Worst MMO Ever? - Wurm Online 

Thank you for the review, Josh! I felt it was very fair and honest. I know many of us on the development team have watched it, and it's already sparking discussions on what we can do better. In particular, I feel we could do a much better job conveying crafting and other gameplay elements to a new player. The points raised are too numerous to list here, but the "adventure line" and changing some of the design choices of old ring loud and clear. - Keenan, Product Manager

Insanely accurate. When I was younger I tried to shoot a bow and realized I didn't have any arrows to nocte, I proceeded to hurl my bow at the target and did moderate damage....to my bow.

"The chat is interesting, they are talking about horse breeding, thankfully, that's on the game" That really got me.

Notch made this, went "okay... now what if I do the exact OPPOSITE?", then became one of the most-successful developers of all time

I've played Wurm for 17yrs now at this point since the Beta days. (I'm 30 now). This was a great review and I sincerely appreciate the fact that Wurm is far from perfect that Josh managed to identify Wurm's redeeming qualities for it's VERY niche audience. There is no doubt Wurm is a exercise in masochism with tedious gameplay, bloated mechanics, uninvolved combat, clunky UI and just...AWFUL tutorial. BUT *if* you can get past that there is a game that is very relaxing and incomparably satisfying. One thing that isn't really talked about in the review which I think is worth mentioning is that a LOT of the game including the mechanics, art, music etc has all be done by volunteers out of love and passion in the last decade and a half. Each one giving to Wurm their own vision of what they should think the game *should* be. This is what creates the the mishmash of weird systems and gameplay that at times is at odds with other parts of the game. Wurm has never really achieved a level of success that has allowed it to have the investment it needed to create a "complete" game. Instead it's been just barely clinging to life desperately trying to keep moving forward. But there is no question that this is a game that nearly two DECADES old and it shows, but the fact it's survived for so long is a testament to the community and the few redeeming qualities the game has. Thanks Josh for giving Wurm a fair shot and a really well articulated and entertaining review.

The part about wurm that made my jaw drop and immediately hooked me was the fact that every building and road you see was built by players, and when you see how long it takes to build a small house I just had so much respect and wanted to leave my own mark.

When I hopped into the game while still in high school, my friend told me that he'd secured us a place near a helpful couple who're willing to get us up to speed and guide us along the way. We got coordinates on a player-generated map and off we went. This was pure orienteering without a compass (then they were not part of the beginning equipment) and I remember dying once along the way. When we reached the place, it was about 2h later and the couple guided us to a shack they'd built for us. They brought us a furnace, gave us food and a few tools and so we started building things. I became the carpenter out of us two, and in the end was ONLY a carpenter, because you need carpentry for nearly everything, so you have constant work. As my carpentry levels increased, I could also expand the house. My friend would take on blacksmithing, mining and farming and he took care of small orders for me. We'd adventure the neighboring areas and find new and exciting people. Usually when a new friend would join the game, I'd give them a PNG of a map with a good route to follow. Sometimes they'd get there fine and sometimes we'd have to find them along the way. Once it was me who got lost trying to find my way to my friend. I was wandering in the woods until I found a player name in the local chat. I asked them for directions, they told me to stay still and wait for him. There came the chadest of all chads in Wurm: A player, dressed in green, riding a bear. They guided me to a road that would lead me home, gave me food and water, and wished me well. In the following years I'd pick up on shipbuilding and build a few of the biggest ships of the game. One ship would take me maybe 3-5 weeks to build because of my low skill, but I loved it all the way. We'd have grand adventures, buy exotic stuff from faraway lands and even move to a new server with all of our belongings in the massive ship. We once had a small war with 4chan's /v/ who had a village right next to ours. The war was mostly held by arranging fart emote raids around their houses and then disappearing into the woods. Ah, I wish I still had the same kind of summer vacations as I had as a kid. The community was the thing. Everyone wants to help and are the best people of the whole internet. Also, did you know that the community has arranged dozens of massive canal digging operations where they'd have tens of people digging up landmass between two oceans? The operations have been greatly documented and can probably still be found in the wikis. They'd also build lighthouses that are regular houses with a fire demon trapped inside. That's creativity and dedication that I wish my games would have at one point in the future.

I want to point out that Notch left the Wurm Online team SUPER EARLY into its development and left Rolf to do pretty much everything by himself.

One of my first experiences with Wurm was discovering not only do you *not* have to deactivate the shovel when cutting down a tree, but you actually get an achievement for cutting down a tree with a shovel.

