New World Text Chat Bug: Everything You Need to Know
By Jakob Lucas
While Amazon Games' New World has been off to a tremendous start, bugs are quickly being uncovered and some of them are literally game-breaking. Unsuspecting players can have their entire experienced ruined simply by someone sending a message in the chat.
One HTML code can crash the game for everybody involved and here's everything players should know:
New World Text Chat Bug: Everything You Need to Know
Many online games have a text box allowing players to communicate with one another. These chat features often have the purpose of fostering a sense of community as players can make friends and alliances through it and use it to overall add to their experience.
Most games' chat boxes only accept typed messages and not any forms of code, though Amazon Games' New World does things a little differently. Whether intentional or not, New World's chat feature accepts HTML code, this issue was brought to attention by YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes.
This chat bug has led to a variety of funny moments as players are able to add random and funny images to the chat. Though, some players discovered a much more malicious way to exploit this HTML code, finding a line of code that can crash the game.
As explained in the YouTube video attached above (the segment about the chat bug begins at 1:35), New World allowing HTML code to be inserted in their chat means that players can be "hiding links as images and sending out malware."
For players' game to crash they must hover over the plain text of the code, the issue with this is that the plain text of the malicious code is indistinguishable from the text of any old chat message. One potential way to avoid a game-breaking code would be for players not to hover over any chat text.
Hopefully this issue is quickly brought to Amazon Games' attention and they can work to address it and prevent any more players' experience from being ruined.