How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wurm

You don’t really hear alot about MMORPGs on Gaming Daily. If you were to ask Craig he’d probably say “I don’t like people, the game itself isn’t much fun and [more often than not] you have to pay monthly. Also I don’t like people.” In most part, I’d have to agree. I like playing with my friends, but when they’re not there I can’t think of a more depressing gaming experience than running through an MMO by yourself, clicking and grinding aimlessly and having your chat channel spammed by idiots. I find it is very rare you’ll actually find a sociable friendly person to help you. And in the game too. But the main problem I have with the experience offered by MMOs is the sense of your own identity in the world, or rather lackof. It never feels like anything you do actually matters, especially when you see twenty other people do the exact same thing a moment later.

It is also impossible to write a good story when the entire game is a farce itself like this. I’ll take WoW, as I think it is the most well known example. Previously Warcraft had a well developed story, from Arthas’ fall from grace to the racially undertoned struggle of Thrall and his orcs finding acceptance. Then WoW came, and suddenly EVERYONE is a hero. You’re all doing the same quests; so after you kill a pivotal character like Kel’thuzad he just, well, resets for the next person to take a pop. In an enviroment like this it’s impossible to create cannon, or care in particularly about what you’re doing. Those boars are always going to need their ribs snapped off and delivered to some dwarf, that inter-dimensional alien is always going to be there to kill on the other side of that portal. Other MMOs might try different things, and most don’t have a pre-established story to wee all over but it’s still hard to care about what you’re doing when all the plot comes from hovering text boxes. No matter what take, all MMOs have never really let a player have a lasting impact on the world. Till Wurm.

So, Wurm then. It has no story beyond “You were teleported here. We might be at war with someone, who knows. Here’s a bit of a tutorial, now off you trot”. There’s no quests. No objective. Yet the world of Wurm has felt the most alive out of any MMO I’ve ever tried, as any mark you make on the world stays. No need to suddenly pretend a cataclysm suddenly occured to create variety once more, no epic bad guy nor “you are the chosen one” to convince you to stay. It’s an MMO about survival. Normally I used to find it a bit strange those that in Fallout and other FPSRPGs (Ferpissrepegs) who installed hunger and thirst mods, as it seems like a strange annoyance. In Wurm too it is a strange annoyance, but utterly compelling and provides the need for you to bond with your fellow players. Alot of the game design is set up to encourage community building like this and is something I’ll come to later. For now, bitching.

Time to stop beating around the bush then; this game is seriously ugly. Even after putting two paper bags over its head and burying it in a coffin on another planet it still isn’t enough to conceal how bad this looks. The avatars themselves are so stifly positioned they make straight lines seem wonky and life like in comparison. There’s no option to customise how your character looks beyond male and female, equipment doesn’t clip correctly into hands and so many more graphical failings. Before you jump in, the game developers like you to believe the world looks something like this -

When as soon as you get out of the starting zone it looks more along these lines -

So you’ll be expecting me to come around and tell you the gameplay is amazing and well refined. No it isn’t. In more words: no it isn’t you’d have better luck doing household chores with only your teeth, as it’s amazingly frustrating and clogged with more bugs than a queen bee’s womb. Every single action you could think of is convoluted beyond recognition, and some painfully obvious facilities are missing. Say you have ten logs, but you only want to put five of them down. There’s no way to Ctrl+click or Shift+click to cherry pick a batch and no insta-key to make it drop what you click. So instead you must right click each one, select from the menu that pops up “drop” and do that for each one of the five. If there’s another way apologies Wurm fans, it must be very well hidden a feature.