The garish colors are the product of another mechanic in wurm: dye making. The opacity of a dye is directly correlated to its quality, and the quality of produced items are the average of the quality of the ingredients used, and if your skill is lower than that it gets either capped or averaged by it (depending on the action: most raw materials are capped). This means that the best dye makers can make high quality dyes, which will color items a pure, ultra bright shade of color. Meaning displaying such garishly colored items is kind of a status symbol, since you're either a good enough alchemist/dye maker to mix such a high quality dye or are influential enough to acquire such a dye.

I used to play this with my husband back in the day, we spent a lot of time on it. Had our settlements side by side. The forums had a volunteer area if anyone wanted to help with the game, I remember making the sheep and chicken/rooster/chick skins. I think they are still being used today! My little contribution.

Any interest in compiling all of these MMOs into a long running tier list? Lol Would really help separate the bad from the terrible from the worst.

Jesus Christ, I tried this game 10 years ago and completely suppressed the memory until this video. The review is spot on. Just like Josh, I set my goals for an initial trial run as: chop a tree, flatten ground, kill an enemy. Failed at all of those and angrily uninstalled the game after wasting four hours. People say that Eve Online feels like a second job. Well, THIS game feels like giving up on employment altogether and just eternally wasting away.

14:11 the amount of suspense in how you looked dead at the camera and raised the microphone to your face here. the delivery was just so good on that one lmao

This game was originally designed for LAN play. The character's were not meant to learn every skill, or max out everything. You have a group of friends. They each choose a certain profession, and work to skill up that profession. Mostly for RPer's. Eventually you have a neighbor, neighborhood, and community, with each player being the butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.

I'm a guy who knows how to do actual real life blacksmithing, in about one tenth of the time this game makes a person screw around with insane mechanics, I could teach them to ACTUALLY SMITH SOMETHING! This game is an absolute disgrace to the concept of fun.

As a player of Wurm Unlimited and a former player of Wurm Online I can without a doubt that this game is all vision and half execution. I enjoy the game but only as someone who doesn't mind a lack of polish graphically. Also in Wurm Unlimited you can control the XP curve, which makes one hell of a difference. The thing I didn't see Josh get into was the purchasing of in game money. Back when I played Wurm Online, I actually paid for the in game money to pay for a deed that was around 9-12 tiles large. You need to pay the taxes on the deed every so often in real time or the deed will expire, which means you need to make money in game or just pay. You've put in full weeks of time into the deed and now you want to take a break from the game but don't want to lose your progress, so you break out your wallet. This is likely the goal of the devs, to finally lock you into this loop. It is the reason everything take so damn long and everything is skill locked. You pay for your deed and you pay for your monthly subscription because now without it, you can't progress in the game. The developers likely abandoned the Wurm Unlimited game because they were unable to monetize like they did with Wurm Online. With this potential in my mind, I can still say that I have a love for these games (Wurm Unlimited far over its Online counterpart) because the feeling of building up a community from a harsh and unforgiving land is fantastic when you've got the time. I believe this is what the game was originally built on, the premise of slow and steady progress as your skills allow you to become faster and more efficient. I do not believe this is the view the development team or at the very least, the heads of the company hold any longer. Wurm Online is amazing as a relic of another era, but it is just that. A relic. Thanks for the fun times Code Club AB (Onetoofree AB as it was once known). As a side note, we really need to stop attaching the game to Notch (Markus Persson) as he left this project so very early on. Rolf Jansson is the one who should be credited in these scenarios.

I feel like if this had been a text based game... it would have felt literally the same and hell, if its even possible, way less complicated.

I played Wurm back when it wasn't on steam, if you join and find people within the world you would likely be invited in a village and that was one of the most advantageous start most people just spend their initial time in the game to find a village rather than do the tutorial. Having joined a village would likely get you a somewhat easier access to resources such as metals, clay, sand, tar, etc. Back during those days real-money trading was a very common thing in the game, so people would literally do jobs like make thousands upon thousands of bricks to afford subscriptions. Most high leveled players would buy thousands of processed materials such as planks, bricks, etc. or hire new players to do those menial tasks for them while they craft more intricate stuff such as ships, guard towers, and massive castles which they then sell to other high level players. Let's be real, wurm is not a game, it's a job.

