And service resumes...with Wurm

It's been a long time since my last post, about seven or eight months all things told. My internet connection is still dire and will be for at least a few months yet, so I'm not actually playing an MMO at the moment. However, what I've moved into recently has been game design. I’ve put my money where my mouth is and started to work on a Crysis mod project with an excellent team working with me (visible at www.dilogus.com). I've learned a lot about game design from it, and it's continuing to be a really great experience.

Recently, though, a couple of things have reignited my interest in the MMO genre - despite my crippling inability to take part in it. One is E3, and the new games that were demoed there. I'll speak of them in my future posts. The second is a real gem of a site called here. Let's get a few things straight, right off the bat. Wurm looks hideous, and appears to be time consuming in the extreme. These are two good reasons why I’ll never play it, barring the not-implausible eventuality where I get fired, but something about it really got me going nonetheless.

To me it is, in a nutshell, what MMORPGs were intended to be when they were first dreamed up. It’s debatable whether a year of not playing MMOs has taken the blinkers off my eyes, or just driven me batshit insane, but Wurm seems to be the logical destination of the road down which Ultima Online et al were pushing the genre before WoW turned up and started tampering with the signposts. Wurm strikes me as an enormous and somewhat broken game, yet one that is essentially beautiful because of it. Reading it brings back memories of playing the early MMOs and the limitless possibilities it seemed the genre once had. Though I'm very fond of World of Warcraft for proving that MMOs are most definitely a feasible business model (and that production values were a good idea), it was for all of its polish a very sanitised game. Just like in most MMOs nowadays, it was and still is essentially a slow-paced co-operative beat-em-up.

The kindliest screenshot I could find on the Wurm site in regards to the game's graphical prowess, or lack thereof.

I perhaps do the genre a disservice above by emphasising game mechanics over the vital and ever-present social element, but playing some of the more modern MMOs has made me wonder in hindsight if the genre had been taking steps sideways rather than forwards in recent times. Ultima Online had a world with things like persistent housing, which unsurprisingly has not been repeated in recent times because it essentially hid all the careful work of the level designers under an endless sprawl of real estate that was broken only by the occasional monster wondering why his swamp had been turned into a shopping centre. The one saving grace of the system was that it made you feel your actions in UO meant actually something in a small way – I mean, if you could get enough gold together, it could be YOU that owned the great big castle thoughtfully placed on top of the swamp where newbie players used to go hunting.

Everquest was admittedly also all about smacking bad people upside the head, but the true joy I found in the game was exploring the wonderfully creative, varied and expansive world of Norrath. Sometimes you'd stumble on a little camp or quest somewhere in an unpopular zone that probably only a handful of the players in the game had ever seen, which was a special feeling to me - something that would definitely never happen in WoW. For all of its accessibility and user-friendliness, WoW lost something by signposting every quest with giant yellow exclamation marks and steering the player through every major location through endless quest chains. Azeroth felt less like a real world than an enormous outdoor dungeon.

Wurm, on the other hand, is a completely persistent world where every one of your actions has a consequence. Want to build a fire? Then you've got to cut down a tree and make some kindling. But that tree ain’t gonna be coming back any time soon unless you replant it. There was one line in the RPS review that really grabbed me; "New players bent double over forges trying and failing to make fishing hooks over and over can look forward to making dragon scale armour one day (assuming they can find a dragon, which are believed by the playerbase to be hunted to extinction)."

Think about that concept for a second, because it's completely alien to any other MMO I've ever heard of - hunted to extinction. No more dragons for anyone, because they've been wiped out. You could probably argue quite persuasively that this is a monumentally bad idea, and I imagine many of you are. I mean, now no new player to Wurm will ever see a dragon, and that hardly seems fair, does it?. But this is an MMO and that's the nature of the beast - few new players to WoW will ever experience a 40-man Molten Core raid, because the game has changed in the meantime. The only difference is that it was changed from the top-down rather than the bottom up, stripping the players of any agency at all.

Part of the reason it reminds me of the original Everquest is the fact the UI is pretty much exactly the same colour and the graphics are pretty much on par. Difference is, EQ is about a decade old.

The beauty of what Wurm has achieved with the dragons is that suddenly there's a story, a legend, in the gameworld; “Hey guys, y’know, there used to be dragons around, but people hunted them to extinction. Probably that guild of powergames. What a bunch of bastards. I’m going to hate them forever now.”

There can be no stories, no legends, no evolution in a game world that is static, or one where change can only come from the developers. Empowering people the ability to change the world means that, yes, things can go horribly wrong - but that's part of the point. That’s the trade off you’re making. The fact there are consequences to your action means that every player is suddenly involved in the world, rather than just being a passenger.

I know that things can be abused, and that griefers could take advantage of the system and ruin things for everyone, and so some thought has to go into working out how to counterbalance that. No doubt the solution would vary from game to game, but I don't think the solution can ever be to have a world as static as those in the current crop of MMORPGs. You'd probably have a game that's less balanced and likely less polished than WoW, but at least you’d no longer be just another transitory figure acting his meaningless part on a stage that never changes.