"Seriously, this is not cool!"
Wurm Online is the anti-WoW. If it were sentient, and somehow had hands, it would have drawn a moustache, thick rimmed glasses and silly eyebrows on every Dark Elf concept picture ever channelled from the tainted minds of Blizzard's toiling artists. What's more, Wurms design ethos seems purposefully locked in opposition to the conventional ideas of fun peddled by the likes of LOTRO, Age of Conan, Vanguard, Ultima Online, Runescape, Lineage 2, or any other popular MMOG you care to name, except perhaps for EVE Online. Anyway, my Google search subverting point is thus: Wurm Online is like no other MMOG I, and I'll wager, you, have ever played. Small parts of it can be compared to known qualities in all of the previously mentioned games, but the whole amalgamous lump consistently and effortlessly defies comparison. It’s fortunate then that this, as it turns out, makes it bloody brilliant. Oh, and it's free.
THE CONCEPT
So let’s get down to brass tacks. Wurm is a self proclaimed "medieval simulation," which, on any serious reflection, reveals itself to be quite a horrifying prospect, conjuring (in my mind, at least) visions of mud cuisine and long hours on the rack in some unspeakably foul dungeon, so it's probably fortunate that Wurm fails miserably in this regard. In actuality it is the single most rewarding and creative MMOG experience I have ever enjoyed. Elements of the game do reflect the 'simulation' claim, particularly the oft yearned for requirement to eat and drink at regular intervals - if you don't, your stamina regeneration slows to a near stop, making any actions nearly impossible. Fortunately, wrapped around this rather prickly core concept, is one of the most open and customizable RPG worlds ever created, with technology which allows players to quite literally shape the world and create a vast array of buildings, furniture and equipment for their own homesteads, towns and cities.
"Wurms world is frequently beautiful and can be entirely altered."
Wurms world is huge - bigger than any game world I’ve experienced, excepting Microsoft flight simulator and Dark & Light (but that doesn't fit the loosest definition of a game, so there). There are no zones, no loading screens and everything on the landscape can be manipulated and altered. This includes terrain height (you can dig right down to water or pile up mountains of dirt), You can mine for precious metals - making actual underground tunnels in the process - chop down (and please re-plant!) trees and flora, and generally treat the landscape like a giant sand pit. Everything players create in Wurm must be hewn from the basic elements of the landscape, which must be mined, farmed, forrested or hunted. Once I began to come to terms with the huge freedom this and the scale of the world provided, I felt something which might be comparable to the sense of excitement and possibility the first American settlers might have experienced when making landfall on the east coast.
FIRST STEPS
I started my adventure into Wurm Online almost three months ago. Since then I've spent some 150 hours in the world, playing alongside a couple of long term MMOG friends. New players are thrown right into the centre of 'New Town', which is understandably the biggest settlement in Wurm. On first inspection it appears to be specifically designed to disorient, confuse and confound inexperienced navigators, but this is not a malicious developer’s idea of fun, rather it's because the city is entirely made by players. The settlement has grown organically, with new players logging in and throwing up homes on the ever expanding city limits. Along with this, farmland and managed forests are fenced off, and players find new uses for exposed land as old buildings decay. This has resulted in a horrifying tangle of dead-end cul-de-sacs and pathways which force the unsuspecting player into two mile jogs along winding paths, only to end up back in the city centre. I kid you not - the first time I logged in I probably spent 40 arduous minutes wondering through the tangle of houses and fenced off fields before finally breaking through to open grassland and forests.
"Don't use this as a map, the city will have already changed.
I had always intended to set up a camp away from large settlements, and this experience had strengthened my resolve tenfold, even as veteran players were warning me against it so soon in my adventure.
GAMEPLAY
Wurms gameplay is a bit like a micro level game of Civilization, where instead of taking the roll of the omnipotent and immortal leader of a great civilization, the player steps into the boots of the very small and very mortal settler - but here's the good bit: he achieves the same things! Players are expected to navigate a kind of tech tree to gradually build higher quality and more varied tools, equipment, and housing, but they are not limited by some arbitrary unlocking system or (in the majority of cases) their skill in a particular craft; they are simply confined to constructions which can be built with the tools and resources at their disposal. It's probably easiest to explain this in the context of my own first few hours in Wurm, where I set about building a house with a friend of mine...
