Wurm Online - Why are there no games like it?

daveospice · September 2019

Wurm Online is an interesting concept of a game. Brutal grind, brutal learning curve...

In all honesty it is archaic, old... too many menus. Yet I'm always going back to it. Why? There's just not many options like it. I tried Life is Feudal and it was heading in the right direction but I don't like PVP I just want to PVE with players in a hardcore PVE setting.

I imagine if someone recreated Wurm Online with modern graphics and interaction (less menus) that it would be a massive success, simply because of the amount of successful survival games out there... you mix the sims, with survival, and make it brutally difficult... I would play it for years

daveospice · September 2019

I should probably mention why I don't like PVP in a sandbox game... Well because there's just too many ways for people to circumvent the pvp aspect and instead use the PVP freedom to troll you when you're not online and it can be very tedious to make things, allowing others to destroy it... I just don't have that kind of patience anymore.

Kyleran · September 2019

Baalzharon said:

Wow! This game looks amazing! Good job! Hope they keep improving

Are you a bot?

Quizzical · September 2019

Because it wasn't commercially successful enough to inspire a bunch of clones. If it had millions of players, there would be more games like it.

Coolit · September 2019

Quizzical said:

Because it wasn't commercially successful enough to inspire a bunch of clones. If it had millions of players, there would be more games like it.

One of the two original creators Markus Persson took much of the concepts he put into Wurm and created Minecraft which was pretty damn sucessful

Quizzical · September 2019

Coolit said:

Quizzical said:

Because it wasn't commercially successful enough to inspire a bunch of clones. If it had millions of players, there would be more games like it.

One of the two original creators Markus Persson took much of the concepts he put into Wurm and created Minecraft which was pretty damn sucessful

This is why there are games that try to copy Minecraft, but not games that try to copy Wurm.

newbismx · September 2019

There are no games like it because Wurm is essentially a tile based MUD with graphics and a level of complexity rarely rivaled outside of Pen and paper RPG's.

Time commitment aside (which is brutal in vanilla WURM and can be a bit much for even the most hardcore among us) the entire state of the internet and computer games is so mainstream now that the people who would enjoy a game of this type are few and far between.

Much easier to make a far less complex game and much more profitable as well- sadly.

I still play WURM Unlimited btw- A masterpiece

Theocritus · September 2019

It was kind of a wierd game...Could never find any land for my own, sometimes the movement system was a pain, very slow gains....It was Ok but not one I'd want to try and design a game world after.

anemo · September 2019

There is a thought set that's missing for games like these, at least in my opinion... Essentially if people are willing to play games as flawed as WurmOnline or Haven and Hearth, there's a fair chance that there are more willing to play a game that works on those flaws (non-3d-MUD graphics, polished UIs, actual tutorials, and some "what can I do now" content).

You can clearly see some of the above hit home with things like ARC, and the hype that Starbase is getting in some communities.

Amathe · September 2019

Kyleran said:

Baalzharon said:

Wow! This game looks amazing! Good job! Hope they keep improving

Are you a bot?

Not anymore he isn't.

Kyleran · September 2019

Amathe said:

Kyleran said:

Baalzharon said:

Wow! This game looks amazing! Good job! Hope they keep improving

Are you a bot?

Not anymore he isn't.

He'll be back, probably already is. Weird thing is eventually he'll reveal his hand and get banned again.

Jakdstripper · September 2019

Life is Feudal is besically a better looking Wurm. You can even play on a pve server. Everything is terraformable, complete sandbox,pretty mich everything has to be built by players and everything is a huge grind. Much like Wurm, it has a tiny community because its just too slow, empty, tedious and grindy for most people.

newbismx · September 2019

Jakdstripper said:

Life is Feudal is besically a better looking Wurm. You can even play on a pve server. Everything is terraformable, complete sandbox,pretty mich everything has to be built by players and everything is a huge grind. Much like Wurm, it has a tiny community because its just too slow, empty, tedious and grindy for most people.

LIF:YO (and the MMO) is like a stripped down version of WURM that only includes some of the basic building premise- Mainly the terraforming- But thats pretty much it.

