Thank you for the review, Josh! I felt it was very fair and honest. I know many of us on the development team have watched it, and it's already sparking discussions on what we can do better. In particular, I feel we could do a much better job conveying crafting and other gameplay elements to a new player. The points raised are too numerous to list here, but the "adventure line" and changing some of the design choices of old ring loud and clear. - Keenan, Product Manager
I've never played the game. And had no intention to do so. I just saw the game on steam then I saw this video. Seeing that the dev's of such an old game take constructive criticism and act on it makes me want to at least try it.
I and a lot of other commenters have nothing but fond memories of playing Wurm. Here's hoping the rekindled interest can revive some of the communities in the old servers.
Insanely accurate. When I was younger I tried to shoot a bow and realized I didn't have any arrows to nocte, I proceeded to hurl my bow at the target and did moderate damage....to my bow.
Not really relevant to the comment or video, but I once tried to shoot a bow when I was kid and that fucker snapped in half an sliced my cheek open 10/10, would Legolas again
They listened to you by the way. Added a crafting window so you don't have to activate and right click things. Added a repeat action button. And a bunch of other QOL stuff this year.
@RolandCollides not many players. But always enough people to help and talk to. I still keep my little plot of land upkept with my boat docked lol. It's fun to explore and see all the incredible things people made. On Xanadu it can take 3 hours , even with a fast horse and roads to get from one side to the server to the other. Fun times.
@corpingtons its... old. Really old Good is a super subjective term. Yes it has a thousand or so daily players. Plenty of markets and stuff are still stocked etc and there's plenty of history and stuff to explore. The continents are full of roads and building, towns and cities, all player made. And still plenty of wilderness to be tamed in between. But it's subscription based. (Though you can farm the currency in game to pay for it fairly quickly) and there's no "combat" per se. It's all just a text log and a few animations. And the learning curve is steep. To me it's good. To someone who plays mostly action games they'd say it's shit. Just depends.
I play an old MMO, and have been playing it for the past 10 years. Our community is insanely helpil, almost to the point where we violently carry new players in some aspects. If Josh is ever on our game he probably wouldnt get the new player experience.
Wurm Online: "Ever dream of singlehandedly building your own log cabin in real life? Well now you can build one in Wurm Online nearly TWICE as quickly!"
I love how this video emulated a typical sandbox MMO experience, where you start off with plans to build big things and then eventually it becomes a homeless medieval fantasy hero dating sim where your main goal is to kiss another player
_"This is the epic tale of one man's attempt to build a shed and punch a wolf in the face"_ sounds like the start of an actually interesting story. You really have a good way with words Josh.
Sounds like the beginning of Dungeon Siege. Man just wants to farm his carrots has to gather a posse and kick the dog shit out a whole continent's worth of bad guys to do so
I've played Wurm for 17yrs now at this point since the Beta days. (I'm 30 now). This was a great review and I sincerely appreciate the fact that Wurm is far from perfect that Josh managed to identify Wurm's redeeming qualities for it's VERY niche audience. There is no doubt Wurm is a exercise in masochism with tedious gameplay, bloated mechanics, uninvolved combat, clunky UI and just...AWFUL tutorial. BUT *if* you can get past that there is a game that is very relaxing and incomparably satisfying. One thing that isn't really talked about in the review which I think is worth mentioning is that a LOT of the game including the mechanics, art, music etc has all be done by volunteers out of love and passion in the last decade and a half. Each one giving to Wurm their own vision of what they should think the game *should* be. This is what creates the the mishmash of weird systems and gameplay that at times is at odds with other parts of the game. Wurm has never really achieved a level of success that has allowed it to have the investment it needed to create a "complete" game. Instead it's been just barely clinging to life desperately trying to keep moving forward. But there is no question that this is a game that nearly two DECADES old and it shows, but the fact it's survived for so long is a testament to the community and the few redeeming qualities the game has. Thanks Josh for giving Wurm a fair shot and a really well articulated and entertaining review.
I've been playing wurm very on and off for a few years but never gave wurm online a try. What server would you recommend for someone returning with only experience from Wurm Unlimited?
@@SoOptic75 Independence was a good server back when I played. It's been a few years since I left so there's no telling how much of the old community is still around. You do know that many servers are linked in such a way that you can actually sail from one to another? Yes, you will need skills high enough to pilot a boat big enough to the task. Either that or catch a ride from another player. Several of us on Inde would plan 'hunting trips' to other servers just for a change of scenery.
@@SoOptic75 My recommendation would be to start on a fresh server (no idea if there's gonna be one soon or if there has been one recently) with a couple friends and then group up with random people in the world. This game is essentially a village simulator where everyone should have their own specialties. Joining on an older server means that there's people with max skills and that the farmer of a village you'll be joining will be years ahead of you in carpentry even if you solely did that as your main focus. This might work and be nice, but I enjoyed the most when we had our own village with my friends for the summer vacation we played in high school.
Playing Wurm as a free-player is what I call "Medieval Beggar Simulator": chop some tress, piss of the owner of a nearby plot because them were waiting for the tress to become old (which yields more and better quality logs), get gifted a cow and rope to lead your beggar-cart somewhere to piss off from said plot owner, get ya cow killed by a mountain lion, and die for a Forest Spider or Troll. Also, if there is still a Colossus Statue ontop of a mountain,near the southern starting town of the Steam PVE server (Cadence), know that it was made by me! PepinoOGrande! If you do archeology on it, you will see that the name FITS! Edit: happened when the server opened on Steam, so 1 year ago, is probably dead! RIP my F2P Guard Tower and Colossus Statue
@@biggestfan. you'd have to be stupid to still be paying the subscription to a game you haven't played in over 5 years. They said this game came out in 2006 and they made a giant statue over the starter town. Literally the most competed area of the game. So they would have had to do so early on before others did.
The part about wurm that made my jaw drop and immediately hooked me was the fact that every building and road you see was built by players, and when you see how long it takes to build a small house I just had so much respect and wanted to leave my own mark.
Exactly! Feeling extremely small in the world and being intimidated by the deep social hierarchy is most of the fun as a new player. You just get this urge to build something and carve your own space to become a part of it yourself.
@@lightnbrightt Nonononononono... in real life you're negative nihilistic with self deprecation problems disguised as bad humor because everything you're capable of is sharing memes (you know, jokes someone else crafted). Sometimes this is topped with inferiority complex and desires for higher powers to give you stuff despite hating them. Or nihilistic narcissistic: you're already too great for this stupid world, so why bother? I'm just venting my view of internet culture, I 100% agree with you.
When I hopped into the game while still in high school, my friend told me that he'd secured us a place near a helpful couple who're willing to get us up to speed and guide us along the way. We got coordinates on a player-generated map and off we went. This was pure orienteering without a compass (then they were not part of the beginning equipment) and I remember dying once along the way. When we reached the place, it was about 2h later and the couple guided us to a shack they'd built for us. They brought us a furnace, gave us food and a few tools and so we started building things. I became the carpenter out of us two, and in the end was ONLY a carpenter, because you need carpentry for nearly everything, so you have constant work. As my carpentry levels increased, I could also expand the house. My friend would take on blacksmithing, mining and farming and he took care of small orders for me. We'd adventure the neighboring areas and find new and exciting people. Usually when a new friend would join the game, I'd give them a PNG of a map with a good route to follow. Sometimes they'd get there fine and sometimes we'd have to find them along the way. Once it was me who got lost trying to find my way to my friend. I was wandering in the woods until I found a player name in the local chat. I asked them for directions, they told me to stay still and wait for him. There came the chadest of all chads in Wurm: A player, dressed in green, riding a bear. They guided me to a road that would lead me home, gave me food and water, and wished me well. In the following years I'd pick up on shipbuilding and build a few of the biggest ships of the game. One ship would take me maybe 3-5 weeks to build because of my low skill, but I loved it all the way. We'd have grand adventures, buy exotic stuff from faraway lands and even move to a new server with all of our belongings in the massive ship. We once had a small war with 4chan's /v/ who had a village right next to ours. The war was mostly held by arranging fart emote raids around their houses and then disappearing into the woods. Ah, I wish I still had the same kind of summer vacations as I had as a kid. The community was the thing. Everyone wants to help and are the best people of the whole internet. Also, did you know that the community has arranged dozens of massive canal digging operations where they'd have tens of people digging up landmass between two oceans? The operations have been greatly documented and can probably still be found in the wikis. They'd also build lighthouses that are regular houses with a fire demon trapped inside. That's creativity and dedication that I wish my games would have at one point in the future.
You bring a tear to my eye. Nowadays we're used to having a quest marker showing us which direction to beeline to, huge hub areas where you have easy access to anything you need, and fast travel which lets you go anywhere at the drop of a hat. But in Wurm, even just going on a foraging run to grab wild veggies for your stew is an adventure, and bumping into a mountain lion or a bear can make for either a pulse pounding chase or, if you're capable of beating and butchering them, an unexpected bounty to bring back home. In my village, I was a "guard", dealing with trolls and bears that would occasionally wander in our turf, wielding my halberd and decked out in chainmail (with a rare helmet I bought from a group of passing players) and as a consequence I had also racked up quite a bit of healing and salvemaking experience from having to tend to my wounds, meaning I was also the guy to go when others took the occasional tumble or wolf attack.
Honestly, that sounds wonderful... but the thought creeps into my mind that this is also why the game has fallen so low. For all its complexity and time investment, many would argue that all the time you spent doing the things you did in game would have been better spent doing those same things in real life. Any game that come so close to an accurate simulation of reality begs the question of why you don't do the things you did in game IRL; for instance, imagine if instead of dedicating weeks and months and years to becoming an in game carpenter and doing carpentry, you spent that time actually becoming a carpenter and actually built and sold things. A very large percentage of potential players are going to see how accurately this game replicates having a mundane job, and question why they would bother when they already do have a job?
@@notsae66 It's the allure of doing that in untamed land. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have the opportunity (not to mention the financial means) to actually build a shed, or a ship, or forge a suit of armor, and even then they wouldn't be able to terraform their terrain freely without the government regulating everything. That's the allure of sandbox games: the freedom.
Can we talk about how this obscure MMO from 2006 still apparently has dedicated players in 2022? There are games that came out in 2021 that don't have this much of a dedicated player base.
Dedicated players are dedicated, expecially when it takes two weeks of practice to get a skill at an acceptable level, two months to get it at a good level, two years to master it. This game rewards effort, and many players nowaday can't even focus for 45 minutes. There is a reason why League of Legends and Dota had to tune down the average match duration. //scrubs lol
@@allthatishere Yeah but Babylon's Fall being used in comparison is like comparing Forza Horizon to Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. It's simply no contest because one game is good and the other would've been better off not existing.
One of my first experiences with Wurm was discovering not only do you *not* have to deactivate the shovel when cutting down a tree, but you actually get an achievement for cutting down a tree with a shovel.
I used to play this with my husband back in the day, we spent a lot of time on it. Had our settlements side by side. The forums had a volunteer area if anyone wanted to help with the game, I remember making the sheep and chicken/rooster/chick skins. I think they are still being used today! My little contribution.
@@PuellaMagiHomuraAkemi Although they both are MMORPGs, the target demographic is definitely not the same. In few words, WoW is a simplistic MMORPG focused on combat and story. Wurm is a very complex game focused on exploration and system depth. So that's why people bothered, Wurm was more appealing to them than WoW. Just because games share their genre, doesn't mean they all deliver the same type of content to entertain the same type of players.
@@frozen3078 I mean WoW works and wants player to stay despite it being tough and does alot for that while Wurm looks like the most annoying thing anyone would bother with. Sure they are different things but my point is that the one MMO works, the other just doesn't and neither does it care. The moment you have to look up a wiki your game failed - and this game always does.
The garish colors are the product of another mechanic in wurm: dye making. The opacity of a dye is directly correlated to its quality, and the quality of produced items are the average of the quality of the ingredients used, and if your skill is lower than that it gets either capped or averaged by it (depending on the action: most raw materials are capped). This means that the best dye makers can make high quality dyes, which will color items a pure, ultra bright shade of color. Meaning displaying such garishly colored items is kind of a status symbol, since you're either a good enough alchemist/dye maker to mix such a high quality dye or are influential enough to acquire such a dye.
@@myotheremailisacat yeah, art imitates life. I think games like Wurm, as well as many other community driven games, shows how societies and cultures form in fast forward.
Its also pretty funny that rich-person art is notoriously gaudy (think NFTs or the French Monarchy's art collection) due to this very effect.. The rich don't understand skill and talent in labour so much as they see value in the end product merely as a means to outproduce rivals.. I guess you can call that a nouveau-riche phenomenon, but that would completely discount the course of human events regarding Italian Villas, toga-measuring contests, clay armies, and pyramids
@@Dong_Harvey I don't really know how to articulate this well, but they're not art. I can't define art, but I know those shitty monkey pictures aren't it.
@@BigCheeseEvie Creative differences. I played Wurm when they were both developing it and that's all it was. Notch wanted to take it into a different direction and Rolf refused to budge.
This one actually felt much more interesting than your usual reviews. Instead of being a shitty asset-flip, it actually was a community built around prohibitively complex gameplay. It was a cautionary tale, rather than a failed cashgrab. Nice.
Believe me, back when the dev pushed out frequent updates they lived by the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" rule. They never pushed out a feature that made the community cry out in outrage, and for the years I played it there were definitely several quality of life additions (like the signpost system letting you easily navigate between neighboring settlements) The premium formula was never changed. They never pushed for cash shop purchases or increased the fee, or devalued the ingame currency. Wurm never screwed over its playerbase, and that's how they stayed loyal to it despite the complexity and eventual tedium.
This brings back some memories. I played this game way back in the day. It had a functional tutorial back then not sure why its gone now. I Started out in a small community I think it was called "the orphanage". The lady that owned it would give you access to your own little shack on her property. It even had a small fenced in yard for gardening. There was community space for mining and crafting. It was a good way to learn the game. Then I set out to build my own castle. Found a large area in a prime spot that was once owned by someone but has since been abandoned, nothing left but a flattened area, a small boat and the start of a mine. on one of the main roads, right on the water, and not far from the initial spawn. A neighbor with 99 carpentry helped me plan out the largest possible castle. I made and sold bricks for in game currency to buy the land and membership. After many many months I had terraced tree gardens, stone gate houses, horses, Bison, ships with a cave in a mountain I could park them in. and a 3/4 built 3 story castle. Then it started getting bad. I had to play hours everyday to maintain my decaying structures, sell products to afford the monthly membership and property fees. at that point it wasn't a game it was a job. I was over worked and under paid. all my progress stopped. I started not being able to keep up. Walls were breaking. animals were dyeing. My farm was full of dead plants. My food was spoiled. I ran out of money. Everything began decaying even faster as it wasn't protected property anymore. I took a break. Logged back in to find my character in a small wooden shack, but it wasn't mine. the land belonged to someone else now. and I was trapped inside.
The very very weird thing about MMO games that .... They rot over time ? Why the hell do they become worse over time ? Have you ever seen a PS1 game become borderline unplayable after 15 years of launch ? No ... But if MMO games surpass 10 years after launch, they decay for some reason
@@themendorean they meant the buildings in-game decay, you gotta pay a fee to maintain your epic structures and buildings, since the in-game world thinks that brick walls and stone pillars decay as fast as my will to live
One note about Steam achievements, they aren't exactly a reliable metric for what the player base has done. Especially on older games like this. What often happens is that a game comes to Steam, players log in on old accounts or the game didn't launch with them on Steam, but achievements aren't always retroactively granted.
I think a more important factor in this case is the game being free to play (up to skill 20). Lots of players will try it for free, log in, be turned off by something (dated graphics, clunky UI, whatever) and just drop it. I doubt most of them were turned off by the tutorial per se. They just didn't know what to make of the game or realised quickly it wasn't for them. Secondly, many (most?) of older players don't even launch it on Steam.
@@danieldahlborg8192 That's precisely why those achievements are important. Say you get your first achievement after playing 30 minutes of a MMO. If only 10% of the playerbase has sad achievement, than only 10% of all players that ever clicked "install game" ever played more than 10%. Yes, people stop playing for all manner of reasons, but such small number means that the very beginning of the game turns people off.
Jesus Christ, I tried this game 10 years ago and completely suppressed the memory until this video. The review is spot on. Just like Josh, I set my goals for an initial trial run as: chop a tree, flatten ground, kill an enemy. Failed at all of those and angrily uninstalled the game after wasting four hours. People say that Eve Online feels like a second job. Well, THIS game feels like giving up on employment altogether and just eternally wasting away.
