The screenshots in this thread speak for themselves

Heres a screenshot from a game in 1980:

Originally posted by Maxipad

I wouldn't advise playing this game at all. It has a small development team, limited resources, and an absolutely horrible community, despite what you might see on these forums from the fan boys and girls. Most people get tired of the text based nature of the game, and in short order. I suppose if people wanted to read all night about the things they do in game then it would have more than a thousand subscribers. Animations in game are about as varied as those found in the original Final Fantasy for the NES. Maybe if you are feeling nostalgic for the old BBS MUD games from the 90s you should give it a try, otherwise it's not worth the time wasted on going through the primitive, yet long winded, tutorial.

 

There is no roadmap for development, and usually any updates come as a surprise to most players and are typically accompanied by a few unintended changes. Documentation is extremely limited and supplied by a player run wiki page that is sometimes outdated and unreliable. Any contact you can hope to have with the very small development team is usually done in IRC where whoever cries the loudest gets attention. All this does is add to the chaotic nature of an already disjointed development structure. In short, you'll pull your hair out waiting for meaningful advancement in this game all while waiting for the true sandbox to unfold. In the meantime, you can get to work digging a few hundred thousand dirts while you wait for that. At least you can be comforted in knowing that the developer is not scared as long as he has 200 dolts on the hook to pay for the lights to be on. And that is sadly the vision for the future of this game.

 

These are simply hard facts. Nothing that I wrote here is meant as a troll. I'm not trying to goad anyone into a fight. I'm just trying to warn people of what they are getting into if they start playing this game.

While some of this is true, it completely fails to mention the existing content of which there is masses of. It is a small team, development is slow, but if you joined now and it took them a year to add any new content at all you still wouldnt have done everything and there would still be alot left to do, unlike story driven linear games we see streaming out of new mmo's, wurm is a game where you make your own story and to suggest that we are waiting for the 'true sandbox' to unfold is imo unfair and inaccurate. Wurm is, in its current condition, an excellent sandbox already.

I will say this though, if you approach this game with a singular object, for example raising your digging skill to 80+, it will become very boring but if you approach the game as a game rather than how quick you can get to max skill, its incredibly enjoyable. Digging away and your bored, there are hundreds of other activities you can switch to on your 'to do list'.

Not to mention the community (on Indy anyways) is excellent, everyone is nice, friendly and helpful. (unlike this forum it seems)

There are 3 PvE servers all within the Freedom Isles cluster (you can travel to all 3), Independence is the biggest and oldest map, then you have exodus and deliverance

Can read more about the server types here:

http://wurmpedia.com/index.php/Server_Types

I can only confirm what others have said in this thread, gameplay is excellent in Wurm, it doesnt have fancy graphics (but they are still really nice) doesnt have many animations (which are being worked on) and the communication methods are abit old school (irc etc) but truth is, I joined this game about 2 weeks ago after spending many many years looking for an mmo that was not a TAB, 1, 2, 3 affair, a game where i could decided what to do and when to do it. Wurm has all of this and even more.

Another thing wurm excels at that other tripleA multi-million dollar mmo's do not, is its incredible attention to detail, its all the little things that really make this game shine above the rest. Ever seen an eclipse in game that makes daytime dark? ever had to bury corses or else attract preditors? ever been able to shape your house to your specifications? Just a tiny amount of examples.

Try it out if you enjoy or have enjoyed sandbox games of the past, you wont regret it.

Seems Wurmpedia is back up, here:

http://stats.wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Its down.

No idea when it will be back up, no idea whats wrong, no idea if this was planned, no idea if the game has died forever, no idea about anything because there is no information anywhere from anyone, but apparently this is normal.

From what I've gathered from the forums before they went down and from dev blogs and the such, the games team doesnt have the capacity or ability to let thier customers know what the status of the service is at any given time.

I couldnt even get a single reply from the 140 people in IRC to a very simple and reasonable question. Do people ever chat in there?

Also cant launch the game, its 7pm prime here in the UK on a saturday...

Forums - Down

Website - Down

Twitter - no updates

IRC - Down

Game - Down

Notification - None

They really need to get thier arse in gear, this is just shoddy customer support, or rather literally zero customer support.

Im lost, did what?

Just missed it! Went ot the page and there were 20 keys left by time i logged in there were 0 lol.

A-Typical of G1, they dont really know what they are doing when it comes to making changes to the games they buy. They must lock the design team inside a room somwhere away from fans and the rest of the worlds population, either that or they ask politicians what they should do because they are completely out of touch with everyone else.

Stopped playing this when they failed to fix the basic crafting bug where the crafting queue would freeze, wouldnt suprise me if it was still broken (and a premium only feature i might add)

Doesnt really matter these days anyways, there are far superior and more fun games out there!

Having recently started playing this I have to say its definately grants a huge sense of accomplishment that you just don't get from recent mainstream games. This is a survival game to its core, the immersion due to the difficulty of being out there in the wild trying to survive surpasses most if not all other mmo's out there.