LIF is...Decent- but its highly lacking.

daveospice · September 2019

Yeah but I feel like if someone took wurm or LIF and made it more modern with great graphics and made the gameplay elements FUN then it could be amazing... I guess the market is too niche?

Btw Wurm Online just launched a new server with faster gains, it seems a lot better now looks like they revamped the cooking systems and such.

Phaserlight · September 2019

Kyleran said:

Amathe said:

Kyleran said:

Baalzharon said:

Wow! This game looks amazing! Good job! Hope they keep improving

Are you a bot?

Not anymore he isn't.

He'll be back, probably already is. Weird thing is eventually he'll reveal his hand and get banned again.

He didn't just get banned, he got nuked!!

Shooting the moon didn't pan out, I guess.

Viper482 · September 2019

DAoC was much more successful and is seen as the model for how to do RvR…..not one clone was ever made nor has anyone even tried to capture the model. And anyone who says "ESO" or "GW2" deserves to be throat punched.

KnightFalz · September 2019

Viper482 said:

DAoC was much more successful and is seen as the model for how to do RvR…..not one clone was ever made nor has anyone even tried to capture the model. And anyone who says "ESO" or "GW2" deserves to be throat punched.

Other than Camelot Unchained, which is essentially all about trying to recapture that model.

As far as what was successful, none of that matters so much as what is, or even as much as what may yet be. I don't imagine that DAoC is all that successful at anything these days.

AAAMEOW · September 2019

Viper482 said:

DAoC was much more successful and is seen as the model for how to do RvR…..not one clone was ever made nor has anyone even tried to capture the model. And anyone who says "ESO" or "GW2" deserves to be throat punched.

I think ESO and GW2 pretty much show what's wrong with DAoC... Even if RvR is dead in ESO and GW2, it still thrive because there are so much more content that RvR.

If RvR is dead in DAoC, or people get tired of doing it, they quit and game over.

daveospice · September 2019

It doesn't matter whether DAOC and it's RVR or Wurm Online and it's eternal grind, the story is the same:

We. Don't. Have. The. Time. To. Make. It. Worthwhile.

Period.

That's why these are such niche games! We love the concepts, we know it'd be fun... but to actually compete we'd need to invest a ton of time making sure we're one of the top players and no one has time for that so we settle for games that auto-position us against likewise players so we can actually have fun in the short amount of time that we have. The game is perfectly fine, we just don't have the time.

AAAMEOW · September 2019

My take is if people really want to play a builder, they'll play minecraft.

The people who play builder and "also" are progressionist(rpg player) are probably pretty minor.

MMOExposed · September 2019

What was Wurm online about? What made it unique

Akulas · September 2019

Too much grind. That is the short answer. I'd play a NG version. Most of the appeal was feeling accomplished after you went through a long process of being able to do something after spending a long time on it. Which is boring. Or some new people falling down a hll and spending the next 3 hours slowly dying.

daveospice · September 2019

It's not really that it's too much grind...

There's a couple issues with wurm that make it not successful.

1. No end game. You grind and grind, and for what? To build a higher ql house that looks exactly the same as the house you made at newbie skill 10 years ago?

2. Hidden information. Nothing kills this game more than just complete lack of information. They wanted the game to be a "discover" the information type of game, which only works on single player, fast paced survival games... not on a long, drag, drawn out grind mmo with menus to boot. Spend a week grinding blacksmithy and gain 10 points in the skill? Congratulations... on the surface, looks like you won - nothing -. The game doesn't actually show you, at all... how 10ql impacts your gear.

3. It was designed to prevent macros and botting, by making Q timers long, and only so many actions could be q'd... this resulted in excessive clicking, Carpal tunnel inducing nightmare... To play this game is worst than playing Eve Online. In Eve Online you can gain skill points offline... In Wurm Online you have to stay online, clicking menus over and over... get used to watching a lot of movies and youtube videos while you play.

4. The game does not encourage teamwork - at all -. You can have a town of 14 people. Each in their own house... grinding skills. No one doing anything together, because everything is designed to be done solo. Even the parts that are meant to be done together, are actually done solo I.E. You make planks I make nails, we both need to make these to make the item, but only one of us can make the item at a time... so in the end, we did it all solo.