Just watching this video, it made me feel like it'd be less cumbersome and less effort to go chop down an actual tree in real life, flatten the ground with tools I made myself, and kill a wild animal by learning to hunt than trying to do any of that in the game.
once you get over the basics it turns into just leveling stuff and waiting for the eternal timers to tick down just to fail on basically everything until you level up enough to do something. Wurm Unlimited (the more player controlled, one time payment version) was abandoned almost two years ago, which is a shame as people were putting out some interesting (still unsupported) mods for their servers. afaik the only thing they did with the still updating Online version was to put out two new servers for the steam release together with seasonal events It could be an amazing game, its just that its extremely niche, time consuming and stuck in time while at the same time being the freest game I have ever played
14:11 the amount of suspense in how you looked dead at the camera and raised the microphone to your face here. the delivery was just so good on that one lmao
I had such a memorable time in this game. I started playing with my friend and when we entered the portal we came out in a forest on a steep mountain slope. There was a road in front of us with a bunch of dead bodies and we wondered how these peopled died here, since there were no enemies or dangers around. We walked down the hill to a lake where some players had built and took a tour around the lake, where we then climbed up a huge ramp someone built up the mountain. We explored the area a bit until we got thirsty. We figured we could just go down to the lake and drink water there, so we started sliding down the mountain. When we both splashed in front of the portal we realized how all those bodies ended up there, lol. The game was super clunky though, we didn't really get into it.
reminds me of a gag in an online comic called "the Noob": almost everyone who tried to play as an Elf died from falling out of a tree in the first minute...
@@ericb3157 I remember that comic lol. it was referencing the original everquest where wood elves city was platforms elevated up in trees, there would just be dead bodies all over the ground below
Years ago, I used to play this game with two friends. We used to trek for hours through the landscape to find a decent place to settle, just chatting and avoiding the lethal wildlife, foraging for berries. I remember the ambience of the wind and rain and the grass waving in the breeze. Despite the dated graphics (and the complete absence of player/creature animations), no other virtual world since has felt more vivid or real to me. As you said in "why you're not having fun in MMOs any more", the problem is that I now have a full time job and so do all my friends, and we have no time to dedicate to these collective immersive experiences. I'm wondering if I enjoyed this game so much because it triggered the ancient part of the brain that remembers being a hunter gatherer. It's so unlike any other MMO I've ever played. Thanks for featuring it!
Also, Wurm is pretty boring. As a working adult I can have fun in FXIV. Not in wurm. Hell even as a kid I wouldn't like Wurm, it'S objectively speaking a boring game.
@@alexandrebelair4360 I haven't played Wurm in years because eventually it did become stale for me. it certainly is repetitive, but repetitive things can be oddly calming/stimulating. it's weird because I feel that exact way about most "theme park" MMOs. I can't think of anything more boring than grinding to level up your combat skills. I just liked the persistent nature of Wurm. despite the gameplay being very slow-paced, the world really felt alive
Came here from Keenan's post on the wurm forums; I hesitated to watch this, but immediately was sucked in. You did a very honest and well balanced review. I can tell you took alot of time to research this game and understand the elements behind it. I can appreciate that dedication towards making a youtube video :) I just wanted to quickly voice an opinion of my own -- Although I understand why an over the top, convoluted, and very detailed game might be off-putting to new players, as an older player of wurm, that's part of what I personally look forward to everyday when I log in to play. I absolutely love every step needed to craft things, and I love the amount of time it takes. It makes you feel extremely accomplished when you do complete something whether it be a boat, house, cart, wagon, breeding animals, or whatever! So, as I understand this probably does deter newer players from sticking around, I really hope that aspect of detail never leaves the game. On the same note, I really do agree the Journal and even the "Missions" in this game could use an update (and I believe we're getting one soonish). They really add to the immersion of wurm, and I hope that whatever the developers come up with will be better than what we have now. Cheers and loved the video!!
I am surprised they don't make you control each legs movement individually when walking. Just a set of buttons to bend the knee, raise the leg, adjust ankle angle for each leg, lol
As much as I hate myself for it, I enjoy a good tier list I'm all for it I'm curious to know what bad games, if any, he would place in 'worst MMO ever' S tier
I played Wurm back when it wasn't on steam, if you join and find people within the world you would likely be invited in a village and that was one of the most advantageous start most people just spend their initial time in the game to find a village rather than do the tutorial. Having joined a village would likely get you a somewhat easier access to resources such as metals, clay, sand, tar, etc. Back during those days real-money trading was a very common thing in the game, so people would literally do jobs like make thousands upon thousands of bricks to afford subscriptions. Most high leveled players would buy thousands of processed materials such as planks, bricks, etc. or hire new players to do those menial tasks for them while they craft more intricate stuff such as ships, guard towers, and massive castles which they then sell to other high level players. Let's be real, wurm is not a game, it's a job.
It sounded pretty cool just a ridiculous time sink to the point of concern for their social lives and real jobs. But then I found out it doesn’t just take weeks to build a simple building they also deteriorate. Which is unheard of as a game mechanic alone but the deterioration is also insanely fast. That is psychotic, the thought of having to log hours everyday day just to maintain what you already achieved. Frustrating because the game feels like it has good bones all it needs is to drop all the arbitrary and crazy levels of busy work
Anything on a deed takes forever to deteriorate, and there's a whole archaeology mechanic to incentivize exploring abandoned deeds. The archaeology thing totally changed my mind about deterioration; it's inevitable that one day, everyone will stop playing. But there's a chance for someone to dig up artifacts from the ruins.@@monhi64
I mean if you already cant just change your appearance but need an item for it ingame that pretty much stands symbolically for "unnecessary complicated"
@@PuellaMagiHomuraAkemi Ehh, I like having cosmetic changes tied to some items (such as cutting tool to cut hair) but just a one use item that magically does it is... yeah.
The death knell was being mostly community driven, since all it took was a dip in the active user base for it to become a boring "well, now what?" game.
I'll be honest, I expected this video to be filled with complaints about how every system in this game is "a quit moment" for new players, but you did a good job of recognizing that the game was made for a niche audience, and that it was also terribly outdated. You made reasonable requests of the game and never once asked for it to become a standard mmo in the style of WoW or Everquest. I respect the thought you put into your videos.
I made a sandbox game in 1997 when they didn't exist at all, but didn't do anything with it. 25 years later I'm doing a serious 3D sandbox game and I'm not even original anymore.
As a player of Wurm Unlimited and a former player of Wurm Online I can without a doubt that this game is all vision and half execution. I enjoy the game but only as someone who doesn't mind a lack of polish graphically. Also in Wurm Unlimited you can control the XP curve, which makes one hell of a difference. The thing I didn't see Josh get into was the purchasing of in game money. Back when I played Wurm Online, I actually paid for the in game money to pay for a deed that was around 9-12 tiles large. You need to pay the taxes on the deed every so often in real time or the deed will expire, which means you need to make money in game or just pay. You've put in full weeks of time into the deed and now you want to take a break from the game but don't want to lose your progress, so you break out your wallet. This is likely the goal of the devs, to finally lock you into this loop. It is the reason everything take so damn long and everything is skill locked. You pay for your deed and you pay for your monthly subscription because now without it, you can't progress in the game. The developers likely abandoned the Wurm Unlimited game because they were unable to monetize like they did with Wurm Online. With this potential in my mind, I can still say that I have a love for these games (Wurm Unlimited far over its Online counterpart) because the feeling of building up a community from a harsh and unforgiving land is fantastic when you've got the time. I believe this is what the game was originally built on, the premise of slow and steady progress as your skills allow you to become faster and more efficient. I do not believe this is the view the development team or at the very least, the heads of the company hold any longer. Wurm Online is amazing as a relic of another era, but it is just that. A relic. Thanks for the fun times Code Club AB (Onetoofree AB as it was once known). As a side note, we really need to stop attaching the game to Notch (Markus Persson) as he left this project so very early on. Rolf Jansson is the one who should be credited in these scenarios.
Yeah it bothered me that he kept mentioning Notch when there have been a team of devs working on this for a decade after Notch left. Don't discredit their work, the game has grown many sizes larger since then. Notch didnt, make this game, the devs did.
@@platynowa It's a pretty complete game already been in development for years. I got 800 hours from WU and enjoyed all of them. Def plenty of things to do in the game.
@@platynowa I have to agree with Zach on that it is pretty complete as it is. There is a lot to do in the game and if you do yearly resets with boosted XP you can find new challenges. My group and I tend to try and setup in strange places, usually with the world against us. One of our favorite things is to have the % of hostile to passive creatures raise every few days or so. Beyond making your own fun there is still events that can trigger, dragons and Avatars are still around to fight and there are random NPC's that'll pop up around the world which you can "chat" with. I say "chat" because we tend to talk with them until they insult one of us enough and we manhunt them. If you are able, I'd suggest finding a group who is active in the game, as most of the joy with Wurm Online or Unlimited is the community aspect. I hope that was helpful.
After watching this, I was struck by the urge to speak up about a game of "too much granularity" that I once played. A game called Haven & Hearth. I wasted so many weeks and months on that game. It is not a game you should try playing. To provide an example of WHY you should, perhaps, only look at the wiki entries on Quality and the skills and some of their applications, let me briefly describe a specific crafting material you might use in the game: Silk. Silk, for those who don't know, is a product of a cocoon-spinning caterpillar, and in order to get silk in the game you have to follow a process similar to the real one. This means you need to go out, catch silk moths, have them breed, let the caterpillars form into pupae, then boil them to get silk threads, which can be collected together to make silk. During each of these steps, the moths and worms must be fed mulberry leaves, once every eight real life hours or so, and you cannot collect any silk if the cocoons hatch into moths. On top of this, if you harvest the silk threads, you won't get a full next generation of silk moths to breed more, and you need to breed generation after generation to increase the Quality Stat of the moths, to increase the Quality of the silk, to increase the Quality of the products so improve their stats. We are talking dozens to hundreds of generations of silk farming to get quality levels to the point where they are even of any practical use. And if you can't feed them? If you have to be away from the game due to circumstances out of your control, the internet goes out for a day or someone passes away, or whatever? If you don't have someone who can cover for the feeding and harvesting and breeding and collecting the leaves and arranging the highest quality moths and so on... You can lose all of the quality process and be sent back to nothing and have to start over with wild moths at the worst quality scores. Because realism. I had a friend I played the game with reach out to me some time back saying "Haven and Hearth 2!" and I had to hand him a firm rejection that I have done in almost no other circumstances in my life.
Was just thinking of H&H recently. Played it many years ago but could never remember the exact title. It was certainly unique and was unforgiving in a roguelike way. I mean, you literally start the game butt naked. Still, I didn't find the difficulty curve anything like Wurm's. Always stuck in my mind anyway. Thanks for the throwback... and good luck with those silkworms.
man H&H is VERY complicated and I played for just about two weeks so didnt go far, but i miss the atmosphere. Just traveling and stealing crops from other players was awesome. Or glitching and mowing down boars with arrows.
Absolutely loved this game back in the day. Remember Notch giving us silver wands that let us teleport. 😅 and Liphos’s house builder. Does anyone remember Jakes’s Folly?! (Huge bridge across the sea)
Every single time Josh says "Grow up" I think to myself "But wait, you thought it first" .. and that's why I love you Josh.. your head is as far in the gutter as mine is, and we need more good company this far out.
I watched your review and started playing and am genuinely in love with the game. Thought your review was fair and good as always. The one thing I learned after a couple of hours in game though, was that Wurm may have the nicest and most helpful community I've ever experienced not just on the internet but anywhere in life. Wanted to say thank you bc I would never have played this game without your review and it is the game I've been looking for for a long time.
@@Eldrygg Hey sry I only just saw this. I actually met some people who invited me to their deed the first day I was playing. Ty so much for your offer and proving my point though
20:00 Not to excuse the design or how it is introduced to new players, but that crafting menu you see there is actually available for every crafting option in the game. Using the right-click -> create menu is also available for players who prefer it. I actually do use both, depending on what I'm doing, so I'm happy for the option, but the right-click option should be configurable and hidden by default, in my opinion. And point players to the crafting menu properly.
That menu was not implemented when I last played, so i was surprised to see it. But can confirm, makes sense that both the new and old menus are available.
Ive played this game for around 10 years, invested thousands of hours in playing multiple characters in parallel. But that was long before steam. I cashed out for a good 700€ when i didnt feel like playing anymore. I still dream about this game every now and then. It is one of my favorite chapters of my life. We actually went to meet rolf and the community in amsterdam a few times, and visited him at wurm online head offices in motala.
This game was originally designed for LAN play. The character's were not meant to learn every skill, or max out everything. You have a group of friends. They each choose a certain profession, and work to skill up that profession. Mostly for RPer's. Eventually you have a neighbor, neighborhood, and community, with each player being the butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.
Wurm gave me some of the most memorable satisfying memories in my 20 years of gaming. Building is hard and difficult. You have to terraform the land, chop trees, smelt some nails, saw the wood into planks and then slowly attach planks to the house one by one. But when you're done, its YOUR house, you made it. Its a kind of familiarity you can only feel when you struggled and achieved something on your own.
I was one of the old players -since 2006, that played Wurm online, i have max lvl and high tier skills character, another priest, been god's champion and almost considered going after deity status.. I can say that there's one thing everyone fails to grasp: skill level. Sure, it seems like making a house is slow but why are you supposed to make your own house on day 1? And what do you think is the difference if you have lvl 90 building skill? Or carpentry? I tell you right away, I could make a Stone wall -not wooden plank, in seconds. No joke. So.. He does have a point. When tutorial or suggested actions tell you to build a shack, it's a bad impression from the start! They should tell you to make a set of tools, make a fenced lot, a chest for your newbie tools (that no-one is gonna steal) and a raft. Then explore on foot and on raft, your surrounding area, make a mine, add gate, move your stuff in it, get iron, continue tools...' By the time you do these you will have enough skills to do other stuff.. All the guides we wrote back in the day (mine was for starting on PvP servers) were deleted from forums and never made it into Wurmpedia. And if anyone made or makes a new guide /tutorial -even on youtube, is anyone linking it officially? No. It's a community driven game but the community is left out on the most important aspect: CA
This is my favourite MMO of all time. I'll always return to it when i want to wander into the wilderness and attempt to survive on my own. But it really shines when you have a group of friends cooperating .
I cringed a bit when I saw this video posted because I've played Wurm Online and Wurm Unlimited since the game was in alpha, and it has a special place in my heart. But I think most of us know the game is overly complicated, not the easiest design to understand. A lot of the concerns you've raised in this video are ones that are recognized by most people who play the game, and yes, the wiki is basically a requirement here. But the problem is that no other game has ever given me the sense of creation and accomplishment until I played Eco Global Survival, which has a lot of the same problems. The combat is definitely the worst part. By the way: Notch hasn't been involved with Wurm for a long time. Rolf, his previous partner, was the one who ran the game for the majority of its lifetime. In any case - despite my love for this game - I recognize its bad design and it does indeed belong in this series - as much as it pains to admit.
same love wurm never really played wurm online but when wurm unlimited released I found out about the game and been hooked ever since, my absolute favorite part just travelling in the wilderness and finding a spot to build but then finding out it was actually an old village long decayed overgrown with trees. one of the coolest things is I found it was a youtuber and they had videos with the actual location we started building and you could make out the terrain, it was the coolest shit ever.
On one hand, this game seems like the perfect example of "why realistic doesn't mean better gameplay". On the other, props for the devs for just adding random stuff they thought of. It's like seeing that fresh childish wonder all over again, it tickles something nice within me.
I know this game has huge faults but it gave me some of the best memories I ever found in an online game. Building a tiny shack and a farm with a friend I've met in the game felt like we've genuinely made something with our own hands. We even had this small community of people living in the area. It took buttload of time though. It's not a game you play when you have many irl responsibilities
"A+ experience so far, would gladly throw my bow at a crocodile again" - i actually nearly died laughing at that last sentence. defenitely best "experience" ive read in a long time xD
I can't believe I played that game 15 years ago, and I still can remember people and events like it was yesterday. Players who I played with like Pops, Rara, Pedro, Kix or the first Grand Prince of Jenn-Kellon Pedro, even my very first 14-day ban in a game for dissbanding enemy houses on Asgard settlement raid because I some how could loot the house owner rights from their corpse, good times. Loved the game for how "hard" it was, and for an kid that couldn't own anything because I was poor in real life spending time and crafting stuff or terraforming in that game gave me soo much joy. Thank you Josh for an very entertaining and memory refreshing review!
