Wurm Online
The rush away from traditional, linear forms of video games and into a mode that could be described as “hobby” games – games that one plays in a tinkering process, like someone who wanders down to a model railroad set after dinner – has been so dramatic that the surge in the general direction of Minecraft and Terraria no longer resembles a mere trend but an awakening in game forms and expectations. Here’s what the future may look like: We play more games in which we only expect to experience a small portion of the game’s universe, or a small number of its mechanics. The emotional states associated with “gaming” continue to diversify. There are fewer games that one may “succeed” at, and play sessions shorten dramatically. Games may even adapt on the fly, tailoring themselves to players who schedule/select/enjoy short or long sessions. We’ve already seen casual and not-so-casual experiences, such as the planetary rover sim Extrasolar, in which players check in with the game periodically to issue orders, see old responses, and that’s it. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2014 survey, the average age of the “most frequent game purchaser” is 35, an age when sinking 1,000 hours into a grind-y MMO such as Rift might not be possible. The trade group’s “casual/social games” category – which doesn’t include MMOs – now account for almost a third of all games played online. “Puzzle, board game, game show, trivia” and “card games” account for another 28 percent. Let’s also glance at the top-selling PC games of 2013, as calculated by the ESA. Sim City 2013, a quasi-casual take on the series and a critical flop, ranked second behind Starcraft 2. The Sims 3 and expansions occupy slots 3-6 and 10-12. The other obvious moneymakers are there, a World of Warcraft expansion, Diablo III, Battlefield 4, Guild Wars 2, shot through with these sprigs of the puttering, the reflective, the social and the relaxing. Other PC staples present something of a balance: Civilization 5, a critical success, snuck onto 14th place, ahead of the old RTS Age of Empires 2 (18th), a hotcake on Steam.
At the same time, crowd-funding has steeled the industry. Players’ dollars say they don’t want their digital video-screen entertainment spoon fed, even if they’re interfacing with games on a more limited basis. Developers are valuing their time more highly, which is only a healthy development in a medium capable of sucking more time than a Proust obsession. While the difference between “casual” and “hardcore” has grown foggier, that between theme-park, on-rails, linear, and narrative-driven games and those of the sandbox has only grown more militant. Minecraft was one of the greatest, canon-upending successes in gaming’s past because of two fronts: minimalism and sandbox building. Consoles have always done minimalism quite well. The PC has often defined itself by the opposite. We have more pixels. Why not use them? Minecraft, and a number of other games, including the wonderful but glacially developed Cube World, were sophisticated enough in their graphical simplicity to provide the most welcoming exit – ever – from the fidelity arms race that has enslaved so much of PC gaming. Identifying as indie provided more validation. And, on the second front, Minecraft (and Terraria, and others) finally and definitively ended the rat race to the End of the Game. Players enjoy game worlds more than can be adequately explained, and allowing them to run their hands through these spaces, sculpting and toggling cobbles and skeletons big and small, was arguably the most medium-altering experience since firing a shotgun in Doom.
A large player settlement, including two colossus statues
Prior to recent years, most developers added world-crafting features to games as an afterthought. On the road between Ultima 1 (1986), one of the first “open world” (but not world-crafting) games, and Minecraft’s first full release in 2011, we pass Ultima Online’s (1997) own player housing system, augmented seriously in a 2003 expansion, and Everquest 2’s (2004) rather complicated houses, hung with tinsel and baubles. Housing was a side quest and changed little about how the industry thought about the basic chemistry of game fun. Most design centered on a contract – each game’s mechanics hold constant and submit to the player in something that might be called the game’s basic unit of combustion. In Mario 3 (1990, U.S.), there’s hurling the plumber through the air and onto the head of a sprite. ARPGs conflate clicking/killing/collecting. More traditional RPGs pit planning and strategy against opposing, and somewhat less intelligent, forces. Doom (1993) has a trigger. Civilization (1991+) was a sign of wider possibilities yet still depended heavily on winning conditions. As a concept, guiding a civilization from the Stone Age to spaceflight should be interesting enough, in itself, but not quite. Not in this game. It’s not Sim Civilization. There’s credit to give Will Wright, Maxis and the earlier Sim City games (1989-2003). His mythical, true story is that after coding a level designer for an early helicopter attack game, he discovered that using the program to create imaginary cities was more fun than the helicopter game itself; and thus Sim City.
