New World: Is Amazon’s MMO Coming to Consoles?
New World is one of the biggest PC games of 2021, but you shouldn't expect to play it on PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo Switch anytime soon.
New World is quickly becoming the biggest (and most divisive) PC game of 2021, but when is Amazon’s hit MMO coming to consoles and mobile devices?
Well, according to New World‘s developers, the odds for a console/mobile port of New World are pretty much non-existent at the moment. In fact, it sounds like the New World team genuinely hasn’t even started to seriously consider the possibility of such ports.
“[Consoles are] not something we’ve specced or considered yet,” said New World director Scot Lane in an interview with Eurogamer. “I love console development, I’ve made a lot of console games, [but] on this we’re pushing the graphics as far as we can. That’s one of the big things we want to bring to the genre: to make a different-looking MMO than you’ve seen. And I think our combat at scale: there’s a lot of things we can push because as PCs get more powerful, it allows us to add more and more to it over time.”
While it’s true that quote comes from a 2019 interview and that a lot could have changed since then, the New World team hasn’t really strayed from that message in the last two years. If anything, the language they’ve used to dismiss the prospects of a New World port has only gotten stronger since 2019.
Despite these very clear messages, fans remain hopeful that New World will eventually come to consoles if for no other reason than the fact that you can never say never when it comes to major publishers like Amazon finding a way to get their games to as many people as possible. After all, few PC game publishers are immune from the profit potential of console and mobile titles.
In this instance, though, it really does seem highly unlikely that New World will come to consoles or mobile devices any time in the next couple of years.
While next-gen consoles could probably run New World, the bigger issue at the moment is that the game is so clearly designed with PC in mind that it would seemingly take a massive undertaking to effectively port it to other devices. The PC version of the game still needs a lot of work, and the logistics involved with making New World playable on a controller while still running smoothly on even next-gen consoles are simply daunting. Even some high-end gaming PCs struggle to run the game while offering the fairly smooth online experience that titles like this essentially demand.
The bigger problem at the moment, though, has to be the nature of the game itself. Simply put, it’s not clear at this time how console and mobile gamers would even be able to jump into New World‘s existing servers without wrecking the game’s already delicate PvP balance. You’d probably need to separate PC and console servers which is, again, a logistical nightmare for a developer that’s still working to get the base game closer to where they eventually want it to be.
The most likely way you’ll be able to play New World outside of a PC anytime in the next couple of years is through Amazon’s cloud gaming service. While we still have questions about how that transition would work (especially when it comes to imagining actually playing New World on mobile devices), it just makes sense that Amazon’s biggest game yet will eventually be part of their cloud gaming plans.
Generally speaking, though, it doesn’t sound like you should expect to be able to play New World on PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo Switch anytime in the near future.
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Matthew Byrd is Games Editor at Den of Geek and an entertainment enthusiast living in Brooklyn. When he's not exploring the culture of video games, he's…