Played this waaaaay back in 2011-12 on the recommendation of Notch. I remember saying then that this was a horrible idea, even for a fantasy simulation. Everything is needlessly complicated and overbearing. And that's just the controls. The 'gameplay' itself is non-rewarding. It's not like after all your efforts you can really do anything more unique than the last person. And to do anything fantastic, you need a group of masochists to join you...in a "game" that makes even that difficult. Apparently nothing has changed much in 10 years.
Isn't that the case in every game? Nothing you do in any MMO is very unique. Even the big grindy achivements that take you years have been done before. You could go for world first runs, but thats also kinda masochistic from my perspective The controls are the biggest fault of this game imo though
@@MaakaSakuranbo The point is that for all the very very very...very...long grind. The rewards are just not there. And the fact that nothing is unique (just like any other MMO) makes it worse.
I'm a guy who knows how to do actual real life blacksmithing, in about one tenth of the time this game makes a person screw around with insane mechanics, I could teach them to ACTUALLY SMITH SOMETHING! This game is an absolute disgrace to the concept of fun.
That song brings back memories. For the time, Wurm Online was a good game. Compared to modern games, however, and looking back, it was very tedious. I remember the terraforming with friends to build things mostly. Great times. People think Wikipedia was created for information in real life. Wikipedia was actually created by a Wurm Online player to make the game easier for new players.
I remember seeing this as a child! I wanted to play it so bad, but I couldnt figure out how to get it installed. and I think I did, but my computer wouldnt boot it up. I then forgot about it and just thought it was a fabrication of my memory. I can now see what I couldve been playing! Thanks Haydes man!
Greetings from Silakka. This was one of the best games and the complexity was the thing that kept me ingame. Lack of endgame and having 7 deeds at once slowly made me decline from the game. Having the best gear and a 100 digging skill I just go awfully bored after doing max 3 height pillar and anything you can name. Archery was a bit of fun shooting angry red trolls, other than that. Keeping my boats repaired and having the max CoC tools etc, it got from super hard to super easy..
I had some time in Wurm. I became a expert boat builder and was able to sell enough boats to fund a premium subscription. It just became too demanding of my time, always worrying I wouldn't make enough boats to pay for the next month that I gave up. It's the ultimate "Put in what you get out" type of game but be prepared to donate a huge chunk of your life to it.
it has gotten more realistic... it is MineCraft for adults.. takes patience and the long view. Still playing after 10 years and it just keeps improving.
Just finished watching! Yup, it's like I remembered. I did actually manage to make a canoe early on and loved just fishing and exploring the world, seeing what everyone else had made.
Was interesting to watch someone have their first experience with this in modern day. When I first played it, like 2010ish, there was NO tutorial whatsoever. You also didn't get any of the starter tools they give you now, you had to figure out what tool you needed to make so you can make this other tool, so you can use that to make this other tool, etc. If I remember right, you got a hatchet, and that was it. Or the easier way, villages in this game are generally very welcoming, and happy to bring you in and get you started with a set of tools and some help. In return for putting you to work repairing some fences or whatever else needs done, of course. My first time playing, I picked a fight with a pheasant trying to get some food. That pheasant absolutely murdered me. I started again, and found a gorilla. Was thinking, maybe I just need to engage with the combat icons? Picked a fight with the gorilla. Immediately broke my neck. I started running, got away from the gorilla, but I was still dying. Happened across some random guy who was just like, "Holy shit, what happened to you?" He brought me into their village, bandaged my wounds, fed me some food, and handed me a bunch of high quality tools. Wound up joining their village, and spent probably 500 hours with some of the coolest people I've ever met. The people are really what makes this game.
I've been waiting for you to do this one! I love Wurm Unlimited, but I know it's a total messy, complicated grind lol Btw, the speedometer is really helpful when choosing/breeding mounts. I like to choose horses with a lot of speed for travel, so seeing that speed in the top left is great lol
The depth in this game is amazing. It's not off putting to me, but good luck finding real life friends to play it with you. The goal isn't to become instantly top level and max BIS items. It's just to enjoy the small achievements, like making a house, forging a sword, etc.
I've been playing on and off since I was in elementary school. Really love this game even though it is hard to love sometimes. I'm glad to see the developers personally respond in a positive way.
28:42 I feel attacked. I actually find that speed meter useful. I just like knowing my speed depending on the weight of my inventory. 2 decimal is a bit much tho.
true. especially if you wear cloth armor and rely on speed. if you took too many items you'll see the change and will be more careful if there are any hostiles around (harder to run away).
I love games like this, I always make the joke: "To loot, press and hold the *Loot* key, then click the left mouse button for every finger on your hand, then click Right Mouse Button to close your thumb."
@@cobaltfox3193 To walk, hold down the 'Walk' key then click left mouse button for left foot and right mouse button for right foot. Click both faster to run.
I love watching your videos after cooking a meal. It's just the perfect thing to watch, really comfy sometimes! Thanks for getting this series going, It's amazing.
The sad part is, thousands of us have actually loved Wurm over the years. So many of us burnt out as less and less happened, as the devs and mods got worse and it stagnated beyond compare. It used to be a fun, if grindy, niche. I honestly miss Wurm from a decade ago.
Wow, they added a tutorial. I tried it some many years ago, before Steam integration was even a thing. I spawned into the world, wandered around dying of dehydration a few times, stole someone's cart, then got enslaved by some town to dig a moat in exchange for water so I wouldn't die. Quit after 2 hours.
Kind of sad to see Wurm in this sorry state, I quit many years ago but back then in all fairness it actually had a functioning tutorial that worked, recently the development was turned over from its original founder Rolf, who co-founded it with Notch, to another set of developers who 'wanted' to try something new and ended up just undoing most of the work that went into it with their 'bright ideas', I think its unfair to look at the game from a modern point of view since its been in existence since early 2000's and it is indeed very complex which can be a good or a bad thing for most people but it definitely hasnt held up well over the years. I suppose you could say Notch took a lot of inspiration from Wurm into Minecraft so without this game, we probably wouldn't have the Minecraft we have today at least...
Beyond just took inspiration, I remember when the original way-pre-alpha Minecraft happened, because Notch was trying to develop a new 3d mining system for Wurm. The result wasn't really compatible but he decided to let people on Wurm play with it, people liked it enough that he kept tinkering around with it. To flesh out Minecraft he started by borrowing ideas from Wurm and simplifying them down to a childish level. It later started getting its own complexity built up over time as more work came out, and some of the most iconic features were due to "huh, not want I intended, but interesting" such as the origins of the creeper was a failed assembly of a pig (the first animal attempt, the legs ended up under an end instead of the base) that was repurposed into something new.
@@jesarablack1661 Funnily enough, Minecraft retains much of that complexity... but somehow presents it better. I mean, Josh is complaining you need to "activate" a hatchet to cut trees; you do the same in Minecraft of course, but instead of navigating icons or inventories, you use a hotbar. You need to combine tools and materials to craft stuff, but instead of activating tools and right clicking a thing and navigating through a menu, you put things in a 3x3 grid. And of course, Minecraft was just as criticised for the "wikiness" - there was never anything that helped you figure out how to do anything, or what you could even do. Ultimately, I think Wurm and Minecraft are actually very similar. But Minecraft is the quick, solo thing (with fun multiplayer option), while Wurm is the slow, community-building thing. And of course, Minecraft moved away from the menu metaphors. Even the most complex Minecraft modpacks are made primarily for solo play, really - and while they can take hundreds of hours to "complete"... no single step really takes a lot of time. And of course, the "no skills" thing in Minecraft is a huge change; I love old-school sandboxes with their 100s of skills _way_ more than the silly level-based games, and the same is true for the games that remove all of that and just let everyone do anything. Because that means it's very easy to welcome new players (indeed, even the sandbox skill-based games tend to be much better than the level-based games in this regard).
There are a few things that i wish this current iteration of the tutorial did better that it just doesn't for example explaining the buttons at the bottom of your screen specifically the crafting window(It is makes crafting for new players so much easier as all recipes are visible in it if you open up a window from there or drop the correct tools in there) You can use keybinds to rapidly add actions without having to right click(The keybind system encompasses most actions in the game and they can be bound to any key that you want to) The wiki is a community lead project with official support behind it but its the players who populate that data so there might be some issues here and there. As for your statement of "wurm is a wiki game you need the wiki open at all times as there is no way to play it without it" Is wrong because a bit of exploring of the UI buttons that are visible will show you a wealth of information in a easy format(for starters the crafting window and recipe window), but i do agree the wiki is a thing that will be used throughout most of your wurm life for checking up on prospecting messages or searching for that obscure bit of info that you just cant remember there and then. Also there is an item called a toolbelt that you can equip that gives you a toolbelt on your UI where you can drag items into so that you can activate them via 1234567890 keys There was a tutorial a very long time ago that explained a lot more about the then UI and the basics of wurm but this was done away with because it had quite a few glaring issues for its time Every version was created by a gm in a short period of time with what seems to be little real thought to the new player experience and this is something I personally have brought up over the years playing this game, I have asked for them to run surveys for new players where new players can answer simple questions(at say the 5 hour mark pop up a window) things like "what would you like to see in the tutorial" and take that information and create a tutorial and let the community test it time and time again until we have a proper good one that explains 1. the UI 2. the basics of the game 3. some nice to have tricks and 4. an optional section where more advanced things are explained. But alas in the past this fell on deaf ears due to the then developers not really caring much(This has since changed with developers who do care and are actively trying to make wurm better) All that set aside the thing that you said about having to get their minds set on what to do right click menu vs crafting menu there is a bit of a story behind that For the longest time for years on end we only had the right click menu then after years of asking the crafting menu was added in a UI update then we were promised an UI overhaul and brand new way of interacting with the game(a more modern way to play the game with potentially controller friendly way of interacting) This overhaul was then over the course of months pushed back and shrunk down to just a UI reskin with some newer features and updated backend to fix wiki support and some other things and we got the UI we have now(including on screen text for take and drop also got the default action and repeat action added and so on) The old dev team had a history of promising a lot then under delivering which lead to years of secrecy and refusal to be honest about the ever slowing pace of development and lead to a lot of angry players Then the game got brought by a investment group and suddenly things started to speed up a lot(you cant tell me otherwise looking at what went on) of the bad developers and gm's were let go(some giving hilarious reasons why) new ones were taken on new positions were created outside help seems to have been brought in and now progress is being made bug fixes arent taken a year anymore the PVP and pve communities are being listened to again slowly wurm is starting to feel worth paying for again. For the longest time i played wurm as there isn't anything like it out there and i had spend over 5 years living and building up my mountain fortress and i loved the game(still do) but it was the staff that made it hard for me to justify spending money, it was the staff not the game that almost made me quit the game that i grew up with as a teenager since 2004 but thankfully before my village disbanded due to running out of money new life was blown back into it and a leadership change happened and a lot of those who were toxic to the game were let go. Is wurm a hard game to learn? Yes. Does it need a newer tutorial that is created not by 1 man/women but by the community and based on feedback from new players? YESSS. Do i want to see a rise back to 8k+ active premium accounts instead of 4500? YES please. Will wurm ever grow to have tens of thousands of players? No i doubt that but maybe reaching its glory days and going beyond that would be nice for me i will hold out hope that some day we will get a proper UI overhaul and alongside it a new player friendly tutorial and journal system that holds your hand more by explaining more. With explaining more i mean showing a simple video that explains how to build your house or flatten terrain via ingame tooltips, having a tutorial that holds your hand instead of the ghost town it is now. Anyway one last thing to say, wurm used to have notch and rolf work together then notch left due to design differences and clashing them it was rolf for a while then rolf with others then rolf alone then rolf with others then just others then rolf alone again, this went on for a few times then a few years of just others and then rolf sold the game leaving what were some rather bad people in charge who are now gone and replaced with great ones, the issue with the clashing of good animations vs bad ones, good art vs bad art, the lack of a solid visual experience stems from this design journey. There was a period in time where wurm was seen as "finished" and true to that wurm was a solid game then came the fighting overhaul(and more of them later on) and a new era of many features many of which seemed like thought of on a Friday afternoon and implemented the next week by Wednesday with little to no real thinking of "should we" to it. This is what has lead wurm to be so feature rich and overflowing with complexity as there are a lot of features all pushing for priority in a wide world, but honestly starting wurm and joining a community or starting with friends is currently the best way to get started and that is honestly sad as for me myself i started alone and it was a simpler game back then but boy I was hooked at a time where runescape forced you to stop playing after a certain amount of time and need for speed 3 was pretty still wurm was something amazing and it still is in a way. I have so much more that i want to say and I have written giant long posts about this game's history and what it lacks and what my gripes are with it on yt and the wurm forums and other places before and gone on 12+ hour long rants in discord(All while playing wurm haha) but I wish i could make the beginning experience of wurm better I really wish we were given that chance as I want this game to grow in players in developers, I want my grandkids to have the chance to play wurm like i have. I love this game and have spend over a thousand days online playing it across multiple characters lived on most servers played countless hours of wurm unlimited spend more money on this game then i have on any other game combined(my steam library cost me less then wurm has cost me) and I do not regret a single cent of that. This truly is a amazing game but its biggest weakness has been apparent since the start and I wish I was given the chance to try and fix it I really do wish for that to be the case.
This seems like the sort of MMO that really needs a community of players willing to each specialize in something in order to actually make it work. But then each person would only be experiencing part of the game so that's only going to happen if there is some absurd goal to shoot for, like 0 nukes in MGSV.
Even moreso by the fact that if you pray regularly at an altar you can become a priest and have several powers at your disposal (such as speeding up crop growth, instantly summoning dirt to fill a hole, enthralling a monster into becoming friendly or magically healing allies) but if you do so your character is permanently (until you renounce your priesthood) rendered unable to perform certain actions, such as cutting trees down or constructing buildings. Thus unless you really are hardcore, you won't become a priest unless you are part of a community that can satisfy those needs.
i do think its good for games like wurm online to exist, even if there might be minority of people wanting to play it, its cool to know that there's at least one game out there that I could use my time into learning everything about it one step by one and maybe achieving great heights of accomplishment within community or just for my personal satisfaction, and its kind of sad that games steered away from this idea of a game loop for sake of profits and instant gratification, just imagine what kind of amazing games some big game companies could make with this long earned gratification gaming as the base game loop? people talk about wanting to be just the adventurer making their mark in a world but sadly it seems majority of paying gamers dont want this but instead endless copies of battle royales and lost ark pay to win mmorpgs.
Wurm is probably the best game I've ever played. It was so addicting that once I was able to get away from it, I never went back because I didn't want to quit my job and life. I've never had crack, but I think my addiction to Wurm is somewhat like it, years after quitting, it still calls to me. It's not one of those games you can win at, it's hardcore!
Legitimately the same thing. This game absolutely pulled me in like nothing else. I was fully immersed. If anything comes like this in the future I fear I'll fall to it.
is this a friends and family post - unless you never played any other game in your entire life, i find it hard to believe this is the best game you have ever played. sorry mate. that's the hard truth
@@twistedmonk778 I don't think this game needs "sympathy" reviews lol. And I've played plenty other games, luckily, none as addictive so I just give up on them within a month or two and move on to another. I get that you might prefer Fanta or whatever, whereas I prefer Coke Zero. Different tastes :)
Isn’t this what the strange mega-project, kickstarter MMO was trying to be? Just, without the “real-time aging and character legacies” aspect? At this point the only thing that’s missing is people who spent thousands of IRL dollars to become the monarchs of kingdoms.
Actually, you can make your own factions like that in PvP and IIRC it costs over a 100 dollars to do so (which was expensive before the scam games raised the average), probably been years since someone did that though. I don't really keep up with pvp but I know the scene for it in Wurm was always very niche because you need to be the kind of person who'll wake up in the middle of the night or leave work early to log in if you get a call about being raided, if you don't have that unhealthy level of loyalty to a game you're better of in the more populated PvE servers.
love Josh's content and I loved Wurm, I have watched him long enough to know how he would react to Wurm, while all his comments are accurate, there is a charm to the game and the sense of accomplishment you get is amazing. The game may not be 'mainstream' but it's free to try give it a go.
The game isnt free by its own mechanics, which was on stage on the steam launch. When a kingdom(server) isn't funded by paying players, and only paying players. None of the free to play mechanics would work. so the game is not and has never been free. even in gold they tried to charge 15 a month like world of Warcraft.