5. Complete lack of reason to go PVE. Not only is the PVE combat completely boring, even the fun part (exploration and finding creatures) is dumbed down and completely boring. There's only a couple variations of creatures, they all act and behave the same, and the loot is pointless because anyone who belongs to a town gets endless, free meat from their spirit guards. The loot table itself is a shell of any PVE game.

6. Incompetent design choices. They've spent years balancing the game around PVP and trying to revive the PVP servers, that have... 30 players playing at any given time. No joke. They have actually invested resources in trying to revive a game that doesn't even have enough players to actively get word of mouth out about the changes to bring people back.

7. The community. The people left in the game are the people who have been playing since it came out, that means 10-15 years. They all know each other, aren't interested in new players and are completely toxic/rude to any newcomer that comes along. They of course, seem nice on the surface until you make a suggestion for a change, or ask to join a town, or... etc... It's a very tight nit group of people who are disgruntled and unhappy with the direction the game has been going and also unfriendly to new suggestions to make it better.

8. When players can max every skill, the result is any new player that comes in feels like there's no point since everyone in their village can make everything way faster/better and it'd take years... literally to catch up.

newbismx · September 2019

daveospice said:

It's not really that it's too much grind...

There's a couple issues with wurm that make it not successful.

1. No end game. You grind and grind, and for what? To build a higher ql house that looks exactly the same as the house you made at newbie skill 10 years ago?

There are World bosses and elite mobs but you're right- This (to me) isnt a bad thing though since I play Wurm as a sort of fantasy life sim .

2. Hidden information. Nothing kills this game more than just complete lack of information. They wanted the game to be a "discover" the information type of game, which only works on single player, fast paced survival games... not on a long, drag, drawn out grind mmo with menus to boot. Spend a week grinding blacksmithy and gain 10 points in the skill? Congratulations... on the surface, looks like you won - nothing -. The game doesn't actually show you, at all... how 10ql impacts your gear.

Big Yes- And layer after layer after layer of complexity. You have to really WANT to play bad enough to spend your first months constantly alt/tabbing to look something up and then if you're lucky enough to find the information you have to hope its still relevant as much has changed during the games lifespan.

3. It was designed to prevent macros and botting, by making Q timers long, and only so many actions could be q'd... this resulted in excessive clicking, Carpal tunnel inducing nightmare... To play this game is worst than playing Eve Online. In Eve Online you can gain skill points offline... In Wurm Online you have to stay online, clicking menus over and over... get used to watching a lot of movies and youtube videos while you play.

True- However, this is where Wurm Unlimited is the answer...In fact WU is the answer to many issues.

4. The game does not encourage teamwork - at all -. You can have a town of 14 people. Each in their own house... grinding skills. No one doing anything together, because everything is designed to be done solo. Even the parts that are meant to be done together, are actually done solo I.E. You make planks I make nails, we both need to make these to make the item, but only one of us can make the item at a time... so in the end, we did it all solo.

Hmmm- Not my experience at all (in WO or WU) as most people were highly specialized- yes, basic things like hammer and nails is done individually but at a certain point everyone specializes.

5. Complete lack of reason to go PVE. Not only is the PVE combat completely boring, even the fun part (exploration and finding creatures) is dumbed down and completely boring. There's only a couple variations of creatures, they all act and behave the same, and the loot is pointless because anyone who belongs to a town gets endless, free meat from their spirit guards. The loot table itself is a shell of any PVE game.

Yeah- The PVE is weak... Focus on this alone would have really helped garner a larger playerbase but it is what it is, sadly.

6. Incompetent design choices. They've spent years balancing the game around PVP and trying to revive the PVP servers, that have... 30 players playing at any given time. No joke. They have actually invested resources in trying to revive a game that doesn't even have enough players to actively get word of mouth out about the changes to bring people back.

-Again- The answer her is Wurm Unlimited. In WO you are correct but the full mmorpg is available to customize and mod and change and run how you see fit and the playerbase is actually larger than in WO most of the time.

7. The community. The people left in the game are the people who have been playing since it came out, that means 10-15 years. They all know each other, aren't interested in new players and are completely toxic/rude to any newcomer that comes along. They of course, seem nice on the surface until you make a suggestion for a change, or ask to join a town, or... etc... It's a very tight nit group of people who are disgruntled and unhappy with the direction the game has been going and also unfriendly to new suggestions to make it better.

