Ridiculous ‘New World’ Exploit Crashes Players’ Games By Hovering Over General Chat
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Featured Image Credit: Amazon Games
Amazon Games has finally found success with one of its games, New World. But despite its popularity and huge launch numbers, there have been a few issues with the game already. We’ve previously written about how fans could be invincible by wiggling their client on-screen, for example, but a new video from YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes uncovers a game-breaking bug caused by a potentially dangerous issue.
Josh Strife Hayes has a video dissecting this entire bug and its implications but the rundown is this. The general chat box you can see in New World can be used for code. Somewhere along the line of development Amazon Games failed to put in a block to prevent the text in the general chat from being able to reference and use game files. This has several repercussions some of which are just funny but others are more serious.
Here is the trailer for New World...
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The first is that you can quite easily recall images in the chat box. The YouTuber uses a picture of sausages to demonstrate how this could look, and how you can even resize them to look huge and block up the chat. If you attempt this with an image that doesn’t exist in the game file, a massive yellow block shows up instead - both are a potential annoyance for PvP situations.
There is also a “flash-bang” bug that allows you to fill the chat box with the yellow block as well as putting that block in-game above your player’s head. This would block a significant portion of the screen for any players in the area. These applications are annoying at worst but there are other issues with this coding oversight.
There is, according to Josh Strife Hayes, a line of code that you can put into the general chat box which would crash any player out of the game for just hovering over the text. Apparently, the code forces the player’s client to attempt to find a file or image that doesn’t exist, basically making it spiral and crash when it can’t find it. Again, this is particularly annoying to PvP situations. The code doesn’t even show up in the text box, it could be any line of information from any player that could have this effect. And finally, this text box issue could certainly lead to malware being distributed amongst players if gone untreated.
What seems particularly annoying about this situation is that MMOs have had this happen before. According to the video, World of Warcraft when through this years ago and New World probably should have learned from that mistake.