There are private server settings that reduce the grind significantly including mods that solve some of the most problematic things like dying in a tunnel and finding the body with its stuff is on the top of an inaccessible peak hundreds of meters above. I have three bodies up there somewhere.
As an ex player of this game I was waiting for it to make it on this channel. I cannot disagree with anything you said in terms of new player gameplay or community, spot on mate. Only thing that got me through the 1st week was running into another new player making a hut near mine and we joined a small group up the river from us. A few weeks later they puttered out but me and that guy hunted forums and found a new group. I stayed with them for about a year an a half even after my original buddy left and I did love our little community. We made a walled town and had ship building business. With help of the alliance over a fair amount of time we made a trade canal from the east coast of our map to the centre and times were good. But I just couldn't keep up with the time requirements and my activity dropped and dropped. I miss it but totally get the absolute ball busting nature of it makes it unpalatable to many
I think a new interesting series for MMO's could be: Abandoned MMO's and going in 'single player' in these abandoned worlds where everyone left. I guess some of these worst MMO's are by chance such videos but maybe this could be an interesting side-series too! Just to see this special atmosphere of these older games and huge open worlds that have been forgotten and abandoned.
Around 15 years ago I played this game for 2 days straight and managed to be able to get myself a weapon, find enough food to not die and find a deserted spot on a hill to build something on. Then I realized that the game is basically just an artificial time sink and the gratification you get is getting stuff done despite the time sink. That's when I quit.
I remember playing this game way back in the late 00s with my younger brother. We built ourselves a proper society on a peninsula on one of the new continents they released and ended up getting into wallet warfare with foreign invaders. Ended up spending a good chunk of IRL currency buying NPC ghost guards to fight offline raids and our little deed became one of the bigger hubs for outgoing raids because of how secure it was thanks to me literally throwing money at the problem of raiders. Ended up having to give it up a few years later as I was trying to go to college and a game that requires the same time commitment as a full-time schooling career was just untenable. I picked it up again a couple years ago on the private server side and found I still enjoyed the elements that initially drew me in but was a bit disappointed with how little had been added on since I had left nearly ten years prior.
@@WebleyVickers I've played it both. I enjoy the risk, I just took advantage of the wallet fighting haha. It's been years now since I've played and I don't really want to go back.
this video made me log back into check on things. i found your house btw, its nice setting, right by the water too. if anyone is looking he spawned on Cadence on Sonata. its a roofless house with a cart in the front.
This was one of those games back in the day where playing it actually felt like a true adventure and the world felt massive and actually dangerous. It really was on a whole other level. Good memories with this game. I took part in the multiple Facepunch invasions that happened over the years and they were always a blast. Wurm Online holds a special place in my heart and always will. Reading through the comments and seeing all the good memories and stories really brings me back, might have to come back to it sometime. Long live Minges Tirith and Blood Gultch.
"Every step up to winning is a time sink", "It adds more clicks, but not necessarily more gameplay". Exactly! Thats how crafting in almost every game works, and thats why i hate it as a mechanic.
@@professorpwerrel yeah FF14 is legit the only MMO I've played so far where crafting actually felt really good, and like it was an actual skill. I also liked crafting in the old Warhammer Fantasy MMO, which is now defunct but can still be played on a private server. Instead of just selecting an item and crafting it, you added a base, an effect, and some modifiers, then attempted to craft it. This meant that instead of a recipe list, you had some influence on exactly what would come out the other end.
@@nidungr3496 this might not be exactly what you're looking for, but Kingdom Come: Deliverance makes weapon maintenance skill based, where you have to sharpen the blade at the right angle, and evenly along the edge, to do it properly. Amazing Cultivation Simulator has talisman crafting where you draw over a template, and the precision affects the quality of the talisman, and thus also the strength of the effect. I think MMOs don't do this in no small part because it would incentivise using bots or other cheats to create equipment superior to that of 99.9% of honest players following the same recipe.
Crafting I feel is better when its a replacement to RNG loot progression, I'm far more annoyed at not getting the RNG drops to equip on my character than with having to craft everything.
This game was rough, but addictive if you found a decent group of people to play with. I found a small village that was accepting new players and was able to work my way up while assisting with mining task and other gathering things, eventually was drafted to become another of the villages boat makers. Was able to make my own boat and sail the seas and found smaller island villages that were much more advanced then us and were able to develop trade agreements with them. All in all it was game that was made fun by the players, the mechanics of the game itself were very rough but allowed alot of self governance and make your own adventure. Now back in the day this game was incredible pay to win in the degree that you had to use real money to purchase/lease chunks of land where you actually owned what was build there.
Seriously, every time my neighbors asked me for help making bricks and mortar to build a road or bridge to expand the infrastructure it made my monkey brain do the happy chemicals. It's so satisfying doing your part for a big and conspicuous project.
To address some points of the video: 1. The lore in the game is really in depth, if you pvp. The pvp aspect of the game has an insanely long player driven story with deep and rich histories where the heroes and villains of those stories are the players themselves. There are still some names that stand the test of time of players like "DoctorChaos". Kings and Emperors are players, their kingdoms and land holding marked in the games history. It is very extensive. 2. You are right man, the systems are really complicated to get into. That really is where the game is advantageous to be played in a village with others. Horse breeding used to be done by a dude in our kingdom and it was just him. 1 guy managed the whole horse program and did relatively little outside of that. 3. The crafting is insane, like you outlined the mallet thing, my god. I cannot tell you how bad it used to be, back in the day iron used to come out occasionally as "scrap" if you failed and it was awful. But as I said on another post, if you really work on a craft, like weapon smithing, and hone that craft to a high level, you can make very high quality weapons worth their weight in silver. A 20 quality weapon might cut butter well, but a 90ql one will be effective against anything. 4. Community is huge, like I mentioned with the pvp. Your name is your reputation, it is all so niche but unmatched. Runescape, for example, you get a drop from a monster and sell it on a ge. Well Wurm? You sit there, craft a sword over a period of time, and then trade it with neighbors for money or goods. 5. Cooking is ridiculous but fun, most skills have a "surface" and a "depth" and cooking is arguably the best example of depth. Sure you can make simple stews, breads, cook meat in a pan. Or you can elaborately sit there, harvest the eggs from your chicken coop, milk your cow, check out the grain fields and grab the wheat. Grind the wheat to flour, combine with the egg and milk, get sugar that you extract from your sugar beat, and make a cake. Oh and then you can add frosting to it, berries, etc. It is ridiculously in depth. 6. To address the time commitment, it is true to an extent. Once the skills develop to a certain point the game gets easier, by a lot. Things get made at higher quality, which makes them faster to use, body stats develop, the game gets better, it does, but it takes time, lots of time. It makes you appreciate items in the game, especially ones made from quality materials, because you realize some guy got high woodcutting to get a high quality log, and had good bowyery skill to make that bow, and spent the time to farm that wemp to turn into a bow string. It is great, crazy, fun. But yeah, the time, yeah sure, it might take a few hours to make a house in the start. But when you get higher carpentry, good tools, maybe enchanted items? Well then you will build larges houses in matter of a short time. 7. The speed, haha. Yeah, well it is useful information for horses and boats especially. Knowing how fast you are going in pvp is the difference of life and death. Truly. 8. You are right on the adventure line. It is not there for new players and if you did not find a group to play with early to at least guide you the correct way, well I wouldn't have played it for over a decade. I was lucky enough to run into a guy before the tutorial even existed, who explained to me how to build a house, and gave me some nails. Without that as a kid I would have dipped out. Conclusion: It is a slow game, with a deep lore based entirely on a community that writes it by the actions they take, the monuments they build, and the wars they start. It is honestly my favorite game, but I have been done playing it for a year or so now due to disagreements between the games staff and myself (part of the problem of tight communities and player moderators is well, you know each other intimately.)
About a year ago I loaded up this game, and chanced to find a community event where players from far and wide had gathered to slay a dragon together. It's remarkable that, for all its flaws, there still is a community that continues to play this game. Compared to a lot of other games Josh has reviewed, the sheer fact that there are people actively talking in the global chat, as well as active moderators, shows some of the love that Wurm continues to have. I hope the current developers take your review to heart! I recorded 'Red Dragon vs. 500 Wurmians', and I think it is a 'show of force' of the community side of this game. I believe it may have been the largest event of the past couple years. ua-cam.com/video/oInP6fx1_WI/v-deo.html It's important to also consider that Wurm had been a multilingual game, with people around the world sharing servers. I remember memes like "Peat is neat" coming from Finnish or Polish players, before we even knew the word "meme". Each settlement has a long and rich history, from its first days, to its peaks, to its eventual decay. It can be very slow if you play alone, but if you have a community of players who can help you with tools, food, etc. it plays much faster. Playing solo is a bit like bashing your head against a wall -- eventually you will relent and either quit, or join an existing community. The game *wants* you not to build a home alone, but to join some existing player and learn from them as a mentor. I would love to see some kind of quest line reflect that!
Honestly at the end of the day this made me want to play it more than anything. I've been playing other painful to get into games for years, and this may be perfect for me
Another good example of an adventure line in a sandbox game being beneficial is No Mans Sky in its current state. When I get bored of the sandbox exploration and building and I find myself contemplating switching games, I go and do story missions. It’s kept me playing the game when I got bored of its main feature and at the end of the day player retention is what’s important.
I'm huge into sandbox games and as casual and "shallow" as it is it's by far my favorite one. Also I love the focus the focus on storytelling in the recent Expeditions.
This is pure gold. You have to activate your axe or the game won't know what you want to do with the... TREE? A compass for which you have to wait 16 seconds to stabilize every time you stop moving?? Macro tracking?!? Wurm Online may not be as surreal as Otherland. Or as objectively horrendous as Mortal or Bloodlines of Prima. But it has got to be one of the most sheer ridiculous experiences anywhere in the gaming world. Hats off to you, Josh. You've outdone yourself on this one.
LOL as one of those players who's been playing WURM on and off since 2007, this is a perfect review of why the game never really took off. The community would tell the devs over and over to fix the things you spoke about... and then the hardcore fanbois on the forums would always shoot them down... Almost feels as if the community held the game back by itself. lol The part about the adventure line is so true. I've mayored villages in this game with over 200 active players and tried to create that dream city with everyone working together and achieving something amazing. And for the first few weeks of a new server, it is that dream MMO. The problem is like you say it literally takes forever to do anything, and there's very few incentives to actually want to keep playing. So the game is amazing on the first month of server release then it goes back to being boring.
Great vid Josh, I played Wurm for a few months several years ago. I remember fondly on my third day of playing I got lost after falling down a hill. (my clanmates had a small encampment I was learning how to develop, none of my friends were online) I had no combat skill so I had to run away from a giant spider, and fortunately a kind-hearted player offered me food and gave me a ride on his cart back to the main starting area. I was very grateful. Sadly my clanmates slowly stopped playing this game so left alone I had no reason to keep playing.
This made me laugh so much. Wurm was launched as a discovery game meaning that there was no one to explain things, this was by design. Today, the wiki is there for people that don't want to discover things on their own, I generally refer to the Wiki if I feel stuck or I'm not feeling like problem solving through discovery. I've been playing off and on since 2017 and in the last 3 weeks I experienced two new things that I never knew existed in Wurm and it was way more fun for me to discover that than diving into the Wiki.
My god a game I've finally played on this channel. I use to spend my entire existence in this game on a private server when WurmUnlimited came out helping new players understand and progress in the game. My village became the new player tutorial basically.
Thank you for the review, Josh! I felt it was very fair and honest. I know many of us on the development team have watched it, and it's already sparking discussions on what we can do better. In particular, I feel we could do a much better job conveying crafting and other gameplay elements to a new player. The points raised are too numerous to list here, but the "adventure line" and changing some of the design choices of old ring loud and clear.
- Keenan, Product Manager
Killing wurm unlimited wasn't it though
All of you should be proud of what has been created over so many years.
@@horder1234 I haven't played in a while. To what are you referring?
I've never played the game. And had no intention to do so. I just saw the game on steam then I saw this video. Seeing that the dev's of such an old game take constructive criticism and act on it makes me want to at least try it.
I and a lot of other commenters have nothing but fond memories of playing Wurm. Here's hoping the rekindled interest can revive some of the communities in the old servers.
Insanely accurate. When I was younger I tried to shoot a bow and realized I didn't have any arrows to nocte, I proceeded to hurl my bow at the target and did moderate damage....to my bow.
Not really relevant to the comment or video, but I once tried to shoot a bow when I was kid and that fucker snapped in half an sliced my cheek open
10/10, would Legolas again
nocte?
@@marsulgumapu2010 notch
@@falscher2 Nock*
So you had the same experience as the guy at 24:08? Cool.
They listened to you by the way. Added a crafting window so you don't have to activate and right click things.
Added a repeat action button.
And a bunch of other QOL stuff this year.
That's nice to hear
That alone might actually make me try this game out
@RolandCollides not many players. But always enough people to help and talk to. I still keep my little plot of land upkept with my boat docked lol. It's fun to explore and see all the incredible things people made. On Xanadu it can take 3 hours , even with a fast horse and roads to get from one side to the server to the other. Fun times.
@@jairusstrunk94so people play it? And is it any good
@corpingtons its... old. Really old
Good is a super subjective term. Yes it has a thousand or so daily players. Plenty of markets and stuff are still stocked etc and there's plenty of history and stuff to explore. The continents are full of roads and building, towns and cities, all player made. And still plenty of wilderness to be tamed in between.
But it's subscription based. (Though you can farm the currency in game to pay for it fairly quickly) and there's no "combat" per se. It's all just a text log and a few animations. And the learning curve is steep. To me it's good. To someone who plays mostly action games they'd say it's shit. Just depends.
Seeing the name "Josh Strife Hayes" or some variation of it in an MMO must be like seeing a plague doctor during the Black Death
It's more like just seeing a pluage doctor a little while after hearing of some disease going around town.
I play an old MMO, and have been playing it for the past 10 years. Our community is insanely helpil, almost to the point where we violently carry new players in some aspects. If Josh is ever on our game he probably wouldnt get the new player experience.
Dunno, I've seen a Spanish speaking Joshstrifeheyes (note the e) on my Lost Ark server. I kinda doubt it was him.
His middle name is fitting in that regard
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! 🎺 I can always come back 😁
Wurm Online: "Ever dream of singlehandedly building your own log cabin in real life? Well now you can build one in Wurm Online nearly TWICE as quickly!"
Honestly. Pretty good achievement
I love how this video emulated a typical sandbox MMO experience, where you start off with plans to build big things and then eventually it becomes a homeless medieval fantasy hero dating sim where your main goal is to kiss another player
If that's typical then there is lot of people who have no life and have 0 social ability. Almost pitiful, what losers. Haha.
a homeless medieval fantasy hero dating sim is quite the description lol
I dont even know what to say to that
Notch made this, went "okay... now what if I do the exact OPPOSITE?", then became one of the most-successful developers of all time
I never expected to find this legend in the comments, love your ror2 content man!
And then managed to ruin everything again by being an insufferable redditor
If you're referrinc to minecraft, I'm pretty sure Notch stole that idea from Infiniminer.
@@juhanipihlajainen4275 stealing is a very strong word, my friend. How about inspired?
@@Flamme-Sanabi stealing is good
_"This is the epic tale of one man's attempt to build a shed and punch a wolf in the face"_ sounds like the start of an actually interesting story.
You really have a good way with words Josh.
Sounds like the beginning of Dungeon Siege. Man just wants to farm his carrots has to gather a posse and kick the dog shit out a whole continent's worth of bad guys to do so
"The chat is interesting, they are talking about horse breeding, thankfully, that's on the game"
That really got me.
I've played Wurm for 17yrs now at this point since the Beta days. (I'm 30 now).
This was a great review and I sincerely appreciate the fact that Wurm is far from perfect that Josh managed to identify Wurm's redeeming qualities for it's VERY niche audience. There is no doubt Wurm is a exercise in masochism with tedious gameplay, bloated mechanics, uninvolved combat, clunky UI and just...AWFUL tutorial. BUT *if* you can get past that there is a game that is very relaxing and incomparably satisfying.
One thing that isn't really talked about in the review which I think is worth mentioning is that a LOT of the game including the mechanics, art, music etc has all be done by volunteers out of love and passion in the last decade and a half. Each one giving to Wurm their own vision of what they should think the game *should* be. This is what creates the the mishmash of weird systems and gameplay that at times is at odds with other parts of the game.
