Wurm Online
| Wurm Online | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Mojang Specifications, Sunsplash Creations |
| Platform(s) | Java |
| Release | June 6th, 2006 |
| Genre(s) | MMORPG, MMOFS |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
Wurm Online is a community-centric fantasy MMOFS developed in Java and OpenGL.
Gameplay
Players start out on an island full of forests, lakes and mountains, but no civilization. Its up to the players to create the buildings, towns and items of the world. Wurm Online features a fully deformable landscape. Trees can be cut and planted, dirt can be moved to create pits and hills, and rock faces can be mined to create underground caverns. Wurm Online has neither Classes, levels nor hit points. Instead, players have a set of skills that define them, and a list of any unhealed wounds they have.
Wurm Online can be difficult to play on your own, so players tend to gather together and form villages and towns. Players are able to purchase village and homestead deeds with ingame money. Deeded Towns provide NPC guards to protect against wild animals and other players. The people and items inside the village remain safe unless the guards are killed. Outside the towns, however, they can do anything they want, but performing illegal activities will lower their status in the nearby villages.
There is two type of servers in Wurm Online. The Home server consists of a single kingdom and PVP and theft are limited, but not completely disallowed. On the Wild server, the two different kingdoms (Eventually three) are at war with each other and are able to fight and raid each others towns. There are currently 2 servers, one home and one wild. Each server contains 256km² of land.
New players start out in Newtown on the Home server. From there, they can spread out and create their own place or join an existing town. It is difficult for new players to know what to do because there is no ingame tutorial and very little documentation. Most new players must rely on chatting with helpful people and the player made wiki for ingame help.
Almost all items and structures are player made from raw materials gathered or extracted from the surrounding nature or creatures. Every item has weight, damage, quality level, size, temperature, possible enchantments, and a custom description attribute. While it is quite easy to create a low quality version of most items, it takes more time, resource and tools to improve the quality of the item to make it truly powerful. Skill is gained faster by improving items then initially creating them, to discourage the mass production of items for skill seen in many games.
Graphics
Wurm Online is developed in OpenGL and can be rendered using either JOGL or LWJGL. While the game has some advanced terrain, sky, and weather effects, it lacks animations for the player and creature models.
Development history
Wurm Online has been in development since mid 2003. It has a small team of developers all of who work part time on the project. The game was in open Beta for several years before it officially went gold on June 6th, 2006. There are both premium accounts and basic accounts. Basic accounts have a skill cap and are limited to what servers they can travel to. Premium accounts cost 5€ a month and ingame money can be purchased (but not sold back) at 1€ for 1 silver coin.