Wurm gave me some of the most memorable satisfying memories in my 20 years of gaming. Building is hard and difficult. You have to terraform the land, chop trees, smelt some nails, saw the wood into planks and then slowly attach planks to the house one by one. But when you're done, its YOUR house, you made it. Its a kind of familiarity you can only feel when you struggled and achieved something on your own.

Every single time Josh says "Grow up" I think to myself "But wait, you thought it first" .. and that's why I love you Josh.. your head is as far in the gutter as mine is, and we need more good company this far out.

After watching this, I was struck by the urge to speak up about a game of "too much granularity" that I once played. A game called Haven & Hearth. I wasted so many weeks and months on that game. It is not a game you should try playing. To provide an example of WHY you should, perhaps, only look at the wiki entries on Quality and the skills and some of their applications, let me briefly describe a specific crafting material you might use in the game: Silk. Silk, for those who don't know, is a product of a cocoon-spinning caterpillar, and in order to get silk in the game you have to follow a process similar to the real one. This means you need to go out, catch silk moths, have them breed, let the caterpillars form into pupae, then boil them to get silk threads, which can be collected together to make silk. During each of these steps, the moths and worms must be fed mulberry leaves, once every eight real life hours or so, and you cannot collect any silk if the cocoons hatch into moths. On top of this, if you harvest the silk threads, you won't get a full next generation of silk moths to breed more, and you need to breed generation after generation to increase the Quality Stat of the moths, to increase the Quality of the silk, to increase the Quality of the products so improve their stats. We are talking dozens to hundreds of generations of silk farming to get quality levels to the point where they are even of any practical use. And if you can't feed them? If you have to be away from the game due to circumstances out of your control, the internet goes out for a day or someone passes away, or whatever? If you don't have someone who can cover for the feeding and harvesting and breeding and collecting the leaves and arranging the highest quality moths and so on... You can lose all of the quality process and be sent back to nothing and have to start over with wild moths at the worst quality scores. Because realism. I had a friend I played the game with reach out to me some time back saying "Haven and Hearth 2!" and I had to hand him a firm rejection that I have done in almost no other circumstances in my life.

I'll be honest, I expected this video to be filled with complaints about how every system in this game is "a quit moment" for new players, but you did a good job of recognizing that the game was made for a niche audience, and that it was also terribly outdated. You made reasonable requests of the game and never once asked for it to become a standard mmo in the style of WoW or Everquest. I respect the thought you put into your videos.

I can't believe I played that game 15 years ago, and I still can remember people and events like it was yesterday. Players who I played with like Pops, Rara, Pedro, Kix or the first Grand Prince of Jenn-Kellon Pedro, even my very first 14-day ban in a game for dissbanding enemy houses on Asgard settlement raid because I some how could loot the house owner rights from their corpse, good times. Loved the game for how "hard" it was, and for an kid that couldn't own anything because I was poor in real life spending time and crafting stuff or terraforming in that game gave me soo much joy. Thank you Josh for an very entertaining and memory refreshing review!

Absolutely loved this game back in the day. Remember Notch giving us silver wands that let us teleport. 😅 and Liphos’s house builder. Does anyone remember Jakes’s Folly?! (Huge bridge across the sea)

"A+ experience so far, would gladly throw my bow at a crocodile again" - i actually nearly died laughing at that last sentence. defenitely best "experience" ive read in a long time xD

Was interesting to watch someone have their first experience with this in modern day. When I first played it, like 2010ish, there was NO tutorial whatsoever. You also didn't get any of the starter tools they give you now, you had to figure out what tool you needed to make so you can make this other tool, so you can use that to make this other tool, etc. If I remember right, you got a hatchet, and that was it. Or the easier way, villages in this game are generally very welcoming, and happy to bring you in and get you started with a set of tools and some help. In return for putting you to work repairing some fences or whatever else needs done, of course. My first time playing, I picked a fight with a pheasant trying to get some food. That pheasant absolutely murdered me. I started again, and found a gorilla. Was thinking, maybe I just need to engage with the combat icons? Picked a fight with the gorilla. Immediately broke my neck. I started running, got away from the gorilla, but I was still dying. Happened across some random guy who was just like, "Holy shit, what happened to you?" He brought me into their village, bandaged my wounds, fed me some food, and handed me a bunch of high quality tools. Wound up joining their village, and spent probably 500 hours with some of the coolest people I've ever met. The people are really what makes this game.