Wurm has never really achieved a level of success that has allowed it to have the investment it needed to create a "complete" game. Instead it's been just barely clinging to life desperately trying to keep moving forward. But there is no question that this is a game that nearly two DECADES old and it shows, but the fact it's survived for so long is a testament to the community and the few redeeming qualities the game has.
Thanks Josh for giving Wurm a fair shot and a really well articulated and entertaining review.
need corn 4 fuk horse
I've been playing wurm very on and off for a few years but never gave wurm online a try. What server would you recommend for someone returning with only experience from Wurm Unlimited?
@@SoOptic75 Independence was a good server back when I played. It's been a few years since I left so there's no telling how much of the old community is still around. You do know that many servers are linked in such a way that you can actually sail from one to another? Yes, you will need skills high enough to pilot a boat big enough to the task. Either that or catch a ride from another player. Several of us on Inde would plan 'hunting trips' to other servers just for a change of scenery.
The biggest problem with wurm other than it's self is the community which I'm sure you are well aware of
@@SoOptic75 My recommendation would be to start on a fresh server (no idea if there's gonna be one soon or if there has been one recently) with a couple friends and then group up with random people in the world. This game is essentially a village simulator where everyone should have their own specialties. Joining on an older server means that there's people with max skills and that the farmer of a village you'll be joining will be years ahead of you in carpentry even if you solely did that as your main focus. This might work and be nice, but I enjoyed the most when we had our own village with my friends for the summer vacation we played in high school.
Playing Wurm as a free-player is what I call "Medieval Beggar Simulator": chop some tress, piss of the owner of a nearby plot because them were waiting for the tress to become old (which yields more and better quality logs), get gifted a cow and rope to lead your beggar-cart somewhere to piss off from said plot owner, get ya cow killed by a mountain lion, and die for a Forest Spider or Troll.
Also, if there is still a Colossus Statue ontop of a mountain,near the southern starting town of the Steam PVE server (Cadence), know that it was made by me! PepinoOGrande! If you do archeology on it, you will see that the name FITS!
Edit: happened when the server opened on Steam, so 1 year ago, is probably dead! RIP my F2P Guard Tower and Colossus Statue
Being able to tell those stories is what its all about though. Good or bad, those memories stick.
Unlikely as it already had the 3 month kicking system. Hard to say if it deletes your property when it shutsdown your account.
@@Skylancer727 Anyone with any time investment would just pay the price of membership.
@@biggestfan. you'd have to be stupid to still be paying the subscription to a game you haven't played in over 5 years. They said this game came out in 2006 and they made a giant statue over the starter town. Literally the most competed area of the game. So they would have had to do so early on before others did.
@@Skylancer727 It doesn't delete your property when it releases an old account
The part about wurm that made my jaw drop and immediately hooked me was the fact that every building and road you see was built by players, and when you see how long it takes to build a small house I just had so much respect and wanted to leave my own mark.
Exactly! Feeling extremely small in the world and being intimidated by the deep social hierarchy is most of the fun as a new player. You just get this urge to build something and carve your own space to become a part of it yourself.
Isn't that how we should feel about real life 💀
@@lightnbrightt
Nonononononono... in real life you're negative nihilistic with self deprecation problems disguised as bad humor because everything you're capable of is sharing memes (you know, jokes someone else crafted). Sometimes this is topped with inferiority complex and desires for higher powers to give you stuff despite hating them.
Or nihilistic narcissistic: you're already too great for this stupid world, so why bother?
I'm just venting my view of internet culture, I 100% agree with you.
enjoy wasting your life lol
great if you love wasting your time.
When I hopped into the game while still in high school, my friend told me that he'd secured us a place near a helpful couple who're willing to get us up to speed and guide us along the way. We got coordinates on a player-generated map and off we went. This was pure orienteering without a compass (then they were not part of the beginning equipment) and I remember dying once along the way. When we reached the place, it was about 2h later and the couple guided us to a shack they'd built for us. They brought us a furnace, gave us food and a few tools and so we started building things. I became the carpenter out of us two, and in the end was ONLY a carpenter, because you need carpentry for nearly everything, so you have constant work. As my carpentry levels increased, I could also expand the house. My friend would take on blacksmithing, mining and farming and he took care of small orders for me. We'd adventure the neighboring areas and find new and exciting people. Usually when a new friend would join the game, I'd give them a PNG of a map with a good route to follow. Sometimes they'd get there fine and sometimes we'd have to find them along the way. Once it was me who got lost trying to find my way to my friend. I was wandering in the woods until I found a player name in the local chat. I asked them for directions, they told me to stay still and wait for him. There came the chadest of all chads in Wurm: A player, dressed in green, riding a bear. They guided me to a road that would lead me home, gave me food and water, and wished me well.
In the following years I'd pick up on shipbuilding and build a few of the biggest ships of the game. One ship would take me maybe 3-5 weeks to build because of my low skill, but I loved it all the way. We'd have grand adventures, buy exotic stuff from faraway lands and even move to a new server with all of our belongings in the massive ship. We once had a small war with 4chan's /v/ who had a village right next to ours. The war was mostly held by arranging fart emote raids around their houses and then disappearing into the woods.
Ah, I wish I still had the same kind of summer vacations as I had as a kid. The community was the thing. Everyone wants to help and are the best people of the whole internet. Also, did you know that the community has arranged dozens of massive canal digging operations where they'd have tens of people digging up landmass between two oceans? The operations have been greatly documented and can probably still be found in the wikis. They'd also build lighthouses that are regular houses with a fire demon trapped inside. That's creativity and dedication that I wish my games would have at one point in the future.
I simply and regrettably cannot envision a future with this detailed and open ended of a game being created.
You bring a tear to my eye. Nowadays we're used to having a quest marker showing us which direction to beeline to, huge hub areas where you have easy access to anything you need, and fast travel which lets you go anywhere at the drop of a hat. But in Wurm, even just going on a foraging run to grab wild veggies for your stew is an adventure, and bumping into a mountain lion or a bear can make for either a pulse pounding chase or, if you're capable of beating and butchering them, an unexpected bounty to bring back home.
In my village, I was a "guard", dealing with trolls and bears that would occasionally wander in our turf, wielding my halberd and decked out in chainmail (with a rare helmet I bought from a group of passing players) and as a consequence I had also racked up quite a bit of healing and salvemaking experience from having to tend to my wounds, meaning I was also the guy to go when others took the occasional tumble or wolf attack.
Honestly, that sounds wonderful... but the thought creeps into my mind that this is also why the game has fallen so low. For all its complexity and time investment, many would argue that all the time you spent doing the things you did in game would have been better spent doing those same things in real life. Any game that come so close to an accurate simulation of reality begs the question of why you don't do the things you did in game IRL; for instance, imagine if instead of dedicating weeks and months and years to becoming an in game carpenter and doing carpentry, you spent that time actually becoming a carpenter and actually built and sold things. A very large percentage of potential players are going to see how accurately this game replicates having a mundane job, and question why they would bother when they already do have a job?
@@notsae66 It's the allure of doing that in untamed land. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have the opportunity (not to mention the financial means) to actually build a shed, or a ship, or forge a suit of armor, and even then they wouldn't be able to terraform their terrain freely without the government regulating everything. That's the allure of sandbox games: the freedom.
@@ZorotheGallade yeah I wish I could actually learn carpentry, shame it'd take hundreds of bucks and space I don't have.
Can we talk about how this obscure MMO from 2006 still apparently has dedicated players in 2022? There are games that came out in 2021 that don't have this much of a dedicated player base.
Dedicated players are dedicated, expecially when it takes two weeks of practice to get a skill at an acceptable level, two months to get it at a good level, two years to master it.
This game rewards effort, and many players nowaday can't even focus for 45 minutes.
There is a reason why League of Legends and Dota had to tune down the average match duration.
//scrubs lol
And then there are players who just come back after a while. Latest surge to this game was the Steam release back in 2020.
Babylon's Fall is one game that comes to mind. That game came out a month ago, and Wurm Online has a higher player count lmao
@@allthatishere Yeah but Babylon's Fall being used in comparison is like comparing Forza Horizon to Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. It's simply no contest because one game is good and the other would've been better off not existing.
Sunk cost fallacy, my old friend
One of my first experiences with Wurm was discovering not only do you *not* have to deactivate the shovel when cutting down a tree, but you actually get an achievement for cutting down a tree with a shovel.
I used to play this with my husband back in the day, we spent a lot of time on it. Had our settlements side by side. The forums had a volunteer area if anyone wanted to help with the game, I remember making the sheep and chicken/rooster/chick skins. I think they are still being used today! My little contribution.
That's really cool! The game would've been really interesting when it came out.
@@z.s.n.
But why bother, WoW was a thing then since two years already
@@PuellaMagiHomuraAkemi Although they both are MMORPGs, the target demographic is definitely not the same.
In few words, WoW is a simplistic MMORPG focused on combat and story. Wurm is a very complex game focused on exploration and system depth.
So that's why people bothered, Wurm was more appealing to them than WoW. Just because games share their genre, doesn't mean they all deliver the same type of content to entertain the same type of players.
This is a completely different game than WoW.
@@frozen3078
I mean WoW works and wants player to stay despite it being tough and does alot for that while Wurm looks like the most annoying thing anyone would bother with. Sure they are different things but my point is that the one MMO works, the other just doesn't and neither does it care. The moment you have to look up a wiki your game failed - and this game always does.
The garish colors are the product of another mechanic in wurm: dye making. The opacity of a dye is directly correlated to its quality, and the quality of produced items are the average of the quality of the ingredients used, and if your skill is lower than that it gets either capped or averaged by it (depending on the action: most raw materials are capped). This means that the best dye makers can make high quality dyes, which will color items a pure, ultra bright shade of color. Meaning displaying such garishly colored items is kind of a status symbol, since you're either a good enough alchemist/dye maker to mix such a high quality dye or are influential enough to acquire such a dye.
That is...amazingly true to real life.
@@myotheremailisacat yeah, art imitates life. I think games like Wurm, as well as many other community driven games, shows how societies and cultures form in fast forward.
Its also pretty funny that rich-person art is notoriously gaudy (think NFTs or the French Monarchy's art collection) due to this very effect..
The rich don't understand skill and talent in labour so much as they see value in the end product merely as a means to outproduce rivals..
I guess you can call that a nouveau-riche phenomenon, but that would completely discount the course of human events regarding Italian Villas, toga-measuring contests, clay armies, and pyramids
Ok now THIS blew my mind.
@@Dong_Harvey I don't really know how to articulate this well, but they're not art. I can't define art, but I know those shitty monkey pictures aren't it.
I want to point out that Notch left the Wurm Online team SUPER EARLY into its development and left Rolf to do pretty much everything by himself.
That’s kinda scummy.
@@larrymantic2635that's a good way to describe notch
@@larrymantic2635 Leaving a funwork passion project in the hands of the more passionate about it isn't scummy.
@@BigCheeseEvie Creative differences. I played Wurm when they were both developing it and that's all it was. Notch wanted to take it into a different direction and Rolf refused to budge.
@@larrymantic2635Notch is a piece of shit but this isnt the reason lmao
This one actually felt much more interesting than your usual reviews. Instead of being a shitty asset-flip, it actually was a community built around prohibitively complex gameplay. It was a cautionary tale, rather than a failed cashgrab. Nice.
Believe me, back when the dev pushed out frequent updates they lived by the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" rule. They never pushed out a feature that made the community cry out in outrage, and for the years I played it there were definitely several quality of life additions (like the signpost system letting you easily navigate between neighboring settlements)
The premium formula was never changed. They never pushed for cash shop purchases or increased the fee, or devalued the ingame currency. Wurm never screwed over its playerbase, and that's how they stayed loyal to it despite the complexity and eventual tedium.
@@ZorotheGallade Yeah, Josh... why didn't you make this point? Pshhhh... /s
If Otherland is what happens when artists make a MMO, Wurm Online is what happens when engineers make a MMO.
Please, never allow a bunch of bureaucrats to make a mmo. Never. Promise me. ;)
@@wizardsghost876 lol bro I got some bad news for you
@@GC_Rallo What's it called?
@@userequaltoNull Society.
@@wizardsghost876 that is what MMOs are right now. You get shallow, money hungry shells that feels bland.
This brings back some memories. I played this game way back in the day. It had a functional tutorial back then not sure why its gone now. I Started out in a small community I think it was called "the orphanage". The lady that owned it would give you access to your own little shack on her property. It even had a small fenced in yard for gardening. There was community space for mining and crafting. It was a good way to learn the game. Then I set out to build my own castle. Found a large area in a prime spot that was once owned by someone but has since been abandoned, nothing left but a flattened area, a small boat and the start of a mine. on one of the main roads, right on the water, and not far from the initial spawn. A neighbor with 99 carpentry helped me plan out the largest possible castle. I made and sold bricks for in game currency to buy the land and membership. After many many months I had terraced tree gardens, stone gate houses, horses, Bison, ships with a cave in a mountain I could park them in. and a 3/4 built 3 story castle. Then it started getting bad. I had to play hours everyday to maintain my decaying structures, sell products to afford the monthly membership and property fees. at that point it wasn't a game it was a job. I was over worked and under paid. all my progress stopped. I started not being able to keep up. Walls were breaking. animals were dyeing. My farm was full of dead plants. My food was spoiled. I ran out of money. Everything began decaying even faster as it wasn't protected property anymore. I took a break. Logged back in to find my character in a small wooden shack, but it wasn't mine. the land belonged to someone else now. and I was trapped inside.
thats great though
The very very weird thing about MMO games that .... They rot over time ?
Why the hell do they become worse over time ? Have you ever seen a PS1 game become borderline unplayable after 15 years of launch ? No ... But if MMO games surpass 10 years after launch, they decay for some reason
@@themendorean they meant the buildings in-game decay, you gotta pay a fee to maintain your epic structures and buildings, since the in-game world thinks that brick walls and stone pillars decay as fast as my will to live
The ending has some absolute "I have no mouth, and I must scream" vibes to it lol
This would make a good creepypasta.
One note about Steam achievements, they aren't exactly a reliable metric for what the player base has done. Especially on older games like this.
What often happens is that a game comes to Steam, players log in on old accounts or the game didn't launch with them on Steam, but achievements aren't always retroactively granted.
Steam achievements are sketchy for a number of games I've played.
Looks like SOMEONE is jealous they're not in the top 1% of Wurms Online players. :P
@@brucewayne1777 "I kissed someone, thank you very much. You don't know her, she's from the Epic islands."
I think a more important factor in this case is the game being free to play (up to skill 20). Lots of players will try it for free, log in, be turned off by something (dated graphics, clunky UI, whatever) and just drop it. I doubt most of them were turned off by the tutorial per se. They just didn't know what to make of the game or realised quickly it wasn't for them.
Secondly, many (most?) of older players don't even launch it on Steam.
@@danieldahlborg8192 That's precisely why those achievements are important. Say you get your first achievement after playing 30 minutes of a MMO. If only 10% of the playerbase has sad achievement, than only 10% of all players that ever clicked "install game" ever played more than 10%. Yes, people stop playing for all manner of reasons, but such small number means that the very beginning of the game turns people off.
Jesus Christ, I tried this game 10 years ago and completely suppressed the memory until this video. The review is spot on. Just like Josh, I set my goals for an initial trial run as: chop a tree, flatten ground, kill an enemy. Failed at all of those and angrily uninstalled the game after wasting four hours. People say that Eve Online feels like a second job. Well, THIS game feels like giving up on employment altogether and just eternally wasting away.
Just watching this video, it made me feel like it'd be less cumbersome and less effort to go chop down an actual tree in real life, flatten the ground with tools I made myself, and kill a wild animal by learning to hunt than trying to do any of that in the game.
This game makes Eve Online seem simplistic. lmao
same
once you get over the basics it turns into just leveling stuff and waiting for the eternal timers to tick down just to fail on basically everything until you level up enough to do something.
Wurm Unlimited (the more player controlled, one time payment version) was abandoned almost two years ago, which is a shame as people were putting out some interesting (still unsupported) mods for their servers. afaik the only thing they did with the still updating Online version was to put out two new servers for the steam release together with seasonal events
It could be an amazing game, its just that its extremely niche, time consuming and stuck in time while at the same time being the freest game I have ever played
14:11 the amount of suspense in how you looked dead at the camera and raised the microphone to your face here. the delivery was just so good on that one lmao
100% one of the best "grow up"s he's ever delivered. Top 3, if not THE best.
