accurately represented is present day woke southern California. These are a small group of vocal, powerful, neo-Marxist nihilists who seek to impose their wokeness on everyone else. All of the “values” and norms of empty-headed sophomoric millennials and their enablers are on full display in Amazon Games virtual world.
With the exception of a few costumes, weapons, and architecture little else about Amazon Game’s New World is authentic or based on any kind of legitimate historical scholarship.
More Diverse Cultures (i.e. New Audiences) are Coming to New World
Here’s a very revealing tidbit of information:
…will continue to do so as we add more in the future.
Clearly Amazon Games plans on adding more cultures to New World in the future. So we can reasonably expect Africans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Malayans, Arabs, Persian, Indians, Pakistanis, Australian aborigines, pygmies, cannibals, and even arctic Eskimos to miraculous master complex sea travel and show up in Aeternum ready to band together with former sworn enemies to fight some ancient evil™ loosed upon the earth. This humanistic fantasy will end up being a virtual world version of the Epcot center with all of the various cultures completely emasculated, sanitized and wokeified.
To me this looks like Amazon Games fully intends to pander to other cultures with the intent of broadening the market for New World via future expansions to expand their profits.
No Sex For You: New World’s Gender Fluidity Propaganda
When I attempted to create my first player character it took me about one minute to realize that New World has no male or female selector. That’s right, you cannot specifically create a man or a woman. I’m not kidding folks. Unbelievable!
Instead, you are only allowed to manufacture a man or a woman or some other Frankenstein monster that you desire. Instead of a male or female, woke Amazon Games gives you the choice of two body types that are clearly male and female.
Other components of New Worlds character creation tool are also absurd.
The most disturbing thing of all is New Worlds androgynous character creation process has its roots not in the objective reality that male and female sexes exist, but in demonic doctrines of identity politics, queer theory, and gender theory. These dubious bumper sticker theories are junk science. They manifest themselves in specious phrases like gender, gender fluidity, heteronormativity, cisgender, pansexual, binary, and transsexuality. All of them are ludicrous concepts that have no connection to legitimate study of humanity, biology, or natural law. Instead, they originated in the humanities via gender studies and gay and lesbian studies departments in many American colleges and universities.
Purple, Green, and Blue Hair Do Not Belong in New World
Another glaring example of New World’s utter disregard for authenticity is the availability of pink, green and blue colors for hairstyles and facial hair. These modern colors were not used in this time period and are out of place. Purple, green, and blue hair are fine for gnomes in a fantasy/steampunk like World of Warcraft’s Azeroth, they obviously do not belong in the a virtual world that purports to be set in the Age of Exploration on planet Earth.
Seeing someone walking around with pink or green hair utterly destroys the suspension of disbelief that is so critical for players to engage in to make virtual worlds seem real. It is an affront to immersion which is one of the fundamental tenets of escapism into virtual worlds.
Did the experts that Amazon hired also approve of pink, green and blue hair for players?
Christianity has been Removed from Amazon’s New World
Going beyond the wokeness of the laughably bad disclaimer and the awkwardness of the character creation mechanic, we are left with the world of New World.
All of the marketing for New World promises to submerge the player in the famed Age of Exploration which takes place around and after Christopher Columbus’s 1492 discovery of the Americas. The New World promotional imagery has the fierce visage of a burly Spanish conquistador. Columbus’s trip was financed and approved by Queen Isabella of Spain who was a devout Roman Catholic, her husband Ferdinand and other Catholic monarchs. To my knowledge, the only Catholicity you get in the MMO is a Roman Catholic priest making the sign of the cross in the introduction cinematic.
At this time, western Christendom was still Roman Catholic and the soldiers and sailors on Spanish expeditions would be all devout Catholics who believed they were following Jesus’s Great Commission to go out in the world to spread the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet, there are no signs of any Catholicism in New Word MMO. There are no churches, chapels or crucifixes on the walls which there would most certainly be in Spanish settlements in the real world. Spanish sailors would not suddenly abandon their Catholic faith upon entering Aeternum, they would do the opposite and increase their zeal and pray for God’s blessing.
For a company that claims to respect many diverse cultures and even further claims to have hired “experts” the absence of Christendom is a disgraceful and irresponsible omission. Many external trappings of Spain are in New Word but God, Christ, and Christendom have been conveniently removed to satisfy the warped woke athiest mindset of southern California game developers.
New World is a virtual world without a soul that is a mirror reflection of its creators.
Black Arabs Have Magically Found Aeternum Too!
One of the first NPCs I met was a dark skinned man with an Arab name. There is no explanation how Arabs found the New Word. After a while, the worldview and basic plot structure are revealed: it’s all about various world races, cultures and civilizations simultaneously arriving in the New Word. This multicultural nonsense reminds me of one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films where pirates from “diverse cultures” all magically show up at an international pirates meeting which echoes the 5 New York crime families meeting from the first Godfather film.
