Amazon was expected to launch its New World massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game on Aug. 31, but that date has now been pushed back to Sept. 28.
A tweet posted yesterday on the official New World account includes a detailed message from the team, which you can read in full below. The reason for the delay is a good one, at least, citing a desire to "smash bugs, improve stability, and polish the game" during the extra four weeks of pre-release development time.
Amazon has little to worry about in terms of the game being popular even with this delay. During the recent closed beta, over a million players logged in to try out the new MMO and they logged over 16 million hours according to the message, although this was later corrected to be over 25 million hours played.
This is by no means the first delay the game has suffered. It was meant to launch in May last year, but the release got pushed back due to the pandemic and the New World development team shifting to remote work. The closed beta highlighted a number of bugs, but the most unexpected involved bricking GeForce GTX 3090 graphics cards, which are both very expensive and hard to find.
New World can be pre-ordered and there's three editions of the game. The Standard Edition is $39.99, the Deluxe Edition is $49.99, and the Steelbook Edition is unfortunately already unavailable due to its popularity. The main difference between the three is the amount of bonus content and in-game items they contain.