I had such a memorable time in this game. I started playing with my friend and when we entered the portal we came out in a forest on a steep mountain slope. There was a road in front of us with a bunch of dead bodies and we wondered how these peopled died here, since there were no enemies or dangers around. We walked down the hill to a lake where some players had built and took a tour around the lake, where we then climbed up a huge ramp someone built up the mountain. We explored the area a bit until we got thirsty. We figured we could just go down to the lake and drink water there, so we started sliding down the mountain. When we both splashed in front of the portal we realized how all those bodies ended up there, lol. The game was super clunky though, we didn't really get into it.
reminds me of a gag in an online comic called "the Noob":
almost everyone who tried to play as an Elf died from falling out of a tree in the first minute...
@@ericb3157 I remember that comic lol. it was referencing the original everquest where wood elves city was platforms elevated up in trees, there would just be dead bodies all over the ground below
@@ericb3157 I loved that comic. Noob Quest, wasn't it? I think they've relocated it to some archives now... shame. They'll probably never finish it.
@@imperatoraugustus9970 hey some of those deaths were caused by lag (notthatI'dknowfromexperienceahem)
Years ago, I used to play this game with two friends. We used to trek for hours through the landscape to find a decent place to settle, just chatting and avoiding the lethal wildlife, foraging for berries. I remember the ambience of the wind and rain and the grass waving in the breeze. Despite the dated graphics (and the complete absence of player/creature animations), no other virtual world since has felt more vivid or real to me. As you said in "why you're not having fun in MMOs any more", the problem is that I now have a full time job and so do all my friends, and we have no time to dedicate to these collective immersive experiences.
I'm wondering if I enjoyed this game so much because it triggered the ancient part of the brain that remembers being a hunter gatherer. It's so unlike any other MMO I've ever played. Thanks for featuring it!
This gane sux ballz
@@gridleaf it's cruel that the world gives us singular emotional experiences that we can never feel again!
Also, Wurm is pretty boring.
As a working adult I can have fun in FXIV. Not in wurm. Hell even as a kid I wouldn't like Wurm, it'S objectively speaking a boring game.
@@alexandrebelair4360 I haven't played Wurm in years because eventually it did become stale for me. it certainly is repetitive, but repetitive things can be oddly calming/stimulating. it's weird because I feel that exact way about most "theme park" MMOs. I can't think of anything more boring than grinding to level up your combat skills. I just liked the persistent nature of Wurm. despite the gameplay being very slow-paced, the world really felt alive
Came here from Keenan's post on the wurm forums; I hesitated to watch this, but immediately was sucked in. You did a very honest and well balanced review. I can tell you took alot of time to research this game and understand the elements behind it. I can appreciate that dedication towards making a youtube video :)
I just wanted to quickly voice an opinion of my own -- Although I understand why an over the top, convoluted, and very detailed game might be off-putting to new players, as an older player of wurm, that's part of what I personally look forward to everyday when I log in to play. I absolutely love every step needed to craft things, and I love the amount of time it takes. It makes you feel extremely accomplished when you do complete something whether it be a boat, house, cart, wagon, breeding animals, or whatever! So, as I understand this probably does deter newer players from sticking around, I really hope that aspect of detail never leaves the game.
On the same note, I really do agree the Journal and even the "Missions" in this game could use an update (and I believe we're getting one soonish). They really add to the immersion of wurm, and I hope that whatever the developers come up with will be better than what we have now.
Cheers and loved the video!!
I am surprised they don't make you control each legs movement individually when walking. Just a set of buttons to bend the knee, raise the leg, adjust ankle angle for each leg, lol
Qwop Online.
Dont give Rolf ideas
@@ratlinggull2223 😆 Qwop Unlimited. World of Qwopcraft. Everqwop. Final Qwoptasy Online. Ok I'll stop
@@onomatopoeia7505 Old School Runesqwop.
And a piss and shit meter. Hold it too long and risk infection or 'accidents'.
Any interest in compiling all of these MMOs into a long running tier list? Lol
Would really help separate the bad from the terrible from the worst.
As much as I hate myself for it, I enjoy a good tier list
I'm all for it
I'm curious to know what bad games, if any, he would place in 'worst MMO ever' S tier
Guildwars 1. Everything else is basically some level of less.
I played Wurm back when it wasn't on steam, if you join and find people within the world you would likely be invited in a village and that was one of the most advantageous start most people just spend their initial time in the game to find a village rather than do the tutorial. Having joined a village would likely get you a somewhat easier access to resources such as metals, clay, sand, tar, etc. Back during those days real-money trading was a very common thing in the game, so people would literally do jobs like make thousands upon thousands of bricks to afford subscriptions. Most high leveled players would buy thousands of processed materials such as planks, bricks, etc. or hire new players to do those menial tasks for them while they craft more intricate stuff such as ships, guard towers, and massive castles which they then sell to other high level players. Let's be real, wurm is not a game, it's a job.
It sounded pretty cool just a ridiculous time sink to the point of concern for their social lives and real jobs. But then I found out it doesn’t just take weeks to build a simple building they also deteriorate. Which is unheard of as a game mechanic alone but the deterioration is also insanely fast. That is psychotic, the thought of having to log hours everyday day just to maintain what you already achieved. Frustrating because the game feels like it has good bones all it needs is to drop all the arbitrary and crazy levels of busy work
not anymore if you see a player run lmao
Anything on a deed takes forever to deteriorate, and there's a whole archaeology mechanic to incentivize exploring abandoned deeds. The archaeology thing totally changed my mind about deterioration; it's inevitable that one day, everyone will stop playing. But there's a chance for someone to dig up artifacts from the ruins.@@monhi64
I think it had lots of good ideas, just with a cluttered execution. Its a shame, this had massive potential like that little java applet from 2009.
I mean if you already cant just change your appearance but need an item for it ingame that pretty much stands symbolically for "unnecessary complicated"
@@PuellaMagiHomuraAkemi Ehh, I like having cosmetic changes tied to some items (such as cutting tool to cut hair) but just a one use item that magically does it is... yeah.
If it was completely remade & streamlines to be less tedious, I'd try it again.
Your stupidity is the same stupidity that made the designers forget "more does not mean better"
The death knell was being mostly community driven, since all it took was a dip in the active user base for it to become a boring "well, now what?" game.
I'll be honest, I expected this video to be filled with complaints about how every system in this game is "a quit moment" for new players, but you did a good job of recognizing that the game was made for a niche audience, and that it was also terribly outdated. You made reasonable requests of the game and never once asked for it to become a standard mmo in the style of WoW or Everquest. I respect the thought you put into your videos.
Crafting/survival simulators are a dime a dozen nowadays, but back in the early 2000s, Wurm Online was one of the few games like this and we loved it.
I made a sandbox game in 1997 when they didn't exist at all, but didn't do anything with it. 25 years later I'm doing a serious 3D sandbox game and I'm not even original anymore.
@@path1024 what was the name of the game
@@theonlythingihavetosayis9333 Mortal Pawns, based on Harshlands which I also worked on.
As a player of Wurm Unlimited and a former player of Wurm Online I can without a doubt that this game is all vision and half execution. I enjoy the game but only as someone who doesn't mind a lack of polish graphically. Also in Wurm Unlimited you can control the XP curve, which makes one hell of a difference.
The thing I didn't see Josh get into was the purchasing of in game money. Back when I played Wurm Online, I actually paid for the in game money to pay for a deed that was around 9-12 tiles large. You need to pay the taxes on the deed every so often in real time or the deed will expire, which means you need to make money in game or just pay. You've put in full weeks of time into the deed and now you want to take a break from the game but don't want to lose your progress, so you break out your wallet. This is likely the goal of the devs, to finally lock you into this loop. It is the reason everything take so damn long and everything is skill locked. You pay for your deed and you pay for your monthly subscription because now without it, you can't progress in the game.
The developers likely abandoned the Wurm Unlimited game because they were unable to monetize like they did with Wurm Online. With this potential in my mind, I can still say that I have a love for these games (Wurm Unlimited far over its Online counterpart) because the feeling of building up a community from a harsh and unforgiving land is fantastic when you've got the time. I believe this is what the game was originally built on, the premise of slow and steady progress as your skills allow you to become faster and more efficient. I do not believe this is the view the development team or at the very least, the heads of the company hold any longer.
Wurm Online is amazing as a relic of another era, but it is just that. A relic. Thanks for the fun times Code Club AB (Onetoofree AB as it was once known).
As a side note, we really need to stop attaching the game to Notch (Markus Persson) as he left this project so very early on. Rolf Jansson is the one who should be credited in these scenarios.
Yeah it bothered me that he kept mentioning Notch when there have been a team of devs working on this for a decade after Notch left. Don't discredit their work, the game has grown many sizes larger since then. Notch didnt, make this game, the devs did.
Yes Wurm Unlimited is so much better indeed.
Hi, how do you deal with no updates in Wurm Unlimited? I considered getting WU, but it being an abandonware discouraged me.
@@platynowa It's a pretty complete game already been in development for years. I got 800 hours from WU and enjoyed all of them. Def plenty of things to do in the game.
@@platynowa I have to agree with Zach on that it is pretty complete as it is. There is a lot to do in the game and if you do yearly resets with boosted XP you can find new challenges. My group and I tend to try and setup in strange places, usually with the world against us. One of our favorite things is to have the % of hostile to passive creatures raise every few days or so.
Beyond making your own fun there is still events that can trigger, dragons and Avatars are still around to fight and there are random NPC's that'll pop up around the world which you can "chat" with. I say "chat" because we tend to talk with them until they insult one of us enough and we manhunt them.
If you are able, I'd suggest finding a group who is active in the game, as most of the joy with Wurm Online or Unlimited is the community aspect.
I hope that was helpful.
The ending where you tried to give it a score was hilariously accurate.
Made me think of how I felt trying to learn how to play One Hour One Life.
After watching this, I was struck by the urge to speak up about a game of "too much granularity" that I once played. A game called Haven & Hearth. I wasted so many weeks and months on that game. It is not a game you should try playing.
To provide an example of WHY you should, perhaps, only look at the wiki entries on Quality and the skills and some of their applications, let me briefly describe a specific crafting material you might use in the game: Silk.
Silk, for those who don't know, is a product of a cocoon-spinning caterpillar, and in order to get silk in the game you have to follow a process similar to the real one. This means you need to go out, catch silk moths, have them breed, let the caterpillars form into pupae, then boil them to get silk threads, which can be collected together to make silk. During each of these steps, the moths and worms must be fed mulberry leaves, once every eight real life hours or so, and you cannot collect any silk if the cocoons hatch into moths.
On top of this, if you harvest the silk threads, you won't get a full next generation of silk moths to breed more, and you need to breed generation after generation to increase the Quality Stat of the moths, to increase the Quality of the silk, to increase the Quality of the products so improve their stats. We are talking dozens to hundreds of generations of silk farming to get quality levels to the point where they are even of any practical use.
And if you can't feed them? If you have to be away from the game due to circumstances out of your control, the internet goes out for a day or someone passes away, or whatever? If you don't have someone who can cover for the feeding and harvesting and breeding and collecting the leaves and arranging the highest quality moths and so on... You can lose all of the quality process and be sent back to nothing and have to start over with wild moths at the worst quality scores.
Because realism.
I had a friend I played the game with reach out to me some time back saying "Haven and Hearth 2!" and I had to hand him a firm rejection that I have done in almost no other circumstances in my life.
Was just thinking of H&H recently. Played it many years ago but could never remember the exact title. It was certainly unique and was unforgiving in a roguelike way. I mean, you literally start the game butt naked. Still, I didn't find the difficulty curve anything like Wurm's. Always stuck in my mind anyway. Thanks for the throwback... and good luck with those silkworms.
hells yeah haven is awesome, new world just started less than a month ago, great time to come back!!! :D
man H&H is VERY complicated and I played for just about two weeks so didnt go far, but i miss the atmosphere. Just traveling and stealing crops from other players was awesome. Or glitching and mowing down boars with arrows.
Absolutely loved this game back in the day. Remember Notch giving us silver wands that let us teleport. 😅 and Liphos’s house builder. Does anyone remember Jakes’s Folly?! (Huge bridge across the sea)
Wow...the game has that? Wish it would be worth getting.
Every single time Josh says "Grow up" I think to myself "But wait, you thought it first" .. and that's why I love you Josh.. your head is as far in the gutter as mine is, and we need more good company this far out.
I watched your review and started playing and am genuinely in love with the game. Thought your review was fair and good as always. The one thing I learned after a couple of hours in game though, was that Wurm may have the nicest and most helpful community I've ever experienced not just on the internet but anywhere in life. Wanted to say thank you bc I would never have played this game without your review and it is the game I've been looking for for a long time.
We have a large village deed if you want help learning the game
Can confirm, Wurm players are the nicest in the whole universe
@@Eldrygg Hey sry I only just saw this. I actually met some people who invited me to their deed the first day I was playing. Ty so much for your offer and proving my point though
@@chipi_media9883 have fun sir, you're always welcome with us if circumstances change
Our deed is called Buske's Cove on Cadence.
20:00 Not to excuse the design or how it is introduced to new players, but that crafting menu you see there is actually available for every crafting option in the game. Using the right-click -> create menu is also available for players who prefer it.
I actually do use both, depending on what I'm doing, so I'm happy for the option, but the right-click option should be configurable and hidden by default, in my opinion. And point players to the crafting menu properly.
That menu was not implemented when I last played, so i was surprised to see it. But can confirm, makes sense that both the new and old menus are available.
Ive played this game for around 10 years, invested thousands of hours in playing multiple characters in parallel. But that was long before steam. I cashed out for a good 700€ when i didnt feel like playing anymore. I still dream about this game every now and then. It is one of my favorite chapters of my life. We actually went to meet rolf and the community in amsterdam a few times, and visited him at wurm online head offices in motala.
I wish I knew the community in Amsterdam back then, since I'm from NL
When you drive along the motorway, do you look at exit ramps and start counting the number of tiles it took to make it...?
Sounds incredible painful to play this for 10 years
@@PuellaMagiHomuraAkemi Sounds incredible painful to be you for ever.
@@GruntGP Imagine getting mad by someone else's opinion.
This game was originally designed for LAN play. The character's were not meant to learn every skill, or max out everything. You have a group of friends. They each choose a certain profession, and work to skill up that profession. Mostly for RPer's. Eventually you have a neighbor, neighborhood, and community, with each player being the butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.
Wurm gave me some of the most memorable satisfying memories in my 20 years of gaming. Building is hard and difficult. You have to terraform the land, chop trees, smelt some nails, saw the wood into planks and then slowly attach planks to the house one by one. But when you're done, its YOUR house, you made it. Its a kind of familiarity you can only feel when you struggled and achieved something on your own.
I feel like if this had been a text based game... it would have felt literally the same and hell, if its even possible, way less complicated.
Well, you're just outright wrong.
How would you build an entire castle to your design in a text based game?
ASCII is a hell of a drug.
You just described Dwarf Fortress with multiplayer
I was one of the old players -since 2006, that played Wurm online, i have max lvl and high tier skills character, another priest, been god's champion and almost considered going after deity status..
I can say that there's one thing everyone fails to grasp: skill level.
Sure, it seems like making a house is slow but why are you supposed to make your own house on day 1? And what do you think is the difference if you have lvl 90 building skill? Or carpentry? I tell you right away, I could make a Stone wall -not wooden plank, in seconds.
No joke.
So.. He does have a point. When tutorial or suggested actions tell you to build a shack, it's a bad impression from the start!
They should tell you to make a set of tools, make a fenced lot, a chest for your newbie tools (that no-one is gonna steal) and a raft. Then explore on foot and on raft, your surrounding area, make a mine, add gate, move your stuff in it, get iron, continue tools...'
By the time you do these you will have enough skills to do other stuff..
All the guides we wrote back in the day (mine was for starting on PvP servers) were deleted from forums and never made it into Wurmpedia.
And if anyone made or makes a new guide /tutorial -even on youtube, is anyone linking it officially? No.
It's a community driven game but the community is left out on the most important aspect: CA
Honestly iam amazed that the game allowed you to touch burning iron with your bare hands. Wouldve expected you to craft some tongs first
don't say that too loud, the Dev's may hear you and get ideas
@@WebleyVickers there's no worry about that, wurm's dev cycle is so slow even if they did implement it, it would be two to four years
@@laycey is the game still being worked on?