That’s the general impression for alot of Wurm’s splendor though; hidden. At first you feel limited by the convolution, frustration and ugliness. “Why do I move so slowly? Am I meant to spend all my time gathering food? Where’s a minimap or a compass even?”. But then you soon realise how unlimited you actually are. All those roads, fences, signs, tunnels, buildings, ships: they’re all built by players. And this isn’t like other MMOs where you have to wait till after ages of playing and levelling to get to the good stuff, you can start slapping things together straight away.
As a warning to those that, like me, hate The Grind it is still there, but here it actually feels productive. My carpentry skill is going up because I’m actually needing to use it, not because I want to be the ultimate or make the most money. You see all those houses around as you walk? They’re not exclusive premium account member objects; you can find the materials and build one within your first day or two if you’re productive. It’s a bit difficult to figure out Wurm logic sometimes to do these things though, and rather than constantly spam the chat channel for help I’d like you to consider a little cartoon I made to illustrate what to do in such matters -

Only nobody was ever actually that rude to me. I can’t tell you how shocked I was by the amount of willingly helpful people in Wurm, and not a single time did they call me a noob. More than once has the kindness of such strangers aided me immeasurably, from lending a hammer to full on guidance and assistance. There’s even a donation coffin near the start area for experienced players to charitably and anonymously give useful items to starting players. How many MMOs have you ever seen that happen in before? Of course there’s still dicks/bitches however who’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down and run off, but they are few and far between. Thankfully there’s countermeasures you can take once you’ve built your first house by putting a lock on your door.

The community really is strong in Wurm, and that’s because Wurm passively encourages such co-operation and friendliness. Sure you can cut down all those trees, saw those planks and smelt those nails by yourself and forage from the land, but things are so much easier and pleasant by working together. They get the benefit of you as a friend and a little more experience in their skills, you get the job done alot faster. Then there’s the consideration of food and other essentials. Again it is possible to do by yourself, but setting people up as farmers and others as cooks helps ensure that everybody is fed. I can’t think of a single game experience like seeing a boring hill become a interwoven self-sufficent village with communal buildings and pathways. That is a reason alone to play this game and persevere with it, trumping anything negative I could ever really say about it. Seriously, over at PCG they’ve even gone all Dubai and started building their very own Island, the beginnings of which is this green patch in the ocean -

I feel guilty for how incredibly harsh I was on this game at the start of this post, but I felt it was needed to try and empathise with the early feelings that I’m sure alot of you out there will feel. The beauty soon becomes apparent, when you climb a difficult mountain to suddenly be able to stare at the world sweeping away below. No screenshot can ever capture that beauty or emotion, as from a cold perspective this game is as ugly as I said. Exploring is an experience in itself when playing Wurm, as though fraught with danger from bears and other nasties, the look of the grass and trees feels just right. And if it doesn’t then cut them all down, dig a hole and start mining for gold. There is so much choice, and so much character in this game any negative preconceptions or grumbles you have fade away. There’s lots of novel ideas to keep you hooked and constantly playing in what is a generally exciting enviroment. Want peaceful building? Take on a project to convert a mountainside. Want to bash people’s heads in? Then build a boat to travel to a different server (each Island is a server) and raid their coast. I’ve never seen a game experience quite like it under the offputting presentation, and can fully reccomend it.

If I’ve convinced you to join, my basic advice for starting fresh in Wurm then:

1) Read the wiki.

2) Read the wiki.

3) Be polite, be patient. If the wiki doesn’t answer something, turn to the PA channel or your local channels and there’ll be people more than willing to help.

4) Work with others. This is the one time where I’ll probably say Communism is fantastic, as you can generally trust your fellow humans and it’s not patriotically driven.

5) Join a community. Now, I think most of you read PCG UK anyway but they’ve got the nicest and friendliest settlement set up, always eager for new faces to join and help pitch in. M_the_C is the unoffical leader, and he provides detailed instructions to help you stumble your way there. Otherwise stop off and say hi in the actual PCG thread.

6) If it’s your first 24 hours, by gods take as much advantage as possible of the free food offered. Trust me, this becomes a right fuck once it expires.

7) There’s day and night cycles in the game, as well as weather changes such as fog. Try to keep wandering in poor visiblity to a minimum as there’s no map or compass.

8) Wave at me. I sometimes get lonely in the wilderness.

This game, is brilliant. It may not seem much, and is rife with problems. But if enough of us can support it then it’ll move onto becoming an actual diamond, a true example of the ways MMOs should let you actually impact substantially in the gameworld for your hours invested. If you find you like it a few from the PCG village are considering becoming paid up members at some point in the future, so think about joining them and helping the devs out.