As others have mentioned, its not super pretty shiny graphics and certain aspects need much improvement (which is in the works) but the gameplay is rich, engaging and challenging.

If your looking for a game to 'live' in wurm online offers that to an extent that no other games do.

BoRinG

And I still cannot fathom as to why they dont release UO2, not only would its loyal fan base go head first into it, but all of us hundreds of thousands of players who used to play and love this game would also be overjoyed and handing over our cash.

3D Ultima online, with the old skill and item systems. Instant money maker.

Originally posted by Deeter

I've always really wanted to come back to this game but every time I read news about it they still have mountains of things that they're planning to fix so I don't even bother when I hear stuff like that.

 

Welcome to G1's world where everything will be fixed tomorrow.

Originally posted by BillMurphy

I'm just throwing this out there... but who WOULDN'T want a new Ultima?  Online or Off?  I mean, seriously.

 

Would easily become the most anticipated game this year (if it remained true to its sandbox nature)

I have to say I'm pleased Skyrim is getting so much praise, it really deserves it. I played Morrowind, was ok but never finished it, Oblivion was better but again i lost interest after a while, Fallout was excellent, played it to the end, fall out new vegas was ok but again lost interest half way through, Skyrim on the otherhand has not become tedious or repetative, I keep trying to stick to a specific quest but it takes me hours upon hours to actually get to the destinations because of the hundreds of caves,huts,houses,forts, sunken ships, mines, towns etc etc. So much to do so little time!

Originally posted by page

I'm an old school gamer. I could handle the 2 D graphics, i'm in it for the game anyway.

I'm sure this mmo is deep. HOWEVER I downloaded the trial about a year ago, and found the UI, and sizing is just horrible.  For asking $9.95 a month is like saying " we don't need any new players, so we don't have to update anything ".

The UI is the most customisable ive ever seen, you can even adjust the size of it in the Enhanced Client. As for the subscription, yes i agree its never changed that much and to be fair for its age and lowering population it should be reduced or even go F2P at this point.

There are frequent updates however.

I think SWG did it the right way, they had both but if you bought from the AH you had to pay 20% extra or something like that, it was an excellent solution, it allowed players to buy quickly if they wanted to or go out and explore and visit the merchants personally for a cheaper price.

But in terms of this entire thread, as UO was my first real mmo i am completely biased, my house in UO is what I played for, it was the ultimate 'end game' feature and something that took alot of work to get but when you compare SWG and UO housing (which i personally feel is the proper way to do housing) when you compare that to all these other so called housing it doesnt compare and has resulted in a very unrealistic perception of what housing can actually be.

Bad Housing:

AoC: Instance guild vity that did nothing but look good.

EQ2: Instance flats that did nothing but look good

LOTRO: Instance houses that, yep you guessed it, did nothing but look good

Good Housing:

UO: Uninstanced houses that was a center for crafting, storage and selling

SWG: Uninstanced houses that was a center for crafting, storage and selling

When you look at the example above its clear about 1 thing, UO and SWG has housing fully develeoped and ingame at launch as a core feature, the others were either rushed out or added later as a mere after thought and as such turned out to be utterly crap (maybe EQ can be excluded here as it got alot of attention)

Housing can give you an attachment that is greater than you have to your characters, we all like to own something and having an attachment to something in a mmo leads to much better retention rates, if someone told me 14 years ago that uo would be still be alive today, i would have laugh in thier face but here it is, still alive (barely but alive!) and i bet you alot of that has to do with housing.

Currently playing UO again lol, as a filler until something else comes out.

I have to agree and disagree in terms of graphics, I have always been a long term supporter of a UO2 3D project, while 2D UO has its charms and is very nostalgic the true feature that imo has never been beaten is its gameplay, UO is a fun game to play, not just to look at which is soemthing that seems to have been tipped on its head with all the newer MMOs, they are nice too look at but boring to play.

When I say gameplay what i mean is the feel and diversity of it, the ultima gameworld is something we can all relate too, the towns and cities in thegame were 'personal' places, not just the next quest hub or place to sell your stuff, they had real character and the players attached themselves to that, then you had the player housing, it was the next step in that ability to connect themseleves to a certain town or city.

Then the other layers, the whole good and bad thing, most games dont give you much of a choice in relation to that, they just hold your hand along the way to your 'hero' status, problem is when everyone is a hero then being a hero mean nothing. UO is different in that respects with the virtue system and lore. Whats even more suprising is that all these existsed at its launch which is more than can be said for alot of these so called skeleton mmo which have absolutely no depth or lore behind them.

From these forums and other mmo sites, the themeparks have been done to death, people are wanting something different which hopefully the companies will pick up on and realise there are a ton of misplaced mmo players looking for something other than the next cloned wow. I have no doubt that it will happen at some point but with numbers dwindling in UO now, maybe EA/Mythic will clinch the opportunity to make UO2.