@@acuteavocado1962 It is. It got re-released on Steam a few months ago and still is getting patched regularly
@@acuteavocado1962 They've just commented, saying that they'll listen to Josh's feedback lol
This is my favourite MMO of all time. I'll always return to it when i want to wander into the wilderness and attempt to survive on my own. But it really shines when you have a group of friends cooperating .
I cringed a bit when I saw this video posted because I've played Wurm Online and Wurm Unlimited since the game was in alpha, and it has a special place in my heart. But I think most of us know the game is overly complicated, not the easiest design to understand. A lot of the concerns you've raised in this video are ones that are recognized by most people who play the game, and yes, the wiki is basically a requirement here. But the problem is that no other game has ever given me the sense of creation and accomplishment until I played Eco Global Survival, which has a lot of the same problems. The combat is definitely the worst part. By the way: Notch hasn't been involved with Wurm for a long time. Rolf, his previous partner, was the one who ran the game for the majority of its lifetime. In any case - despite my love for this game - I recognize its bad design and it does indeed belong in this series - as much as it pains to admit.
Well said.
well josh himself even place his own favourite and also the game that was the fondation of his channel as worst mmo 1 year ago i think
same love wurm never really played wurm online but when wurm unlimited released I found out about the game and been hooked ever since, my absolute favorite part just travelling in the wilderness and finding a spot to build but then finding out it was actually an old village long decayed overgrown with trees. one of the coolest things is I found it was a youtuber and they had videos with the actual location we started building and you could make out the terrain, it was the coolest shit ever.
try dwarf fortress, space station 13, or aurora 4x, they'll wet your whistle.
Josh: "Grow Up."
Me: "My ancestors are smiling on me, imperial. Can you say the same?!"
THIS COMMENT WINS TODAY.
What in Oblivion is that?!
Manslayer
To be fair he caught me red handed there.
Ah, a man of culture, I see.
On one hand, this game seems like the perfect example of "why realistic doesn't mean better gameplay".
On the other, props for the devs for just adding random stuff they thought of. It's like seeing that fresh childish wonder all over again, it tickles something nice within me.
And major props for the fact they still added QoL content along with all that.
That may just be indigestion.
It's your clitoris.
idk about that. Id say realistic makes AMAZING gameplay.
@@bloodarmyproductionsyeah but it doesn't MEAN your game is better
This game is genuinely so damn impressive, just the fact that this exists, that a game this detailed could be built and playable is incredible.
I know this game has huge faults but it gave me some of the best memories I ever found in an online game.
Building a tiny shack and a farm with a friend I've met in the game felt like we've genuinely made something with our own hands. We even had this small community of people living in the area.
It took buttload of time though. It's not a game you play when you have many irl responsibilities
well said, Wurm takes time and patience.
That game is like a house mortgage you start something and few decades later it's finally done. But could still do some polish at the end.
The game is trying too hard to be immersive.
"A+ experience so far, would gladly throw my bow at a crocodile again" - i actually nearly died laughing at that last sentence. defenitely best "experience" ive read in a long time xD
I can't believe I played that game 15 years ago, and I still can remember people and events like it was yesterday. Players who I played with like Pops, Rara, Pedro, Kix or the first Grand Prince of Jenn-Kellon Pedro, even my very first 14-day ban in a game for dissbanding enemy houses on Asgard settlement raid because I some how could loot the house owner rights from their corpse, good times. Loved the game for how "hard" it was, and for an kid that couldn't own anything because I was poor in real life spending time and crafting stuff or terraforming in that game gave me soo much joy. Thank you Josh for an very entertaining and memory refreshing review!
> Loved the game for how "hard" it was
Profile picture checks out :P
Played this waaaaay back in 2011-12 on the recommendation of Notch. I remember saying then that this was a horrible idea, even for a fantasy simulation. Everything is needlessly complicated and overbearing. And that's just the controls. The 'gameplay' itself is non-rewarding. It's not like after all your efforts you can really do anything more unique than the last person. And to do anything fantastic, you need a group of masochists to join you...in a "game" that makes even that difficult. Apparently nothing has changed much in 10 years.
Perfect gift for your german masochist friend!
It's the perfect video game for an Amish teenager raised to believe that labor is the only fun you'll ever need.
Isn't that the case in every game?
Nothing you do in any MMO is very unique. Even the big grindy achivements that take you years have been done before.
You could go for world first runs, but thats also kinda masochistic from my perspective
The controls are the biggest fault of this game imo though
@@MaakaSakuranbo The point is that for all the very very very...very...long grind. The rewards are just not there. And the fact that nothing is unique (just like any other MMO) makes it worse.
I'm a guy who knows how to do actual real life blacksmithing, in about one tenth of the time this game makes a person screw around with insane mechanics, I could teach them to ACTUALLY SMITH SOMETHING! This game is an absolute disgrace to the concept of fun.
Fun is personal dude
That song brings back memories. For the time, Wurm Online was a good game. Compared to modern games, however, and looking back, it was very tedious. I remember the terraforming with friends to build things mostly. Great times.
People think Wikipedia was created for information in real life. Wikipedia was actually created by a Wurm Online player to make the game easier for new players.
I remember seeing this as a child! I wanted to play it so bad, but I couldnt figure out how to get it installed.
and I think I did, but my computer wouldnt boot it up.
I then forgot about it and just thought it was a fabrication of my memory.
I can now see what I couldve been playing! Thanks Haydes man!
Greetings from Silakka. This was one of the best games and the complexity was the thing that kept me ingame.
Lack of endgame and having 7 deeds at once slowly made me decline from the game.
Having the best gear and a 100 digging skill I just go awfully bored after doing max 3 height pillar and anything you can name.
Archery was a bit of fun shooting angry red trolls, other than that. Keeping my boats repaired and having the max CoC tools etc, it got from super hard to super easy..
I had some time in Wurm. I became a expert boat builder and was able to sell enough boats to fund a premium subscription. It just became too demanding of my time, always worrying I wouldn't make enough boats to pay for the next month that I gave up. It's the ultimate "Put in what you get out" type of game but be prepared to donate a huge chunk of your life to it.
So hype for this. Been wanting to hear your thoughts for ages- played it ages ago.
lmao..his opinion wont be nice at all..u can bet on that
Ditto!
it has gotten more realistic... it is MineCraft for adults.. takes patience and the long view. Still playing after 10 years and it just keeps improving.
Just finished watching! Yup, it's like I remembered. I did actually manage to make a canoe early on and loved just fishing and exploring the world, seeing what everyone else had made.
@@WebleyVickers you know you can play minecraft as an adult, right?
"Grow up"
While it is true that you knew exactly what I was thinking, you're the one who worded it that way!
This is basically “If you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe”: The Game
Was interesting to watch someone have their first experience with this in modern day.
When I first played it, like 2010ish, there was NO tutorial whatsoever. You also didn't get any of the starter tools they give you now, you had to figure out what tool you needed to make so you can make this other tool, so you can use that to make this other tool, etc. If I remember right, you got a hatchet, and that was it.
Or the easier way, villages in this game are generally very welcoming, and happy to bring you in and get you started with a set of tools and some help. In return for putting you to work repairing some fences or whatever else needs done, of course.
My first time playing, I picked a fight with a pheasant trying to get some food. That pheasant absolutely murdered me.
I started again, and found a gorilla. Was thinking, maybe I just need to engage with the combat icons? Picked a fight with the gorilla. Immediately broke my neck. I started running, got away from the gorilla, but I was still dying.
Happened across some random guy who was just like, "Holy shit, what happened to you?" He brought me into their village, bandaged my wounds, fed me some food, and handed me a bunch of high quality tools.
Wound up joining their village, and spent probably 500 hours with some of the coolest people I've ever met. The people are really what makes this game.
@JoshstrifeHayes1938 Reported.
I've been waiting for you to do this one! I love Wurm Unlimited, but I know it's a total messy, complicated grind lol
Btw, the speedometer is really helpful when choosing/breeding mounts. I like to choose horses with a lot of speed for travel, so seeing that speed in the top left is great lol
The depth in this game is amazing. It's not off putting to me, but good luck finding real life friends to play it with you.
The goal isn't to become instantly top level and max BIS items. It's just to enjoy the small achievements, like making a house, forging a sword, etc.
My exact experience with this game. I love the complexity, but it is really hard to recommend it to friends at the same time lol.
I've been playing on and off since I was in elementary school. Really love this game even though it is hard to love sometimes. I'm glad to see the developers personally respond in a positive way.
28:42
I feel attacked.
I actually find that speed meter useful. I just like knowing my speed depending on the weight of my inventory.
2 decimal is a bit much tho.
true. especially if you wear cloth armor and rely on speed. if you took too many items you'll see the change and will be more careful if there are any hostiles around (harder to run away).
I love games like this, I always make the joke:
"To loot, press and hold the *Loot* key, then click the left mouse button for every finger on your hand, then click Right Mouse Button to close your thumb."
Absolute perfection.
@@cobaltfox3193 To walk, hold down the 'Walk' key then click left mouse button for left foot and right mouse button for right foot. Click both faster to run.
I love watching your videos after cooking a meal. It's just the perfect thing to watch, really comfy sometimes! Thanks for getting this series going, It's amazing.
The sad part is, thousands of us have actually loved Wurm over the years. So many of us burnt out as less and less happened, as the devs and mods got worse and it stagnated beyond compare. It used to be a fun, if grindy, niche.
I honestly miss Wurm from a decade ago.
Wow, they added a tutorial. I tried it some many years ago, before Steam integration was even a thing. I spawned into the world, wandered around dying of dehydration a few times, stole someone's cart, then got enslaved by some town to dig a moat in exchange for water so I wouldn't die. Quit after 2 hours.
Right when you started to move I laughed. Thank you for playing this for us to watch and making this series a real thing
I was looking for this kind of comment as I bursted into laugh as well 😂😂
Kind of sad to see Wurm in this sorry state, I quit many years ago but back then in all fairness it actually had a functioning tutorial that worked, recently the development was turned over from its original founder Rolf, who co-founded it with Notch, to another set of developers who 'wanted' to try something new and ended up just undoing most of the work that went into it with their 'bright ideas', I think its unfair to look at the game from a modern point of view since its been in existence since early 2000's and it is indeed very complex which can be a good or a bad thing for most people but it definitely hasnt held up well over the years. I suppose you could say Notch took a lot of inspiration from Wurm into Minecraft so without this game, we probably wouldn't have the Minecraft we have today at least...
Beyond just took inspiration, I remember when the original way-pre-alpha Minecraft happened, because Notch was trying to develop a new 3d mining system for Wurm. The result wasn't really compatible but he decided to let people on Wurm play with it, people liked it enough that he kept tinkering around with it. To flesh out Minecraft he started by borrowing ideas from Wurm and simplifying them down to a childish level. It later started getting its own complexity built up over time as more work came out, and some of the most iconic features were due to "huh, not want I intended, but interesting" such as the origins of the creeper was a failed assembly of a pig (the first animal attempt, the legs ended up under an end instead of the base) that was repurposed into something new.
@@jesarablack1661 Funnily enough, Minecraft retains much of that complexity... but somehow presents it better. I mean, Josh is complaining you need to "activate" a hatchet to cut trees; you do the same in Minecraft of course, but instead of navigating icons or inventories, you use a hotbar. You need to combine tools and materials to craft stuff, but instead of activating tools and right clicking a thing and navigating through a menu, you put things in a 3x3 grid. And of course, Minecraft was just as criticised for the "wikiness" - there was never anything that helped you figure out how to do anything, or what you could even do.
Ultimately, I think Wurm and Minecraft are actually very similar. But Minecraft is the quick, solo thing (with fun multiplayer option), while Wurm is the slow, community-building thing. And of course, Minecraft moved away from the menu metaphors. Even the most complex Minecraft modpacks are made primarily for solo play, really - and while they can take hundreds of hours to "complete"... no single step really takes a lot of time. And of course, the "no skills" thing in Minecraft is a huge change; I love old-school sandboxes with their 100s of skills _way_ more than the silly level-based games, and the same is true for the games that remove all of that and just let everyone do anything. Because that means it's very easy to welcome new players (indeed, even the sandbox skill-based games tend to be much better than the level-based games in this regard).
Fun fact: Notch left both games behind around the time horses were being added.
The legend says that Josh is still searching through the wiki to learn how to make ink.
There are a few things that i wish this current iteration of the tutorial did better that it just doesn't for example explaining the buttons at the bottom of your screen specifically the crafting window(It is makes crafting for new players so much easier as all recipes are visible in it if you open up a window from there or drop the correct tools in there)
You can use keybinds to rapidly add actions without having to right click(The keybind system encompasses most actions in the game and they can be bound to any key that you want to)
The wiki is a community lead project with official support behind it but its the players who populate that data so there might be some issues here and there.
As for your statement of "wurm is a wiki game you need the wiki open at all times as there is no way to play it without it" Is wrong because a bit of exploring of the UI buttons that are visible will show you a wealth of information in a easy format(for starters the crafting window and recipe window), but i do agree the wiki is a thing that will be used throughout most of your wurm life for checking up on prospecting messages or searching for that obscure bit of info that you just cant remember there and then.
Also there is an item called a toolbelt that you can equip that gives you a toolbelt on your UI where you can drag items into so that you can activate them via 1234567890 keys
There was a tutorial a very long time ago that explained a lot more about the then UI and the basics of wurm but this was done away with because it had quite a few glaring issues for its time
Every version was created by a gm in a short period of time with what seems to be little real thought to the new player experience and this is something I personally have brought up over the years playing this game, I have asked for them to run surveys for new players where new players can answer simple questions(at say the 5 hour mark pop up a window) things like "what would you like to see in the tutorial" and take that information and create a tutorial and let the community test it time and time again until we have a proper good one that explains 1. the UI 2. the basics of the game 3. some nice to have tricks and 4. an optional section where more advanced things are explained.
But alas in the past this fell on deaf ears due to the then developers not really caring much(This has since changed with developers who do care and are actively trying to make wurm better)
All that set aside the thing that you said about having to get their minds set on what to do right click menu vs crafting menu there is a bit of a story behind that
For the longest time for years on end we only had the right click menu then after years of asking the crafting menu was added in a UI update then we were promised an UI overhaul and brand new way of interacting with the game(a more modern way to play the game with potentially controller friendly way of interacting)
This overhaul was then over the course of months pushed back and shrunk down to just a UI reskin with some newer features and updated backend to fix wiki support and some other things and we got the UI we have now(including on screen text for take and drop also got the default action and repeat action added and so on)
The old dev team had a history of promising a lot then under delivering which lead to years of secrecy and refusal to be honest about the ever slowing pace of development and lead to a lot of angry players
Then the game got brought by a investment group and suddenly things started to speed up a lot(you cant tell me otherwise looking at what went on) of the bad developers and gm's were let go(some giving hilarious reasons why) new ones were taken on new positions were created outside help seems to have been brought in and now progress is being made bug fixes arent taken a year anymore the PVP and pve communities are being listened to again slowly wurm is starting to feel worth paying for again.
For the longest time i played wurm as there isn't anything like it out there and i had spend over 5 years living and building up my mountain fortress and i loved the game(still do) but it was the staff that made it hard for me to justify spending money, it was the staff not the game that almost made me quit the game that i grew up with as a teenager since 2004 but thankfully before my village disbanded due to running out of money new life was blown back into it and a leadership change happened and a lot of those who were toxic to the game were let go.
Is wurm a hard game to learn? Yes. Does it need a newer tutorial that is created not by 1 man/women but by the community and based on feedback from new players? YESSS. Do i want to see a rise back to 8k+ active premium accounts instead of 4500? YES please.
Will wurm ever grow to have tens of thousands of players? No i doubt that but maybe reaching its glory days and going beyond that would be nice for me i will hold out hope that some day we will get a proper UI overhaul and alongside it a new player friendly tutorial and journal system that holds your hand more by explaining more.
With explaining more i mean showing a simple video that explains how to build your house or flatten terrain via ingame tooltips, having a tutorial that holds your hand instead of the ghost town it is now.
Anyway one last thing to say, wurm used to have notch and rolf work together then notch left due to design differences and clashing them it was rolf for a while then rolf with others then rolf alone then rolf with others then just others then rolf alone again, this went on for a few times then a few years of just others and then rolf sold the game leaving what were some rather bad people in charge who are now gone and replaced with great ones, the issue with the clashing of good animations vs bad ones, good art vs bad art, the lack of a solid visual experience stems from this design journey.
