What Stage Are We At Today

 

 It’s been two days now since Amazon announced the end of development for New World: Aeternum, so let’s check in on where we are with our grief.

Denial
Anger
Bargaining ← we are here
Depression
Acceptance

 We speedran the denial stage. It didn’t take long to go from news of layoffs at Amazon to the announcement that New World’s development was ending. Maybe at first we could tell ourselves it wouldn’t be the entire dev team, but that was squashed quickly.

 Anger came swiftly to the shores of Aeternum. If we did a word diagram of the community feedback, the words “fuck” and “Amazon” would be big, bold, and centered.

 Now comes the bargaining phase, where each of us takes our grievances to our higher powers — for some, that is, sadly, Elon Musk. There’s a furious rumor that xAI is going to buy out Amazon Game Studios and New World. A plausible press release is making the rounds. There is some credence to this; xAI has well-known intentions of getting into gaming, and Elon has said he wanted a game out within the year. X is probably better than the game being dead, but I have some real-world grievances with Musk that I’d need to grapple with.

 So here we sit — hoping, and for some, praying — things will change and we’ll get our New World back. Tune back in tomorrow, where we stare over the edge of that slip into the depression stage.

Note: this post was edited with the help of AI (ChatGPT). The thoughts are my own.  The grammatical correctness and em dashes (—) are the AI.   Yes, I realize the irony here with mentioning xAI as a possible suitor.