Having completed the short introduction tutorial and been awarded my set of basic tools, Me and Rob (for that was my esteemed associates name) headed out into the wilderness to plant metaphorical flags in our patch of land. We followed our noses to a lake then along its east bank and south out of New Town, through a small valley barely above water level and on to the north shore of a second lake. The landscape here rose into gentle rolling hills to the south, with a steep wooded hill behind us. It's here that we chose to set up our new camp called 'The Temple of Gon'. After some flailing of arms and general boggling at the scale of the task ahead, we set about clearing and flattening terrain for our first building, which would be christened 'The Palace of Dan Flower'. It was to be a virtual shrine to the grandiose irony of a simple old school friend, who really was called Dan Flower. Our first task was to cut down some Birch and apple trees to clear a small patch of land, I then set about digging, and dumping dirt where appropriate, to flatten out a few tiles. We had all the tools needed to cut down trees, and to shape them into planks, but a helpful passerby informed us we needed two other ingredients: Large Nails (for obvious reasons), and a Mallet to plan and construct the building. The mallet was not so tricky, being a relatively simple matter of carving a log into a shaft, then another shaft into a mallet head and connecting the two. It's possible to fail at each stage, but success (and final item quality) increases with practice. This is the basic premise of all construction in Wurm and it works very nicely indeed. The changing of the world and the collection of the finished products of your labour are a suitable reward for time spent, and something I consider to be far more tangible than the unlocking of new skills, or 1up’ing of attributes.
"Fires are really important when you are starting out."
GRAPHICS
Let me digress here to get the whole "graphics" thing out the way, Wurms visuals are... odd. The environments, particularly the landscapes, water and weather effects are frequently surprising in their beauty, and give me a great sense of the elemental nature of the untamed world. However, the indie pedigree of the game is often visible in basic and sometimes ugly models for players, creatures and buildings. That said, on balance, I enjoy the slightly retro nature of the artwork and the lack of A+ graphics does not detract considerably from the thrust of the gameplay.
Even given the simple graphics, Wurm will struggle with densely populated areas, particularly New Town. Don't be put off if you are getting ~2 FPS when you first log into NT, this means you'll get ~25 or more once you are out of that hell hole. There's also plenty which can be done to improve performance; reducing tree, building and object view distance to the minimum when in town, and turning off a number of shaders and special effects, but you'll want to put these back up to at least medium if you don't have any speed issues. As I mentioned before, weather and water effects really stand out as the best graphical features of Wurm, the procedurally generated skies are wonderful, and I love it when heavy rain rolls in and the grass starts getting really buffeted by the wind. The camp really takes on a life of its own, and it is endearing to the game that these effects can generate such a strong sense of both relying on, and being at odds with nature.
"Wurm's world is huge, and beautiful.. mostly."
COMBAT
So let’s get back to the Temple Of Gon, where a valuable lesson is about to be learned. When you are starting out in Wurm, you don't hunt animals... they hunt you, and frequently turn you into soft furnishings for their homes. So, let me make this very clear: do not, whatever you do, try to outrun a brown bear if you are carrying anything more than a tooth pick.
Unfortunately, I happened to be carrying 60KG's of iron ore when I met my first denizen of Wurm. The fight was short, and embarrassingly one sided; I feebly kicked the bear in his ribs between relentless gouges into my wool clad body. A heavy strike to my leg soon rendered me immobile and sealed my fate. Fortunately I had drawn the creature some distance from the camp before I finally succumbed to massive haemorrhaging of all the wrong body parts.
This altercation raises one final important point: Wurm is neither forgiving of nor friendly to noob's. You've gotta have a thick skin and expect to get beat down at fairly regular intervals by any animal that comes along, that is, until you've got yourself a decent weapon, some armour and a bit of fighting skill. What’s more, since I entered Wurm every proceeding hour has been more confusing than the last. This is Wurms biggest asset and folly; it has been a defining factor in all my experiences inside the game. I can't stress this strongly enough: Wurm Online is obscenely complex. There is no logical flow to the actions you perform and no apparent learning curve. Even if there were an expansive set of tutorials, any element not touched on would remain a black box. Fortunately there are resources to help: the Wurm official Wiki is managed by veteran players and goes a good way to documenting the vast number of interactions and items in the world; also, the Wurm community is one of the most consistently friendly and helpful I have ever had the pleasure to play alongside. In all, the game demands a rather pro-active mind-set, possibly beyond the comfort zone of many gamers, but I attribute GAX's members with +1 intelligence on every 'choice of game' roll, so I think you folks will do just fine.
Wurm has two servers: Wild, and Jen Kellon. Guess where this picture is from."
If you want to give Wurm a try, then roll over to their website and hit the 'Play Now' link. It'll download and install right there, and it's entirely free (though your skills will probably cap out after about 24 hours of play). Do yourself the justice of working through the tutorial and spending a few hours in the world with some other folks, by that time you'll know if you want to carry on. If you want to get in touch with me or other GAX'ers in Wurm then join my Wurm group! Thanks for reading, and good luck! I'll leave you with a trailer that the Wurm community has released since I originally posted this review.
THE GAX REVIEW I THOUGHT I WOULD SHARE IT ON HERE YOU GUYS SHOULD HAVE A LOOK ON WURM ITS A GREAT GAME. ITS ONE OF THE BEST REVIEWS I HAVE READ!!!!
NOTE i didnt write this i just have permissions to put it from GAX to mmorpg.
dragon cows.