There was a period in time where wurm was seen as "finished" and true to that wurm was a solid game then came the fighting overhaul(and more of them later on) and a new era of many features many of which seemed like thought of on a Friday afternoon and implemented the next week by Wednesday with little to no real thinking of "should we" to it.
This is what has lead wurm to be so feature rich and overflowing with complexity as there are a lot of features all pushing for priority in a wide world, but honestly starting wurm and joining a community or starting with friends is currently the best way to get started and that is honestly sad as for me myself i started alone and it was a simpler game back then but boy I was hooked at a time where runescape forced you to stop playing after a certain amount of time and need for speed 3 was pretty still wurm was something amazing and it still is in a way.
I have so much more that i want to say and I have written giant long posts about this game's history and what it lacks and what my gripes are with it on yt and the wurm forums and other places before and gone on 12+ hour long rants in discord(All while playing wurm haha) but I wish i could make the beginning experience of wurm better I really wish we were given that chance as I want this game to grow in players in developers, I want my grandkids to have the chance to play wurm like i have.
I love this game and have spend over a thousand days online playing it across multiple characters lived on most servers played countless hours of wurm unlimited spend more money on this game then i have on any other game combined(my steam library cost me less then wurm has cost me) and I do not regret a single cent of that.
This truly is a amazing game but its biggest weakness has been apparent since the start and I wish I was given the chance to try and fix it I really do wish for that to be the case.
This seems like the sort of MMO that really needs a community of players willing to each specialize in something in order to actually make it work. But then each person would only be experiencing part of the game so that's only going to happen if there is some absurd goal to shoot for, like 0 nukes in MGSV.
Even moreso by the fact that if you pray regularly at an altar you can become a priest and have several powers at your disposal (such as speeding up crop growth, instantly summoning dirt to fill a hole, enthralling a monster into becoming friendly or magically healing allies) but if you do so your character is permanently (until you renounce your priesthood) rendered unable to perform certain actions, such as cutting trees down or constructing buildings. Thus unless you really are hardcore, you won't become a priest unless you are part of a community that can satisfy those needs.
i do think its good for games like wurm online to exist, even if there might be minority of people wanting to play it, its cool to know that there's at least one game out there that I could use my time into learning everything about it one step by one and maybe achieving great heights of accomplishment within community or just for my personal satisfaction, and its kind of sad that games steered away from this idea of a game loop for sake of profits and instant gratification, just imagine what kind of amazing games some big game companies could make with this long earned gratification gaming as the base game loop? people talk about wanting to be just the adventurer making their mark in a world but sadly it seems majority of paying gamers dont want this but instead endless copies of battle royales and lost ark pay to win mmorpgs.
Wurm is probably the best game I've ever played.
It was so addicting that once I was able to get away from it, I never went back because I didn't want to quit my job and life.
I've never had crack, but I think my addiction to Wurm is somewhat like it, years after quitting, it still calls to me.
It's not one of those games you can win at, it's hardcore!
nice copium
Legitimately the same thing. This game absolutely pulled me in like nothing else. I was fully immersed. If anything comes like this in the future I fear I'll fall to it.
is this a friends and family post - unless you never played any other game in your entire life, i find it hard to believe this is the best game you have ever played. sorry mate. that's the hard truth
@@twistedmonk778 I don't think this game needs "sympathy" reviews lol. And I've played plenty other games, luckily, none as addictive so I just give up on them within a month or two and move on to another. I get that you might prefer Fanta or whatever, whereas I prefer Coke Zero. Different tastes :)
But why
Isn’t this what the strange mega-project, kickstarter MMO was trying to be?
Just, without the “real-time aging and character legacies” aspect?
At this point the only thing that’s missing is people who spent thousands of IRL dollars to become the monarchs of kingdoms.
Yep, I found this looking for something to hold me over until Elyria was done. Still playing Wurm! LOL
Elyria was a damn shit show lmao, but yessir indeed you are correct
Actually, you can make your own factions like that in PvP and IIRC it costs over a 100 dollars to do so (which was expensive before the scam games raised the average), probably been years since someone did that though. I don't really keep up with pvp but I know the scene for it in Wurm was always very niche because you need to be the kind of person who'll wake up in the middle of the night or leave work early to log in if you get a call about being raided, if you don't have that unhealthy level of loyalty to a game you're better of in the more populated PvE servers.
love Josh's content and I loved Wurm, I have watched him long enough to know how he would react to Wurm, while all his comments are accurate, there is a charm to the game and the sense of accomplishment you get is amazing. The game may not be 'mainstream' but it's free to try give it a go.
The game isnt free by its own mechanics, which was on stage on the steam launch. When a kingdom(server) isn't funded by paying players, and only paying players. None of the free to play mechanics would work. so the game is not and has never been free. even in gold they tried to charge 15 a month like world of Warcraft.
There are private server settings that reduce the grind significantly including mods that solve some of the most problematic things like dying in a tunnel and finding the body with its stuff is on the top of an inaccessible peak hundreds of meters above. I have three bodies up there somewhere.
As an ex player of this game I was waiting for it to make it on this channel. I cannot disagree with anything you said in terms of new player gameplay or community, spot on mate. Only thing that got me through the 1st week was running into another new player making a hut near mine and we joined a small group up the river from us. A few weeks later they puttered out but me and that guy hunted forums and found a new group. I stayed with them for about a year an a half even after my original buddy left and I did love our little community. We made a walled town and had ship building business. With help of the alliance over a fair amount of time we made a trade canal from the east coast of our map to the centre and times were good. But I just couldn't keep up with the time requirements and my activity dropped and dropped. I miss it but totally get the absolute ball busting nature of it makes it unpalatable to many
I think a new interesting series for MMO's could be: Abandoned MMO's and going in 'single player' in these abandoned worlds where everyone left.
I guess some of these worst MMO's are by chance such videos but maybe this could be an interesting side-series too! Just to see this special atmosphere of these older games and huge open worlds that have been forgotten and abandoned.
No. Thats way to much for my heart to handle :(
Around 15 years ago I played this game for 2 days straight and managed to be able to get myself a weapon, find enough food to not die and find a deserted spot on a hill to build something on. Then I realized that the game is basically just an artificial time sink and the gratification you get is getting stuff done despite the time sink. That's when I quit.
I remember playing this game way back in the late 00s with my younger brother. We built ourselves a proper society on a peninsula on one of the new continents they released and ended up getting into wallet warfare with foreign invaders. Ended up spending a good chunk of IRL currency buying NPC ghost guards to fight offline raids and our little deed became one of the bigger hubs for outgoing raids because of how secure it was thanks to me literally throwing money at the problem of raiders. Ended up having to give it up a few years later as I was trying to go to college and a game that requires the same time commitment as a full-time schooling career was just untenable. I picked it up again a couple years ago on the private server side and found I still enjoyed the elements that initially drew me in but was a bit disappointed with how little had been added on since I had left nearly ten years prior.
Try the PvE side where you can build without raiders tearing it down. 80% of Wurm's users have always been on the PvE servers.
@@WebleyVickers I've played it both. I enjoy the risk, I just took advantage of the wallet fighting haha. It's been years now since I've played and I don't really want to go back.
this video made me log back into check on things. i found your house btw, its nice setting, right by the water too. if anyone is looking he spawned on Cadence on Sonata. its a roofless house with a cart in the front.
This was one of those games back in the day where playing it actually felt like a true adventure and the world felt massive and actually dangerous. It really was on a whole other level. Good memories with this game. I took part in the multiple Facepunch invasions that happened over the years and they were always a blast. Wurm Online holds a special place in my heart and always will. Reading through the comments and seeing all the good memories and stories really brings me back, might have to come back to it sometime.
Long live Minges Tirith and Blood Gultch.
"Every step up to winning is a time sink", "It adds more clicks, but not necessarily more gameplay".
Exactly! Thats how crafting in almost every game works, and thats why i hate it as a mechanic.
Is there any game that makes crafting a minigame that requires actual skill?
@@professorpwerrel yeah FF14 is legit the only MMO I've played so far where crafting actually felt really good, and like it was an actual skill.
I also liked crafting in the old Warhammer Fantasy MMO, which is now defunct but can still be played on a private server.
Instead of just selecting an item and crafting it, you added a base, an effect, and some modifiers, then attempted to craft it.
This meant that instead of a recipe list, you had some influence on exactly what would come out the other end.
Forging in Dragon Quest 11 is fun. It's a little minigame where there is no negative win states.
@@nidungr3496 this might not be exactly what you're looking for, but Kingdom Come: Deliverance makes weapon maintenance skill based, where you have to sharpen the blade at the right angle, and evenly along the edge, to do it properly. Amazing Cultivation Simulator has talisman crafting where you draw over a template, and the precision affects the quality of the talisman, and thus also the strength of the effect. I think MMOs don't do this in no small part because it would incentivise using bots or other cheats to create equipment superior to that of 99.9% of honest players following the same recipe.
Crafting I feel is better when its a replacement to RNG loot progression, I'm far more annoyed at not getting the RNG drops to equip on my character than with having to craft everything.
This game was rough, but addictive if you found a decent group of people to play with. I found a small village that was accepting new players and was able to work my way up while assisting with mining task and other gathering things, eventually was drafted to become another of the villages boat makers. Was able to make my own boat and sail the seas and found smaller island villages that were much more advanced then us and were able to develop trade agreements with them. All in all it was game that was made fun by the players, the mechanics of the game itself were very rough but allowed alot of self governance and make your own adventure.
Now back in the day this game was incredible pay to win in the degree that you had to use real money to purchase/lease chunks of land where you actually owned what was build there.
Seriously, every time my neighbors asked me for help making bricks and mortar to build a road or bridge to expand the infrastructure it made my monkey brain do the happy chemicals. It's so satisfying doing your part for a big and conspicuous project.
To address some points of the video:
1. The lore in the game is really in depth, if you pvp. The pvp aspect of the game has an insanely long player driven story with deep and rich histories where the heroes and villains of those stories are the players themselves. There are still some names that stand the test of time of players like "DoctorChaos". Kings and Emperors are players, their kingdoms and land holding marked in the games history. It is very extensive.
2. You are right man, the systems are really complicated to get into. That really is where the game is advantageous to be played in a village with others. Horse breeding used to be done by a dude in our kingdom and it was just him. 1 guy managed the whole horse program and did relatively little outside of that.
3. The crafting is insane, like you outlined the mallet thing, my god. I cannot tell you how bad it used to be, back in the day iron used to come out occasionally as "scrap" if you failed and it was awful. But as I said on another post, if you really work on a craft, like weapon smithing, and hone that craft to a high level, you can make very high quality weapons worth their weight in silver. A 20 quality weapon might cut butter well, but a 90ql one will be effective against anything.
4. Community is huge, like I mentioned with the pvp. Your name is your reputation, it is all so niche but unmatched. Runescape, for example, you get a drop from a monster and sell it on a ge. Well Wurm? You sit there, craft a sword over a period of time, and then trade it with neighbors for money or goods.
5. Cooking is ridiculous but fun, most skills have a "surface" and a "depth" and cooking is arguably the best example of depth. Sure you can make simple stews, breads, cook meat in a pan. Or you can elaborately sit there, harvest the eggs from your chicken coop, milk your cow, check out the grain fields and grab the wheat. Grind the wheat to flour, combine with the egg and milk, get sugar that you extract from your sugar beat, and make a cake. Oh and then you can add frosting to it, berries, etc. It is ridiculously in depth.
6. To address the time commitment, it is true to an extent. Once the skills develop to a certain point the game gets easier, by a lot. Things get made at higher quality, which makes them faster to use, body stats develop, the game gets better, it does, but it takes time, lots of time. It makes you appreciate items in the game, especially ones made from quality materials, because you realize some guy got high woodcutting to get a high quality log, and had good bowyery skill to make that bow, and spent the time to farm that wemp to turn into a bow string. It is great, crazy, fun. But yeah, the time, yeah sure, it might take a few hours to make a house in the start. But when you get higher carpentry, good tools, maybe enchanted items? Well then you will build larges houses in matter of a short time.
7. The speed, haha. Yeah, well it is useful information for horses and boats especially. Knowing how fast you are going in pvp is the difference of life and death. Truly.
8. You are right on the adventure line. It is not there for new players and if you did not find a group to play with early to at least guide you the correct way, well I wouldn't have played it for over a decade. I was lucky enough to run into a guy before the tutorial even existed, who explained to me how to build a house, and gave me some nails. Without that as a kid I would have dipped out.
Conclusion: It is a slow game, with a deep lore based entirely on a community that writes it by the actions they take, the monuments they build, and the wars they start. It is honestly my favorite game, but I have been done playing it for a year or so now due to disagreements between the games staff and myself (part of the problem of tight communities and player moderators is well, you know each other intimately.)
About a year ago I loaded up this game, and chanced to find a community event where players from far and wide had gathered to slay a dragon together. It's remarkable that, for all its flaws, there still is a community that continues to play this game. Compared to a lot of other games Josh has reviewed, the sheer fact that there are people actively talking in the global chat, as well as active moderators, shows some of the love that Wurm continues to have. I hope the current developers take your review to heart!
I recorded 'Red Dragon vs. 500 Wurmians', and I think it is a 'show of force' of the community side of this game. I believe it may have been the largest event of the past couple years. ua-cam.com/video/oInP6fx1_WI/v-deo.html
It's important to also consider that Wurm had been a multilingual game, with people around the world sharing servers. I remember memes like "Peat is neat" coming from Finnish or Polish players, before we even knew the word "meme". Each settlement has a long and rich history, from its first days, to its peaks, to its eventual decay. It can be very slow if you play alone, but if you have a community of players who can help you with tools, food, etc. it plays much faster. Playing solo is a bit like bashing your head against a wall -- eventually you will relent and either quit, or join an existing community. The game *wants* you not to build a home alone, but to join some existing player and learn from them as a mentor.
I would love to see some kind of quest line reflect that!
Honestly at the end of the day this made me want to play it more than anything. I've been playing other painful to get into games for years, and this may be perfect for me
Another good example of an adventure line in a sandbox game being beneficial is No Mans Sky in its current state.
When I get bored of the sandbox exploration and building and I find myself contemplating switching games, I go and do story missions. It’s kept me playing the game when I got bored of its main feature and at the end of the day player retention is what’s important.
I'm huge into sandbox games and as casual and "shallow" as it is it's by far my favorite one. Also I love the focus the focus on storytelling in the recent Expeditions.
This is pure gold. You have to activate your axe or the game won't know what you want to do with the... TREE? A compass for which you have to wait 16 seconds to stabilize every time you stop moving?? Macro tracking?!? Wurm Online may not be as surreal as Otherland. Or as objectively horrendous as Mortal or Bloodlines of Prima. But it has got to be one of the most sheer ridiculous experiences anywhere in the gaming world. Hats off to you, Josh. You've outdone yourself on this one.
LOL as one of those players who's been playing WURM on and off since 2007, this is a perfect review of why the game never really took off. The community would tell the devs over and over to fix the things you spoke about... and then the hardcore fanbois on the forums would always shoot them down... Almost feels as if the community held the game back by itself. lol
The part about the adventure line is so true. I've mayored villages in this game with over 200 active players and tried to create that dream city with everyone working together and achieving something amazing. And for the first few weeks of a new server, it is that dream MMO. The problem is like you say it literally takes forever to do anything, and there's very few incentives to actually want to keep playing. So the game is amazing on the first month of server release then it goes back to being boring.
And this is the improved user experience and control scheme. A few years ago when I tried it, it was even more complex to perform simple actions.
Great vid Josh, I played Wurm for a few months several years ago. I remember fondly on my third day of playing I got lost after falling down a hill. (my clanmates had a small encampment I was learning how to develop, none of my friends were online) I had no combat skill so I had to run away from a giant spider, and fortunately a kind-hearted player offered me food and gave me a ride on his cart back to the main starting area. I was very grateful. Sadly my clanmates slowly stopped playing this game so left alone I had no reason to keep playing.
This made me laugh so much. Wurm was launched as a discovery game meaning that there was no one to explain things, this was by design. Today, the wiki is there for people that don't want to discover things on their own, I generally refer to the Wiki if I feel stuck or I'm not feeling like problem solving through discovery. I've been playing off and on since 2017 and in the last 3 weeks I experienced two new things that I never knew existed in Wurm and it was way more fun for me to discover that than diving into the Wiki.
My god a game I've finally played on this channel. I use to spend my entire existence in this game on a private server when WurmUnlimited came out helping new players understand and progress in the game. My village became the new player tutorial basically.