I've been waiting for you to do this one! I love Wurm Unlimited, but I know it's a total messy, complicated grind lol Btw, the speedometer is really helpful when choosing/breeding mounts. I like to choose horses with a lot of speed for travel, so seeing that speed in the top left is great lol

Greetings from Silakka. This was one of the best games and the complexity was the thing that kept me ingame. Lack of endgame and having 7 deeds at once slowly made me decline from the game. Having the best gear and a 100 digging skill I just go awfully bored after doing max 3 height pillar and anything you can name. Archery was a bit of fun shooting angry red trolls, other than that. Keeping my boats repaired and having the max CoC tools etc, it got from super hard to super easy..

That song brings back memories. For the time, Wurm Online was a good game. Compared to modern games, however, and looking back, it was very tedious. I remember the terraforming with friends to build things mostly. Great times. People think Wikipedia was created for information in real life. Wikipedia was actually created by a Wurm Online player to make the game easier for new players.

I remember seeing this as a child! I wanted to play it so bad, but I couldnt figure out how to get it installed. and I think I did, but my computer wouldnt boot it up. I then forgot about it and just thought it was a fabrication of my memory. I can now see what I couldve been playing! Thanks Haydes man!

On one hand, this game seems like the perfect example of "why realistic doesn't mean better gameplay". On the other, props for the devs for just adding random stuff they thought of. It's like seeing that fresh childish wonder all over again, it tickles something nice within me.

People don't actually want survival games. They want games that are fun and have survival mechanics. They want to earn their way and for acclaim (levels, gear, 'property') to be worth something. It's the protestant ethic fantasy.

This seems like the sort of MMO that really needs a community of players willing to each specialize in something in order to actually make it work. But then each person would only be experiencing part of the game so that's only going to happen if there is some absurd goal to shoot for, like 0 nukes in MGSV.

7:18 so that background music mechanic of just stopping started in this game and was carried over to Minecraft nice

This made me laugh so much. Wurm was launched as a discovery game meaning that there was no one to explain things, this was by design. Today, the wiki is there for people that don't want to discover things on their own, I generally refer to the Wiki if I feel stuck or I'm not feeling like problem solving through discovery. I've been playing off and on since 2017 and in the last 3 weeks I experienced two new things that I never knew existed in Wurm and it was way more fun for me to discover that than diving into the Wiki.

This game was rough, but addictive if you found a decent group of people to play with. I found a small village that was accepting new players and was able to work my way up while assisting with mining task and other gathering things, eventually was drafted to become another of the villages boat makers. Was able to make my own boat and sail the seas and found smaller island villages that were much more advanced then us and were able to develop trade agreements with them. All in all it was game that was made fun by the players, the mechanics of the game itself were very rough but allowed alot of self governance and make your own adventure. Now back in the day this game was incredible pay to win in the degree that you had to use real money to purchase/lease chunks of land where you actually owned what was build there.

I remember playing this game way back in the late 00s with my younger brother. We built ourselves a proper society on a peninsula on one of the new continents they released and ended up getting into wallet warfare with foreign invaders. Ended up spending a good chunk of IRL currency buying NPC ghost guards to fight offline raids and our little deed became one of the bigger hubs for outgoing raids because of how secure it was thanks to me literally throwing money at the problem of raiders. Ended up having to give it up a few years later as I was trying to go to college and a game that requires the same time commitment as a full-time schooling career was just untenable. I picked it up again a couple years ago on the private server side and found I still enjoyed the elements that initially drew me in but was a bit disappointed with how little had been added on since I had left nearly ten years prior.

Wurm is probably the best game I've ever played. It was so addicting that once I was able to get away from it, I never went back because I didn't want to quit my job and life. I've never had crack, but I think my addiction to Wurm is somewhat like it, years after quitting, it still calls to me. It's not one of those games you can win at, it's hardcore!

this video made me log back into check on things. i found your house btw, its nice setting, right by the water too. if anyone is looking he spawned on Cadence on Sonata. its a roofless house with a cart in the front.

"Every step up to winning is a time sink", "It adds more clicks, but not necessarily more gameplay". Exactly! Thats how crafting in almost every game works, and thats why i hate it as a mechanic.

"So many people want a home on the internet, Wurm Online can provide you with that" -Christopher Walken

I did give this a shot for a few days just leisure gaming. It was nice exploring the world with its player made structures, but it all was empty and abandoned. Many of the buildings people have sunken countless hours into being turned into ruins. Still I build myself a little house including a garden thanks to some looting from a nearby abandoned town which gave me a boost in resources - which was a nice experience in itself as it gave a sense of reclaiming an abandoned settlement that was entirely player-made. But then I found out that I'd have to constantly repair each wall pretty much every other day as they decay rapidly if you don't own a paid plot of land. So there was that. I closed the door to my short lived homestead and uninstalled the game. The insane complexity under the hood manages to wake some morbid fascination, but the game is hopelessly outdated in its mechanics and their worlds are depressingly lonely and abandoned.

