It's got good and bad bits. It's hard to liken it to any other MMO, except, dare I say it - Fallen Earth done right, in a fantasy vein.
Its design choices mesh with what it intends to do. In the same way that Eve Online provides a sandbox for empire-spanning operatic stories of political corporate cutthroats moving legions of people and ships around like little pieces on a chessboard, Wurm Online provides a sandbox for individual folks to join up into little tribal villages and townships, creating heroic epic stories of survivalists, adventurers and eventually/maybe leaders and kings at war.
It's Eve on a different scale.
It also reminds me of Unreal World, a survivalist roguelike. Except where in roguelikes, you're ultimately the centre of the universe the NPCs revolve around, in a survivalist MMO, you're a wannabe newbie hoping to work your way towards one of the centres of the universe formed by other players.
One of the things that first caught me off guard with Wurm Online is that it runs in Java. Relatively small clean download, which is a rarity in these MMO client days.
The second was that it was all in first-person view. Yep. No camera finagling. No seeing yourself in third-person. (Not that your avatar is that cool in art assets anyhow.) This no doubt helps immersion, as well as allows you to get thoroughly lost in the land.
I didn't find the nights that dark. Though apparently as a newbie, you get a little newbie light surrounding you. So the dark nights looked quite a bit like a Morrowind or Oblivion night, and try as I might, I couldn't seem to attract any horrible wolves and spiders and things to come eat me, though I spent quite a while floundering around in the woods while dragging a cart containing the only possessions to my name, like an itinerant tramp. Could be the whole 'deity light surrounds you' thing at work.
One thing I did detest was the very premise of the crafting system. It uses the standard MMO progress bar as timesink schtick. That means if I want to mine, I right-click a cave wall and select "mining = >mine" in the menu, and promptly wait 0:32 for the timer to run down - after which it plops some ore at my feet. If I want to cut a tree, I right-click the tree tile, and select "chop down" after which an 8 second timer runs and I chip away at the tree until it falls over. If I want to forage, I right-click grass, select "nature => forage" and wait another 12 seconds, etc, etc.
The one saving grace was that they had added in a fairly recent patch a check to make sure the grass patch hadn't been recently foraged (ie. yield nothing) BEFORE going through the 12 second timer. This also makes me shudder at the thought that previously, you'd spend a whole lot of minutes foraging empty grassland that had been pillaged by tens of newbies before you.
The other thing I detest about the crafting system is the use of a skill stat to dictate crafting success/failure on a percentage dice roll.
Yes, this is one of the standard crafting models. I suffered it in Aion. Other less hardcore games like LOTRO (possibly WoW too) adjust it by guaranteeing you a wimpier "standard" item, should your "crit chance" fail, but everyone only desires the crit items anyhow.
In Wurm Online, you start out as a pathetic newbie with 0 skill, and have to level it up in hardcore fashion. (And I mean hardcore, since after 6 years of running, they just celebrated a character which managed to reach the max of 100 in a particular skill score!) Skills are capped at 20 on the free server. If you're hitting 30 on the skills, you're doing pretty good, says the Wurm FAQ. At 50, you start getting titles to celebrate your achievements.
This makes the simplest of craft attempts an exercise in resource preparation overloading as a newbie. Say you want to cut a plank from a log. With 0 woodcutting (or whatever relevant skill it was, woodworking or whatever) skill when you first start out, the happily displayed chance of success is.. a whopping 9%. Um. Ok. After one or two guaranteed-to-fuck-up attempts, you raise your woodcutting skill to 1 - yay! And your chance of success is now 49%. At a woodcutting skill of 2 and some decimals up (after several hours of play, not all of which was spent woodcutting, fortunately), that brings it to a middling 51-53% for planks.
Good thing a tree yields a LOT of logs if you cut down one of the right age.
The thing that makes me want to break down and scream though, is the time factor involved with metal ores and cooking and pottery. Anything to do with fire, really. The more gimpy and newb and low quality your fire is, the longer it takes to do anything. This is, of course, "realistic." This also makes it a masochistic experience for most newbies to endure.
Even by leapfrogging this and using one of the friendly newbie-public forges, it takes upwards of 30 minutes to melt iron ore down into a workable lump of iron. On a newb campfire, you're lucky to get a result at 1h+.
Presumably, it wouldn't be so bad if you were the only one at the forge. Problem is, I was sharing the forge with 2-3 other characters, supposed newbies, but newbies that knew how to label ores by their own names, and apparently circumvent whatever coding there was to prevent theft in the newbie village. (Whenever I click on something not mine, the option comes up "steal" instead of "take." Since I didn't want to destroy my reputation and have NPC guards attack me, I decided not to even try.)
Problem was, when I dumped about 6 ores into the forge, and ascertained that those were mine, and wandered off. When I came back, the ores were no longer mine and were someone else's. I could have unwittingly allowed this (some chat convo later revealed that if you wander more than 2 tiles off, apparently, the ownership fades away.) But come now, did you expect me to idle for an hour at a forge while some lumps of metal melted?
I'm an ATITD player. I'm going to fucking maximise my time and do something else. That's what I do.
In order to save my sanity, I did in fact wander off further away from newbie central, and discover a nice open forge in the middle of a cave right near an iron vein, and no one around. So I fired the forge myself, fed it with wood (took a while to figure out how to do that right too), and dumped in about 18 ore in staggered bits, and managed to do some blacksmithing in peace.
The tech trees do not appear as well designed as my favored crafting game. Yes, ATITD has bottlenecks. But the bottlenecks are more or less optional (you do NOT have to build a pottery wheel as a newbie), and the public population has developed ways of making the bottleneck negligible - public pottery wheels, free jugs or a small amount of leather if you ask anyone, etc.
In Wurm, I've bumped into no end of them. With lousy skill, you can't make complete tools on the first go. You end up with "unfinished" items which require other items like a pelt to polish it, water to temper and a whetstone to sharpen. You look those things up, and find out you need a butchering knife (and a dead animal) for a pelt, and a stone chisel for a whetstone, and dammit, you were trying to make a blade for a butchering knife or the chisel in the first place. So your only option is to throw resource overkill at it. For every 3-5 unfinished items you make, you will eventually get lucky enough to make a finished one on the first go, at which point you can presumably finish the other unfinished items for way too many tools.
I have no idea how I'm going to get a dead animal because I'm so newb that a stray dog would be able to eat me for breakfast with negligible fighting skill.
Speaking of breakfast, Wurm Online has a hunger and thirst meter. Thirst, thankfully, is not so bad, since there are wells dug by other people that they graciously keep open, and there's hugging a river to go get some fresh water.
Food, though, I'm at my wit's end. For 24 real life hours of game play, you will get fed for free by NPC bartenders, as long as you stay near the starting villages. Of course, this makes the first few days of play extremely boring as well, since you are chained by the ankle to the starting village.
My one escapade into the wild did not end well, as I walked in an apparent circle (no compass, no map, no sense of direction) passing by many many many built up houses, saw no wildlife until lucking into a young stray dog, tried to kill it, failed miserably, ran away wounded, rested to heal (ie. just waited, because one was too newb to have bandages and things), fought again, got further mauled, watched as some other guy popped up and mashed it into the ground, butchered the dog and walked off with nary a word to me, accidentally fell into the water and got my cart stuck, tried to haul the cart off the mud, and due to injuries from the dog, fell back into the water and drowned because one was too weak to climb up again.
I've written off everything on my corpse and cart, since I have no idea where the incident occurred. On the plus side, I am back at the starting village where I will get fed by the NPC again, instead of starving to death.
Can I fish? Nope, I need cotton for a fishing line. Which is obtained with a lucky forage for some seeds, which you'd then have to plant, or something. But the grass by the starter village has been raped (or over-reaped) by newbs.
Obviously, I cannot hunt for food. The predators will eat me instead.
So I'd have to be a gatherer and forage for miserable berries and things. (See over-used grass.) Eating the raw berry also = negligible hunger satiation. So I could cook, maybe. Except cooking a stew or casserole involves placing the food into a pottery bowl (which thankfully, newbies have as a freebie now, and do not have to make from scratch anymore), and putting it in a campfire, and then waiting for 30 RL minutes.
I hear frying pans allow for "instant" meals. This I gotta try. Except I'd have to do a whole stint of iron ore mining and smelting again in order to maybe make a frying pan.
To me, Wurm Online's intriguing gimmick is also its downfall. It is the only sandbox that allows land terraforming. In fact, everything you see built up, is player-made. Even the newbie zone, which I gathered from some forums reading, was made by a GM's hand - presumably they get the resources free, but still placed by hand.
On Golden Valley, there is a LOT of build up. While one may marvel at the man-hours that went into it, one runs into the same problem I ran into on ATITD. Lebensraum.
A newbie can't build everywhere because the good spots have all been taken, and if you do, you're going to run into some unhappy people screaming at you, so better not risk it. Doubly confusing is my inability to check if the person is still playing, which means you either steer clear (or are forced to because they fenced it all up and your pathetic newbie self is still unable to pick a lock yet) or take refuge like a hobo wondering if the owners are going to come back at any second to evict you.
Apparently, there is more land on the premium pay servers. Which makes fair enough sense.
But the accepted solution to this is to just join a village. Ie. make nice with some veterans and offer your slave labour help until you learn the ropes and can contribute or make your way out into the wild. Kinda Eve-like. You could do this with ATITD too, but it's not the only road you're forced into.
A key difference I detect between ATITD and Wurm is this: skill-based crafting. As in, real player skill-based is to be found in ATITD. The minigames support actual thinking - actual exploration, up to the point of hardcore spreadsheeting and macro'ing. Sure, some of the chores take time, but there are no dice rolls involved. If you invest 15 minutes gathering grass, you have a guaranteed handful of grass every time you pluck it. In Wurm, if I spend the same amount of time poking at the grass, I might get random types of herbs and berries popping up, and I might get nothing at all if I was unlucky.
ATITD, then, allows for far more strategic resource management. If I run a macro, if I place these things so-and-so, if I start this going and then come back to that, etc. I speed up my resource collection over a newbie who has yet to figure out these things.
In Wurm, if you didn't do the grind, you're still pretty screwed as a newbie, and have to grind the skills out at some point in order to progress further. The grind can be masked by not attempting to grind and just playing the game and living "life" but ultimately, the progress counter is still ticking.
In ATITD, I could grow flax on a level 1 alt and still beat a newbie who is level 10 if that newbie never took the time to figure out efficient flax growing methods.
Presumably in Wurm, a veteran would be able to level up a alt faster from more game knowledge and bound keyboard shortcuts, but that veteran still has to invest time in getting those skills up to a decent tolerable level.
Land terraforming creates some fantastic landscapes though. Roads are built by players. Caves and mines are hollowed out by players. I've walked into caves that were dug nicely and evenly, and in other caves, the floor pretty much drops away into a pit. All the wooden buildings are player-created. (On premium, there are even stone buildings.) If you cut a tree down, that tree is GONE.
You can use a sickle (player-made) to harvest a sprout from it beforehand, and plant the little baby tree somewhere else, so that over time, you get another tree again.
Point remains though, not on any other game, can you influence the landscape as much as in Wurm Online. In ATITD, you can build structures and stuff, but the landscape remains inviolate, and in the hands of the artisan GMs. In Wurm, the players rule the land. (Leading back into the point of as a newbie, you're like a force of destruction hoping not to get caught by anyone, and left with nowhere to go.)
Wurm definitely makes for a better group story, should you be lucky enough to walk into the game as a group.
As a lone newbie player, things decidedly feel a little lonely.
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