During the time period that New World is set in, the only Arabs who were capable of sailing were the vicious and dreaded Barbary Muslim pirates. It it very doubtful that they would have sailed beyond the Straits of Gibraltar into the deep Atlantic Ocean and accidently sailed into Aeternum. I suppose the experts that Amazon Games hired were not expert enough to know and appreciate this fact.
Bonus Gripe
Amazon’s New World uses the metric system instead of the imperial system for distance measurement in their HUD compass. The metric system was created in France in 1785 which is 85 years after the age of exploration ended in 1700. Spain adopted the metric system in 1858. So much for the competency of Amazon Games’ experts.
Conclusion
The central problem with Amazon Games’ New World is that it was made by a huge soulless American corporation that is enslaved by the rigid ubiquity of woke corporate values. By their very nature, big corporations are prone to groupthink and conformity instead of creativity and innovation. So instead, they buy up startups where innovation and risk taking is still possible. Because of this paradox, an entrenched bureaucracy, and an ascendant diversity & inclusion mentality, true innovation and viewpoint diversity is impossible at Amazon Games, so the result is a predictable recourgitation of identity politics, intersectionality, and neo-Marxism which is the religion for most of their robotic millennial employees.
Screenwriter and columnist Andrew Klavan made this very point recently:
The arts are so expensive — movies, video games, television video games — are all so expensive that they require corporations to make them, the corporate mindset has taken over. So now if you watch the comedians — the so-called comedians on late-night tv — they all have the exact same opinion, they all say the exact same thing.
This observation applies perfectly to the New World’s counterfeit lore, their androgynous character creation mechanics and other woke nonsense within.
Video games that have become widely successful like Minecraft and Valheim were unexpected successes and were created by a handful of independent developers who were free to pursue their vision and not the vision of some faceless, bloated, woke corporation. Given the current woke climate of the corporate America that stifles viewpoint diversity, risk taking, and outside the box creativity, I highly doubt the creation of new MMO that will gain mass acceptance will ever be possible again from a AAA video game studio.
Amazon’s New World is an expensive bait and switch Trojan Horse of subversive radical leftist propaganda and a Potemkin Village built with a thin veneer of historical authenticity. Amazon’s anemic version of the Age of Exploration setting is cowardly and dishonest.
How can we trust a studio that can’t even bring itself to acknowledge the intellectual reality that male sex and female sex are biologically different and unique?
There is no way to sugarcoat what I’m about to say: the neo-Marxist ideological underpinnings of New Word is a reflection of the depravity, narcissism, and immaturity of the Amazon Games team. Art reflects the artist. This MMO is an affront to everything that is sacred and good. Because of this, I will have nothing to do with this evil and twisted abomination. I hope Amazon’s New World fails and fails hard.
Epilepsy warnings and the “culturally diverse team” mention are very much like Ubisoft, seems to be part of the virtue signaling and warding off the woke mob these days.
New World mashes things together that don’t quite belong together. Factions inspired by Spanish Conquistadors and Frontiersmen (Marauders), a bit of the Templars and Inquisition (Covenant) and a mix of thieves, alchemists and mages for the Syndicate faction. There were also Romans in the trailer.
This is an approach that believes that if you throw everything together in a pot, the result is probably tasty. I rather found it to indicate a lack of style and direction resulting in a generic fantasy mish-mash. But don’t think the factions are ANY different. As much they seem three factions, the player characters forming them are absolutely identical in abilities and appearance. So no, the Marauders are not melee or physical combat focused specialists, the Covenant isn’t a religious organization, the only heretics they could fight are “corrupted” beings. Quite in line with the modernist “we are all equal, except for those who don’t agree with us” thinking. And the mages are not better or worse at casting spells than the other factions. You can develop every char differently, but the factions and char creation are the same. So basically, mix orc, troll, human, all the same, Horde and Alliance are the same, too, pick your team. Hint: It doesn’t really matter.
New World started perhaps development with the idea of the conquest and fight for a new land, very much inspired by American colonization and the Age of Discovery early on. Is it the work of experts that only bits and pieces of a culture that are non-offensive get used as ornamentation?
Any culture/people/tribe has its glorious and its dark sides. They are part of their identity. Mayans and their temples, but without the bloody sacrifices? Strong and splendid conquistadors, but without their cruelty towards native tribes, without greed? Welcome to BLAND NEW WORLD. Where meat is vegan, and every dish tastes the same… as you quoted “a sanitized re-enactment of the European colonization of the Americas and elsewhere” … indeed.
So, sanitized means it is the ever-identical but still for some reason claiming to be unique snowflakes vs…. the corrupted OTHERS.
Such thinking is known to have led to the greatest massacres and atrocities in the history of mankind. Is this not part of identity and gender studies? Yes, the process of “othering” is understood, but only when it comes to evil white men doing this vile thing to people with a different origin and skin color. Funnily, the woke collective has no problems doing the same to everyone not wanting to be part of their team. Well, let’s wait for Eskimos and Egyptians that look identical with the same skill trees and abilities band together. Trashfest fantasy. I found it a bit picky that you criticized that they use the metric system, but I mean if they deviate so far from history, this isn’t something I would pick up as negative example. Because they give a damn about historical accuracy, it’s only a source of inspiration.
