The knight storms forward, hammer swinging on his back, armor gleaming in the sun. He barrels through the crowds in Windsward, a village bustling with arrivals every day, just one of the million people clamouring to start a life on the lush island of Aeternum. This is New World, the new massively multiplayer RPG from Amazon Games. The knight's name is 'Judge's Verdict' and he is on the warpath.
"How are we doing on the fort?" he shouts into the chat. "Do I need to come over?"
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He's already running. Judge is a disciple of a grand religious sect whose uniforms are dyed a zealous yellow. But this holy order, called Covenant, is not above violence. When I see Judge lumbering out the town gates, I stop dead. As a virtual war reporter, there's only one thing you can do when a big man thunders past talking loudly about a fort being under siege. You follow him.
It's only been a few weeks yet each faction is already forming its own subculture and stereotypes.
New World opened to all in September. Its shores have since been awash with players. So many, in fact, that long queues formed online. Much of it is familiar to MMO players. You do quests, kill wildlife, harvest resources, earn XP. But there is a competitive element. Players chasing PvP murderfun can opt into a three-sided faction war, where companies small and large fight in skirmishes or massive battles to dominate the map. The colors are Yellow, Green and Purple. Choose your flavor.
It's only been a few weeks yet each faction is already forming its own subculture and stereotypes. The global chat channel is full of jibes. The Purples are a menacing horde, ask anyone. The Yellows are a fanatical cult, don't you know? The Greens are braindead barbarians, and that's a fact. To make matters more complicated, each faction is subdivided into companies of up to 100 people, which themselves vie for power and control of the land, even within their own chosen side.
I waded into this three-headed conflict to meet with leaders and underlings from each faction and get their perspectives on the war. What I found was gleeful gang warfare and jolly cooperation in a land defined as much by peace as by bloodshed.
A Matter of Faction
"Did the rats run off back to their sewers?"
Judge looks around. We've just done a patrol around the fort, finding no enemies. He enters the fort, scrambles up the walls and glances about. Empty. Judge clambers onto a crate and reclines with the 'sit' emote. He intends to wait here patiently for any attack.
"We lose this bastion, we lose our capital," he says.
"The Purples are the largest faction by far… but they are weak despite it. They roam in packs and that's the only really menacing thing about it. I do five times the damage that one of those rats do... Greens are a bit more honest but not much more."
As a player, you can earn titles that hang under your nameplate for all to see. Under Judge's username hangs the word 'Indomitable'. He is the leader of a small, three-person company. He signed up for the Yellow faction because the thought of fighting for a church seemed nice. Or maybe he just liked the uniform.
"Paladin aesthetic," he insists, breaking the world down into known fantasy archetypes. "Essentially, this faction is lawful good, Green is chaotic neutral and Purple is neutral evil."
He pauses.
"I like the uniform, yes."
But war in New World is not really about the color of your cloth. At the highest level, if a Yellow company controls this region they will earn taxes from the land. Whenever a player buys a house, whenever they buy bullets or materials from the marketplace, or craft an item at the workshops in town, the ruling company takes a cut. That gold goes into the coffers, to be used on upgrades to the town or buffs for all players of that faction. Essentially, if you can control a territory, you can make life easier for your own faction members. All these decisions are made by governors, the leading players of controlling companies. Governors get something the average player doesn't: their own office.
The Greens
AlphaTekk is trying to look official. He vaults over his desk a few times. He tries crouching behind it, but now it just looks like he's hiding underneath. As the Green chieftain of a ruling Marauder company and owner of Brightwatch Town, it seems a shame there's no animation to sit at his governor's desk. He gives up and inspects a scroll.
"Purple has been trying to fight us a lot but, due to their tyranny, has run out of money."
That's a bad sign for Purple. Each company collects donations from their members on top of taxes. The Purple regions have the lowest tax rate on the map. Good for homeowners, bad for the war effort. AplhaTekk says they've run dry.
"In the next week or so we will sadly enter the Age of the Marauders," he says, a little grandiloquently. "I have tried my best to slow the progress but expansion is inevitable."
An hourglass sits atop piles of paper. It seems odd for this spikily armoured chief of the Greens to say "sadly" about his own impending conquest. Isn't he a Marauder himself?
"I am," he says. "But I want it to be balanced so that everyone playing can enjoy the game."
It's a surprisingly magnanimous attitude to war. The server is on the eve of a big push. A critical battle is happening tonight. All factions could have expanded fairly into unclaimed fens and woodland. But with the Purple Syndicate's problems, that doesn't look likely now.
"Currently, Purple is having a crazy civil war due to poor leadership, or more over a bad monarchy."
"In the next week or so we will sadly enter the Age of the Marauders."
It's the first report I will hear about Purple in-fighting, but it's hard to tell the scale of the problem. For the warlike Greens, discipline is a bedrock.
"I would say most of the Greens all work together to help each other," he says, "but there will always be those few outliers."
As for the chief, he has to run a hefty company, talk to other factions, and level up his own character, all while battling more than just his enemies.
"I got Covid," he says, in one of those moments where real life peeks out from beneath the feathered cap of MMO chit-chat. I worry for a moment, but AlphaTekk sees an upside.
"I have some time off work now to try and organise everything more than I could beforehand," he says. "The paid time off will be nice."
As I leave the relative luxury of the chief's candlelit office, all red drapes and home comforts, I realise I need to see things from a different perspective. The chief is concerned with diplomacy and high-level strategising. I need to find some players who are more grounded.
The Yellows
"Why are we crawling?" I ask the soldier ahead of me.
He picks himself out of the dirt, starts wading across a river.
"I saw someone," he says. "lol".
