New World: A Massive Multiplayer Delusion

60 hours and 3 weeks away from the release, it's safe to say that the first impressions were confirmed and won't change any time soon.
Normally in an MMO the player can expect to see the game change with time, but with the expertise Amazon Games has in making the games fail and get closed down, and the hard time they seem to be having for a simple Character Transfer, this time around is more of a gamble.

First things first, the usual critic.
The queues and the servers.
Those are issues doomed to persist as servers can be upgraded only up to 2200 (at the moment of the writing in fact, bigger servers failed to meet the requirements of stability and reliability) which would be a satisfying number considering the PvP battles are up to 50vs50, which also means the game doesn't need massive amount of players in order to get the things moving (even tho many risks to miss the action because of the very low population limit), but since they are regrouped under 'World Sets' per which a player can have only 1 character, the available servers are in reality more than halved, thing that will prompt the need of even more servers in case the game population should increase, creating a loop of bad server management.

Gameplay-wise the game has some bright sides, like the souls-like combat system which is engaging and refreshing, creating a very enjoyable experience, the fishing mini-game is also a different and smart approach to an otherwise boring and tedious 'waiting game'.
Unfortunately those innovations get diluted by the shabby and shallow mechanics that govern the PvE, the crafting, and the PvP.

• In the crafting department, New World tries to innovate what Albion introduced, with a lot of Jobs that work together in order to craft the finalized item. The approach is interesting and time to time engaging but gets ultimately killed by the sheer amount of type of resources needed to create a single item and the lack of an in-game portable source of informations; a single item may require different metals, herbs, and crystals which locations are barely described, more like hinted, at the crafting tables and once left the city in order to actually find those resources, players have to search either on Google or to wander aimlessly around the map and kill the always-respawning hordes of enemies while desperately trying to find what they need.

• The PvE is comparable to the shabbiest low budget F2P available. Extremely mainstream and boring missions that lead to an extreme of the map in order to kill 3 animals and get their skin, while hundreds of players are doing the same, and then get back to the city in order to get the next mission which leads to the other extreme of the map, kill 6 enemies and then get back to complete it, for a couple of coins and a disappointing amount of EXP.
  All of this by walking, as the only ways to move around is either by foot, a free teleport to the Inn (once every 60 minutes) and a paid teleport which leads to cities and to only a few portals scattered around the regions, whose cost is determined by various sources and can get quite expensive as the 'coin' used is also needed for crafting.

• PvP is the next, and probably biggest delusion. New World wants to be a PvP driven game, where players fight in massive battles for the control of regions and forts but this mechanic can be accessed only after the 50th level, which without buying an account (thing that the majority of high level players have done, creating an enormous disparity between them and people who want to play the game in a legit way) can take weeks of grinding and since, as said, it wants to be the focus of the game, it can become quite frustrating not being able to participate to the main action for so long.

The game feels, overall, an empty and quite buggy mess, maybe a good starting point for a Beta but definitely a nono for a game that's supposed to be fully released and ready to receive an expansion or big update.
This is quite important and feels right to be repeated: MMOs do tend to come out looking like this and usually get better over time, ESO is the living proof of this behavior, but the mix of yes-men populating the game and the general incompetence of Amazon Games could be the exception confirming the rule.