The hair colors, yeah, it’s clearly not the Age of Discovery, that became clear after I saw the color choice. I give you a hint who mostly has these hair colors: punks and woke community managers, or Jennifer S. type developers. Andrew Klavan was right, great example. Isn’t it kinda hard to be diverse if everyone is on the same boat wearing the same shoes?!
Besides all the wokeness, I wonder that the game is selling so well on Steam. This shows me that people crave to play a MMO. But how long will New World last? Hopefully not too long.
The gameplay is quite atrocious. Reports from Alpha, the late shift from full on PvP to PvE with structured PvP, and bad alpha reports and some personal infos from testers I got (that made me cancel my preorder) were warning signs. I got into the beta weekends, be it because I was picked randomly from signing up for the betas or because I ordered and cancelled and it got forgotten, no idea. I did not play much the two- three times it was available for testing.
As I said, this boring world template of blandly inspired by everything mashed together, this didn’t excite me. The character models look terrible, even with a hat and without purple hair. The quests are on the kill ten X level, so I wondered if it is more about resource acquisition than questing. It is nothing. It is a pure grind for minor upgrades, with this unsatisfying lore/background that does not matter one bit. The background story of every character class or deity description of the EQ pantheon is leagues above that. This does not even compare to post-woke-WoW or other contemporary MMOs favorably.
Metacritic is 76/100 for the professional reviewers and 3.9/10 user score. This split is quite common these days, for New World some quite high-profile streamers got paid a lot, IMO. To sell this bull.
The game copies elements from about every MMO that ever was, from DAOC over EQ, WoW to Age of Conan and so on. And nothing is wrong with that!
But they copied only the superficial elements. They don’t connect and blend, there is no direction, no design.
Everyone who played at least 1-2 of the known MMOs can recognize New World within an hour to be a seriously underdeveloped MMO without clear vision, design flaws and tons issues. I didn’t even mention their server issues, those will be resolved.
I can’t help, games and gaming in general got worse over the years. MMOs were in decline for a while already, but other genres are infected, too. It’s like living in the era of the fall of the Roman Empire and seeing things fall apart, the begin of the Dark Ages. Not only in games design, sweeping statement on my part and somewhat unrelated, but Western civilization/culture is going down fast and hard.
All in all, it’s a terribly bad designed game even without added wokeness factored in.
I have been playing New World and I can confirm everything you have said. I am already over it. For starters, its a cash grab. They copy paste MAJOR cities. There is a handful of NPC’s. The game cant tell if its a PVP game or PVE game, it caters to neither.
There is one animation for males and females.
A forum post was made by a player asking about LGBTQ servers, a poster in that thread said something to the effect “if I was requesting for a heterosexual only server, I’d be banned”…
Then a mod came in and said and I quote: “This thread is walking an incredibly fine line so I just wanted to take a minute and make one thing utterly clear:
We do not allow hatred or bigotry in this community. Follow the Code of Conduct 2 and keep the conversation civil. Thank you for your understanding”
…and then banned the guy saying “If I requested for a heterosexual only server”…so much for the mod not following their own rules.
The content of the game is a joke, the moderation is a joke. Its a woke fuckfest.
I just want to play a game to get my mind off the communist/Marxist takeover of the west FFS…
Thanks for the post and the info about the androgynous male/female animations.
Here’s a post on the Steam forums about how woke the moderators are:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1063730/discussions/0/3090023948271211439/
How NOT to get Banned in game Tutorial.
1. Turn off all chats.
2. Use direct messages
3. use help only.
4. treat chat like church and your grandparents.
5. Understand you are dealing with a very sensitive type of moderation staff, where even a pimple might offend them for deforming their looks.
Everything you might say in general chat in game is already offense.
I don’t use the in game chat, I direct message or use help. So far I have avoided the Ban Happy Hyper Active Offended Woke Mob.
I was on the fence about purchasing this one. Glad I didn’t pull the trigger. Hard pass.
In addition: The Spanish FREED the native tribes from the savage Aztecs. There is zero need for hand-wringing and apologetic statements.
Excellent point! Many if not most of the natives thanked the Spanish for their liberation from the Aztecs.
Hello, I just discovered your blog, absolutely great, you write what I think. I was also a WoW player recently, I loved playing the game but the propaganda is spoiling the fun more and more. I would be interested if you know MMORPGS that are relatively free of the Marxist propaganda. Greetings from Germany
Thanks for stopping by! Alas, most of the MMMORPGs today are woke and staffed by woke supremacists and depraved alphabet people.
The only MMORPG I can think of that is free from wokeness is Lord of the Rings Online. Apparently, it’s getting a major facelift soon.
https://www.lotro.com/en
I’m sure there are some others out there.
Thanks I will try it out.