Once again, I stand up and try to keep pace. We've been running through the woods in the dead of night. Crawling in grass and shrubs is not just for roleplay. In the grass, your nameplate (normally visible to all who hover their crosshairs over you) disappears. With all the foliage in the world, full-on PvP ambushes are possible using this tactic. Right now, this Yellow soldier and I are simply using it to get safely to Keep Windsward.
We see another Yellow soldier in the distance. I recognise him as a gung-ho squad leader I've followed before. Each server in New World can be home to over 1000 players, a big population that's somehow confined enough for a "small town" feel. You see the same names popping up again and again in town squares, farms and battlefields.
The Keep appears on the horizon. The two soldiers blip through the gate, far ahead of me. I hear shouts, screams, and through the closed gate I see the life bar of my two new friends drop rapidly to zero. I pause a few meters from the gate. Then I turn and run the other way.
This is one way PvP happens. Players flag themselves as PvPers, then march out to attack a fort in a neighboring region, like the one I'm now running away from as fast as possible. Warmongers will often move in groups. This leads to chaotic brawls as bands of PvPers meet each other while criss-crossing the countryside – informal pockets of gang warfare on a larger world map. Bigger 50v50 battles, like the one happening tonight, are reserved for specific times and play more like their own instanced game mode. But on the world map, war simply looks like a Purple posse picking off a Yellow straggler, a trio of high-level Greens fending off a random attack by low-level opportunists. Or two soldiers entering a fort and getting cut down in seconds.
They're faced with a single remaining enemy Green. She is called 'Level 99 NPC'. A bold ploy. She is actually level 18 and dies quickly.
I hide in a bush. Before long I hear footsteps. More Yellow troops have shown up. But they too hang back from the Keep. I join them as they cluster together behind a log, crouched or crawling through stalks of lavender. Looking at the Keep with covetous eyes.
"There's no way we're gonna take this back with the people we have," says one soldier whose title reads 'Quartermaster'.
"Need more."
More arrive. When there are six of us, the Quartermaster decides it's enough. She bolts for the gate. Her men get up from the scrub and follow. Inside they're faced with a single remaining enemy Green. She is called 'Level 99 NPC'. A bold ploy. She is actually level 18 and dies quickly to the squad's axe swings and ice blasts.
The other Greens have run away. Capturing this fort won't give Yellow control of the region — you need to win a big battle for that — but it will activate a region-wide XP boost for all Yellow members.
A gold circle on the ground expands to capture the Keep. To celebrate, the soldiers dive repeatedly into the dirt of the courtyard and roll about like hogs. Much more than a means of hiding in the undergrowth, the prone button has become something of a custom among New World players. Worm-like conga lines are frequent in towns. Even the Quartermaster joins in the fun. As Keep Windsward is captured, she dives into the muck with her soldiers.
The Purples
Purple is going to lose the war tonight. But Eve Lily, governor of Monarch's Bluff, won't be there.
"I haven't signed up," she says. "There's much higher level people and better PvPers than me. I also wouldn't want to take a spot from anyone who really loves participating!"
We're standing behind town hall, overlooking the settlement. As governor, Eve sets the tax rate for the region (very low) and decides what town projects to invest in. Should she upgrade the workshops to allow smiths to forge new weapons? Give woodcutting a buff so lumberjacks collect more logs? There's only one way to decide.
"I ask the people!" she says. "Of course, everyone has different ideas, like the crafters want one thing and the PvPers want another. But I try to alternate days on who I satisfy and so far everyone seems pretty happy."
Talk of a rebellion within Purple has been exaggerated. I meet one supposed revolutionary leader in a shady inn to discover his only act of sedition was to ask his Purple cohorts to stop spamming chat with caps lock on ("I don't take the war super serious," he said.)
Most people ignore the war. They just want to gather wood, cook stews, and earn the money to buy a new place to call home.
Disorganization aside, the Syndicate is such a populous and nebulous group that to call anybody its leader seems foolish. Even Eve says being governor is "just a title." But she must have some deeper plan, right? Some scheme to ensure Purple supremacy?
"For me? I just love Monarch's. Working on getting a home here..."
Hang on. What home?
"Actually, I really like the one behind you a lot."
The house is small, it stands alone. Wooden beams, white walls, a red painted door. Two dogs laze on the porch behind a wicker fence. All tucked away from the bustle of the town's plaza.
I look again at Eve Lily. She is not the military leader of the Purples. I couldn't tell you who is. But she is emblematic of a sentiment shared by many in this MMO. Most people ignore the war. They just want to gather wood, cook stews, and earn the money to buy something everyone values, in both New World and Old. A new place to call home.
"The Game Hasn't Even Really Started"
Night has fallen over the empty fort in Yellow territory. Judge's Verdict, proud paladin, paces back and forth on the wooden palisade, taking practice swings with his gargantuan warhammer, which he assures me can kill a man in three hits.
"The real game hasn't even truly begun," says Judge. "It's when people reach [level] 60 and all territories are taken that things truly will heat up."
The stars shine above us. I've found New World to be a predominantly peaceful MMO. For every missionary with a literal axe to grind, there's a public administrator who just wants to calculate a fair tax rate. For every gank squad, there are a hundred people fishing for 'medium salmon'. New World is one of the most popular MMOs in a long time, the server queues can attest to that. I know one lonely Yellow sentry who has learned the value of waiting.
"I at first didn't think I'd enjoy this game," says Judge. "But it's easily turning out to be one of my favorite MMOs in years."
The night is still. Through the gate below us, a single Purple player is sneaking into the fort.
"And as I said, the game hasn't even really started."
Brendan Caldwell is a freelance writer. You can find him on Twitter, and he hosts Hey, Lesson, a podcast about asking smart people silly questions about games.
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