Wurm Online
I've been concentrating pretty solidly on my tabletop games for the past few months, and World of Warcraft has had very little attention. I still log in once in a while to do some auctions and to manage the guild bank, but that's about it. None of my other MMOs have really appealed; while there are guilds and small communities to work with in both EQ2 and LoTRO, I haven't really the interest in the games at the moment; I'm about burned out on quest-oriented gameplay again after the Cataclysm railroad ride.
So it was only with vague interest and curiousity that I set the client for Wurm Online going, not really expecting to do more than look around. Three or four hours later, I got killed by a bear while trying to make my way to an interesting settlement far from the spawn point, and found myself back where I started. This is, I suspect, the point at which most people who aren't really interested give up. I was having none of that, this was a sandboxish world, and I was going to master it, godsdammit.
After another few hours, I'd found a place to build a house, and went about doing so. Level the ground, chop down trees, make planks... indeed, make the mallet to make the house... and then I went to try to collect some iron ore, exhausted myself carrying rocks to try to melt them down, slipped, fell, and died.
I gave this some careful consideration. I could make my way back across the world (about an hour's travel, I think) to that house site, but it wasn't very good, since it was hard to access - a long way from any roads - and had no real way to get iron ore without killing myself frequently.
So I went hunting again for a new site, with a new notion of what I wanted. I found a place that had access to water, wood, iron, some foraging space for food... and even a neighbouring trader.
About 10 hours of play in, I can safely say that Wurm is utterly fascinating. One of the developers is better known as the guy who invented Minecraft, and it's from the same general school of low graphic, simulation-and-economy gaming, with a chunky Java interface. It's not very polished. But it appeals very strongly to the make-your-own-story, leave-a-mark-on-the-world bits of my gaming wants that are not served at all by the themepark MMOs.
Now, I find EVE similarly fascinating, and yet I don't play it all that often, so it's entirely possible I'll lose interest in this one after a few weeks as well. But for now, you'll find Anvarius trundling around on the Freedom PvE server, mumbling about housing and giant spiders that are out to get him.
Posted by Drew Shiel at May 3, 2011 1:58 PM