And then there was a game called Wurm Online (2006). World of Warcraft came out in 2004, following Ultima Online, Everquest 1 (1999) and Asheron’s Call (1999). Wurm was also an MMO. Sort of. There were shards, servers that host a large number of players concurrently. In Wurm, servers emerge as unshaped landmasses, as if a portal in a medieval fantasy world had opened onto a wild, undiscovered realm of craggy mountains, arid steppe land, slithering deserts and such. That’s the idea. The fiercely radical thing about Wurm is its pursuit of world-craft at the expense of nearly everything else, especially the “unit of combustion,” as described above. What matters most is hosting a fully modifiable game world where every bush, tree, unit of dirt, millimeter of bedrock, and handful of moss can be subtracted, expounded upon, re-arranged and re-processed into the sorts of settlements that dot the maps of traditional fantasy RPGs – both those of the linear narrative and open world variety. The playerbase doesn’t just romp through the towns, running hero’s errands and keeping the local blacksmith in business. It manages, farms, sometimes fights and always founds the world’s cities, outposts, lonely woodland dwellings, shipyards and bazaars.
A waterfront village with player-made boats
An action timer governs most interactions with the environment. Like your average MMO, Wurm sacrificed twitch-based controls in favor of “massive” server capacities. If the server only has to check in with each player once in a second, instead of dozens of times (hello, first person shooters), it can juggle a lot more people. While WoW and other traditional MMOs have dressed up this process with technicolor spell effects, area attacks, cool down timers and other strategic leavening, Wurm in no way attempts to recapture a “unit of combustion.” As a sandbox, world-crafting MMO of the purest sort, it’s triply indebted to its organizing idea. The classic exaggeration about Eve Online, the space-faring sandbox MMO (which also has a touch of space outpost crafting), is that, as a game, you might as well re-caulk your bathtub. But as something else – and here the commenter is grasping for a definition – there’s nothing like it. Social experiment? Doesn’t participating in a grand space experiment sound more interesting than playing a video game? Cerebral gaming of this sort still feels new and shows how games can be about ideas, and visions, by doing what games do best – processes – as opposed to laying grown-up themes on top of existing forms. Part of Gone Home’s thrill was in staging an unremarkable, semi-realist home, and leaving the player to wander about. Boredom was a risk, but seldom the result. Tetris is a very limited experience. Themes like love and maturation may call for equally human activities, such as snooping.
What’s additionally surprising is how un-game-ified Eve and Wurm’s processes can be. Mainstream culture has long assumed that in order to spend time in a virtual world, there must be a tonic, either game mechanics that are satisfying in themselves or a story, not the vague experiential currency and delayed gratification that players take from Wurm and Eve. The former’s name is fitting: New players start out with a basic bag of tools, minimal skills, and no chance of developing into a master of anything for a very long time. Combat is a bad idea for most of the early game, if not in general. Left untended, a player’s creations will wither to a flat slab of dirt in a matter of weeks or months, depending on the quality of the construction. The more advanced wings of the crafting system, e.g. shipbuilding, are best approached gradually. Magic is possible but seems like a far-off mystery for much of the game. Even digging is sharply limited – “Digging,” the skill, determines the slope of the ground one can indent. You begin with the slightest rise. Surviving and thriving in the world requires both food consumption, cooking and drinking realistic quantities of water. “Hot Food Cooking” is a notoriously finicky skill to advance and requires masses of plain vegetables or sundry and meat. Subsisting on foraged nuts and berries fills the stomach but drives down a “nutrition” level that, when low, causes hunger to come roaring back every time. Bottom out, and you’ll begin to digest fat layers, which provide temporary relief, but push you ever closer to true famine. Death costs hard-earned skill points. Players form villages to share resources and erect protected compounds. Healing, like everything, is a skill (er, two different skills) aided by bandages (usually cotton picked from a field or found during foraging) and crafted “healing covers,” poultices that hasten the speed of recovery. Dyes, rugs, pillars, forges, horse statues, paving blocks, bookcases, pup tents, golden altars, palisade walls, stone houses, cathedrals and apartment buildings may all be crafted.
Sparring between players
Wurm’s graphical fidelity, in the beginning, was post-EQ1, but just barely. Much of the game looked kind of horrible prior to 2012’s 1.0 update. Monsters resembled placeholder art gone mad. Renewed interest in world-crafting games has helped – now about eight years old, Wurm has done much to refurbish and expand its core game play. One of its founding co-developers, Markus “Notch” Persson, left in 2007 to pursue other adventures, including the development Minecraft. (Persson recently parted ways with Minecraft, now the property of Microsoft, to spend more time, he has said, on smaller projects.) Continued development fell to the other developer, Rolf Jansson, a one man team for about four years. Then, in 2011, Alexander Astrom, the current-day “client programmer,” joined Jansson’s Code Club AB as an intern focused on “coding a new model loading and animation system,” according to Johan Svensson, company spokesman and community liaison. With the engine strengthened, Code Club hired a new art director, Emil Norrman, who continued the task of re-skinning and modeling the game’s assets – which he’s managed to do, as part of the current day’s six employees, without losing the semi-photorealistic style that felt strangely right in earlier versions. Wurm is coded in Java and uses the Open GL API for rendering, and much of Wurm’s future potential depends on Astrom’s efforts, though he’ll have help. As “premium,” paid accounts have tended to increase in recent years, with ups and downs, “the lion part of revenue is invested back into development,” Svensson says. “This helps us as we can then employ external consultants to speed up specific projects like an update to our graphics engine.” The renderer will remain in Java but go into the shop for an extensive work-over – the code, a featherweight download for an MMO, is sometimes blamed for the “hitching” problems experienced by players and low frame rates.
Svensson says there are “inherent strengths and weaknesses in using Java as a base for our game. Weaknesses we are always working to overcome.” Strengths include compatability across OSX and Linux, effectively any platform that plays nice with Java and Open GL. Portability should only expand. In the engine revamp, which has “been in development in the background for quite some time,” according to Svensson, there will be “much more efficient rendering, more realistic handling of light sources and shadows, to name some things.” Other updates have come fast and furious in recent months, adding, or at least slating, sheep and a new wool system, whales, dolphins and portcullises. Svensson told me that the engine updates “will be ready for implementation soon,” which could be very soon, indeed. Other major improvements are waiting in the wings, with Life is Feudal (developed in part by former Wurm players), The Forest and other Wurm-like sandbox games beginning to offer competition. On Wurm’s PvP-enabled (player versus player) servers, a recalibrating of player combat is underway, and on the PvE-only, “Freedom Isles” servers (player versus environment), some “pretty major updates” will expand “your possibilities to create and shape a real, sweet-looking fantasy, medieval setting and village, with all that entails,” Svensson says. “We are focusing on the fun factor of doing said things to give you and your fellow players better feedback from actions.” Carrying Wurm to the “next generation” won’t mean crowd-funding, he says, although Code Club has “been tempted.” The game’s situation “is such a different outlook,” he says. “We are so many years ahead in development and features compared to new titles.”
A “champion” lava spider
Balance is another asset – Wurm expands in many directions and unlocks gradually. Grinding works, but so does “just playing the game,” and taking the experience as it comes. Not unlike rogue-likes, the player must level up by weathering the game’s hard lessons, as the in-game character gains abilities. And as in Nethack, a certain percentage of the game’s mechanics remain shrouded in mystery. What is the true purpose of tea, made from camellia leaves and hot water? According to the Wurmpedia, only Rolf may know, and he holds other secrets. The great “Wurm” itself has appeared on rare occasion, but only on the screens of characters who have contracted an in-game insanity and begun to “hallucinate.” Wurmpedia says that these players, touched with visions, see a massive brown shape, stomping off in the distance, much larger than any “real” dragon.
