Somewhere there exists a virtual world that is completely sculpted by the players. That place is WURM Online

Over at MMOvoices.com, there is always a current “game of the site”.  I have to admit that I didn’t participate in any of them…until now.  It is, however, a fun time to get in to a game and know there are others you can immediately group with, if you want.  It’s also a great time to learn about and play new MMOs.

I always told myself I’d try WURM someday, ever since I saw it a year ago.  For some reason, I never did, and I’m sorry I didn’t start sooner.

WURM is a very different MMORPG in that the player creates almost everything.  I was on the games merchandise page and saw it referred to as a community-centric fantasy MMORPG.  You start in a forest with a little direction, but the depth of the crafting in this game slowly becomes remarkable.  Perhaps the only downside some players will find, is that it takes too long.  Much like older MUDs, WURM has you playing out even the most simple of tasks, all in a graphical 3D world.  Need water?, well you’ll need to find clay, which you’ll need to dig up, then build a fire for.  You’ll have to chop down trees into logs, chop those logs into planks or scrap wood, use flint and steel to start a fire, form the clay, and burn it to make a bowl or clay flask to hold either food or water.  Want to build a small wood shed? No problem.  Cut the trees, form the planks, but you’ll need to smelt ore into nails that you mine.  But this is really where the game shines.  It’s the ability to do this, in a graphical world, that’s very intoxicating.

It’s a game of survival and crafting at its core.  There’s PvE and PvP servers.  There’s also free and pay servers.  Our little, but growing, community of MMOvoicers has settled on the free PvE server Home.  Guru Bear, the Bard of WURM, has really helped us out, as many of us had no idea where to get started.  There’s plenty of info on the WURM website, but Guru Bear really helped facilitate the process for us.  We have a nice little home started near the water. For now, It’s a collection of some small sheds, fences, and just cleared land right, but things are moving along, and we’ll have a nice home in no time.

My first real night playing was tremendous fun, with me being the newest member to offer a helping hand and asking for even more help.  It took me a few minutes just to figure out how to add a log to our forge’s fire.  After a couple hours though I started to see how the tools and actions functioned for any task.  From there I was able to be a bit more independent in my exploration of what I could do.  It was a little hairy at one point.  I was weighed down by carrying logs back to camp, which slowed me down considerably, and suddenly a wolf was in front of me.  I had heard to stay away from them as they could kill a newb like myself.  It was a lot of screaming in chat, running to the water, and trying to open my inventory to drop enough logs to run faster.  In the end, I made it, everyone online rallied together, tracked the wolf down(which didn’t stray far), and slew it.

I’ll be tracking some of our progress through this post, and updating progress pictures.   The breadth and depth of this game is really remarkable.  Some of the graphical elements, like character avatars, are a bit archaic, while other graphical elements of the world are really well done.

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