8. When players can max every skill, the result is any new player that comes in feels like there's no point since everyone in their village can make everything way faster/better and it'd take years... literally to catch up.

Hawkaya399 · September 2019

daveospice said:

Wurm Online is an interesting concept of a game. Brutal grind, brutal learning curve...

In all honesty it is archaic, old... too many menus. Yet I'm always going back to it. Why? There's just not many options like it. I tried Life is Feudal and it was heading in the right direction but I don't like PVP I just want to PVE with players in a hardcore PVE setting.

I imagine if someone recreated Wurm Online with modern graphics and interaction (less menus) that it would be a massive success, simply because of the amount of successful survival games out there... you mix the sims, with survival, and make it brutally difficult... I would play it for years

When I play I play on Chaos, with PvP open world FFA, so I guess we're different in that respect. I think the base game has no longterm challenge. The monsters are imbalanced, and fairly easily avoided with some resilience. Once you're established, the survival gameplay is over. PvP gives the survival longevity, although I wish the base game already had it.

The menues aren't the problem. Context menues are a smart way to have easy access to a lot commands. The problem is unnecessary commands and the way things are put together. The crafting UI, for example, is so unintuitive and clumsy. This clumsiness runs throughout the interface and interactions in the world, meaning the game is more cumbersome than it should be. I think they bit off more than they could chew.

I've written some posts in the Wurm Online forums. I think the two biggest problems are one dimensional skills and how skills interact with each other, especially across skill levels. For example, mining needs more dimension. Where you mine on a tile could influence yields. It could operate somewhat more like Everquest 2, where you have to use different methods to produe a superior result--not just the same method every time. In fact, playing Tetris to increase yields would be better than what it's now--and that should be easy to reproduce. Bottom line, there's no depth in the skill gameplay, resulting in something that'll ALWAYS be grindy no matter how fast the skill gain is. And secondly, how skills interact, as well across level ranges, influences everything from a skill being rewarding to use, to whether you feel like a needed member of your village or cohort. These two factors ALONE increase the sense of grind. It's the difference between training a skill and using a skill to actually make something you need. It's the difference between feeling like a slave and feeling like a brother or sister.

There're so many other things I could bring up, from the way mobs are distributed on the map being a hinderance to poor combat players, to the lack of PvE variety, to the lack of actual survival challenges for established players (especially ones in a village) and more. But of the many things it does wrong, it does some things right too. One of the best things it does right is its rich sandbox. There're so many things you can build. And furthermore, you earn it. It's a game with a longterm bent. You'll spend years growing in it if you're serious. And thing change mildly, they don't just decay. You'll go back to a place a year later and many of the buildings are gone, and there're ditches and hills where there weren't before. But it's still recognizable, meaning the past will always be a part of you, yet change is ongoing, so things won't grow stale. When you explore there's a genuine sense of history to the place. You'll see names and old maps. Things are reused. It starts to feel alive. It's a living breathing world.

I may give a bleak impression of Wurm Online, but actually it's hte best MMO experienced I've ever had. I've NEVER been more immersed. I've never been so touched by my experiences in a virtual world. My first MMORPG was EQ in 1999. I also played UO in 1999. I played many other MOMRPGs over the yars. I can faithfully say Wurm Online beat all of them in terms of its immersion and the overall experience. Evenstill it's a weak RPG, and more sandbox-oriented. It's not for everyone. It really depends on what you're looking for, and how you grade it.

It's still a shining beacon in the dark in what's a vast ocean of casual railroad story-driven MMORPGs. I'm not saying casual MMORPGs are bad, or hat railroad story-driven MMORPGs are bad. If I was implying that, why would I be playing Star Wars The Old Republic at this time? No, every MMORPG has a place, has a role to play. Large number of players want these casual mainstream MMORPGs, and that's FINE. But for niche players, or minority players, MMO's like Wurm Online are a welcome escape from the norm. Many of the feature it has will be scorned by mainstream players, but loved by its niche fans. It's ok to be small, to be unpopular. It's not a failure.

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Wurm Online - Why are there no games like it?

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

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Wurm Online - Why are there no games like it?

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV