Wurm Online Review

Wurm online is a unique massive multiplayer online role-playing game. What makes this game unique is the fact that not only is it a role-playing game, it also falls under the 'sandbox' genre, giving the player an opportunity to unleash his or her creativity in a dynamic world. Wurm online began as a massive 3d world with nothing more than hills, valleys, mountains, forests, lakes and oceans and has slowly evolved over time since all of the structures and roads in this game are built entirely by the players.

To understand what Wurm online is about, you first have to get rid of any preconceived notions as to what constitutes an 'MMORPG'. In this game, you will spend very little time killing monsters as much of your time will be put into simply surviving in the world, and when you do kill animals, it will most likely be for thir meat and fur. As opposed to most other MMORPGs where every player plays the roll of a hero, in Wurm you play the roll of a simple peasant. As a peasant, your tasks typically include gathering food, cooking it, maintaining your household and various other trivial tasks such as mining or landscaping.

The world in Wurm online is 3D with a massive landscape which is dynamic and fully Terraformable. For instance, with the use of a shovel, you can dig up dirt and reshape any area of land to your liking, or with the use of a hatchet, you can cut down a tree and then you can further chop that fallen tree up into logs for either burning or building. Like in the real world, trees can spread and grow using a form of cellular automata; so for instance, you can plant one single tree in the middle of a field, come back some weeks later and you may find a small forest in it's place.

Building in Wurm online is far different than most other sandbox games, such as Second life. In Second life, you build things using an in-game 3D modeler and assign textures to your creations, whereas in Wurm online, things are built using a system which is more akin to how things are built in the real world. Let's say you want to build a house, first you claim and flatten an area of land, you then gather resources such as wood for planks and iron ore for nails and then slowly build your house by nailing each plank to your unfinished walls. This is no easy task as each wall requires 20 planks and each time you try to hammer in a plank, there is a pretty good chance that you will fail, the failure rate being based on your carpentry skill.

Hunting in Wurm online does not yield any magical treasures, equipment or even experience points, as experience points do not exist in this game. Killing animals in Wurm online is primarily for the purpose of survival and is quite dangerous, even for experience players. Every time you are damaged by an animal, there is a chance that your walking speed will be reduced and when that happens, that leads to a dangerous situation of not being able to run away if that particular animal happens to get some critical hits in. Another interesting feature of Wurm is the fact that damage is done locally over various areas of your body which must be healed individually by either resting or bandaging yourself up.

Another interesting aspect of Wurm online is the fact that you must eat and drink to survive as your stamina is directly related to these two variables. As your hunger and thirst increases, your stamina regeneration slows down and it can get to the point where it doesn't increase at all. The main effect of low or no stamina is a slower walking and working speed, and reduced walking speed can often lead to death if you run into a giant bear or a creepy crawler in the woods.

Wurm is completely free to play with an option to upgrade your account to "premium", which comes at the cost of recurring payments. As a free account, your skills cannot advance past 20, which leaves you unable to build certain items, such as large boats or stone houses. Additionally, you cannot create a villiage or a homestead, although you can still build your own house or move into a villiage. Another thing that comes with a premium account is game currency, you can also get more currency buy purchasing bundles from the official website. Since this is the only way the money enters the game, there isn't much of a currency backed economy, instead the economy revolves around trading good for other good, or trading work.

Now that I've discussed some of the pros, I will now discuss some of the problems I see with Wurm online. One thing which stood out to me was the fast rate of decay. Everything in Wurm online is slowly decaying and if you want to keep what you have built, you have to go through the tedious work of constantly repairing and improving your items, which often requires a lot of work and time. Thankfully if you live in a village or homestead, decay rate isn't so bad, but living outside of a village means you will have a lot work ahead of you just to prevent your housing from decaying away. Another con is some of the graphical issues, including unfinished graphics. Some of the 3d models are either incomplete or not animated, so they look very static. Additionally, the player models look quite poor and are poorly animated, which can break the immersion.

PROS

* Unique gameplay with less of an emphasis on endlessly killing things than other MMORPGs.

* Huge and dynamic world to explore which is constantly changing

* The close-knit feeling of living in a small village and relying on each other for survival

* Large view distance

* Calendar system with harvest seasons

* Dynamic animal spawn system

* Large number of skills

* Ability to build boats and ships

* Free to play with option to upgrade your account to a paid 'premium' account.

CONS

* Clunky java interface

* Very few animations, and the few that do exist are not very detailed

* Not many ambient sounds

* Not enough weather variation

* Tedious! Once the novelty wears off, much of the upkeep work becomes repetitive and tiresome.