Wurm Online gave me the best online experience, for many years. I started as a pitiful noob, joining a village of 5 other pitiful noobs who had to gang up 4-5v1 on scorpions to get a kill, just to see some of my buddies die from untreated wounds because they were too severe to be treated by our skills and supplies. When i got better i started to build and plan complex houses, riding horses, cultivate crops, and exploit whatever little advantage i had in combat to have a chance to survive hard encounters (footing, distance, high ground advantage, focusing..) The learning curve wasnt that steep anymore. I helped building roads and water wells. I built a boat and learnt how to navigate. Made personal maps to find the way home wherever i was in a GPS-less world. And it worked. The immersion was fantastic. some travels could take even 2-3 hours and weren't even that boring. A year and a half later, (70+ combat, 50+ on almost every other skill) i was riding horses to hunt in deserts, spending 1-2 hours to improve a weapon or a piece of armor to great quality, essential to survive, joining unque boss fights for a scrap of dragon leather or some blood. I had a deed, planned out and built in like a month of work (terraforming, gathering materials and trasporting them, building). The result was meh and the spot was trash, i learnt from my mistakes, loaded everything onmy knarr boat and moved in a search of another place to make another deed. When everything was sorted out, more content available/ and no time to play due to my job, i quit my epic adventure after 5 years. No fucking regrets on the time spent. By far the best sandbox ever made. Now it just needs better graphics and more content. This game is not for everyone. It requires dedication, planning, oriantation skills and.. something else to do while waiting on timed actions (like clean your home, cook dinner, watch a movie, entertain your girlfriend..) Avoid if you have the attention span of a mealworm.

I would LOVE to see you play Haven & Hearth, it’s a more obscure game with a super tight knit community, it is absolutely brutal though.

LOL as one of those players who's been playing WURM on and off since 2007, this is a perfect review of why the game never really took off. The community would tell the devs over and over to fix the things you spoke about... and then the hardcore fanbois on the forums would always shoot them down... Almost feels as if the community held the game back by itself. lol The part about the adventure line is so true. I've mayored villages in this game with over 200 active players and tried to create that dream city with everyone working together and achieving something amazing. And for the first few weeks of a new server, it is that dream MMO. The problem is like you say it literally takes forever to do anything, and there's very few incentives to actually want to keep playing. So the game is amazing on the first month of server release then it goes back to being boring.

The kissing achievement was just tracking the irl rates of people who play WO

There are a few things that i wish this current iteration of the tutorial did better that it just doesn't for example explaining the buttons at the bottom of your screen specifically the crafting window(It is makes crafting for new players so much easier as all recipes are visible in it if you open up a window from there or drop the correct tools in there) You can use keybinds to rapidly add actions without having to right click(The keybind system encompasses most actions in the game and they can be bound to any key that you want to) The wiki is a community lead project with official support behind it but its the players who populate that data so there might be some issues here and there. As for your statement of "wurm is a wiki game you need the wiki open at all times as there is no way to play it without it" Is wrong because a bit of exploring of the UI buttons that are visible will show you a wealth of information in a easy format(for starters the crafting window and recipe window), but i do agree the wiki is a thing that will be used throughout most of your wurm life for checking up on prospecting messages or searching for that obscure bit of info that you just cant remember there and then. Also there is an item called a toolbelt that you can equip that gives you a toolbelt on your UI where you can drag items into so that you can activate them via 1234567890 keys There was a tutorial a very long time ago that explained a lot more about the then UI and the basics of wurm but this was done away with because it had quite a few glaring issues for its time Every version was created by a gm in a short period of time with what seems to be little real thought to the new player experience and this is something I personally have brought up over the years playing this game, I have asked for them to run surveys for new players where new players can answer simple questions(at say the 5 hour mark pop up a window) things like "what would you like to see in the tutorial" and take that information and create a tutorial and let the community test it time and time again until we have a proper good one that explains 1. the UI 2. the basics of the game 3. some nice to have tricks and 4. an optional section where more advanced things are explained. But alas in the past this fell on deaf ears due to the then developers not really caring much(This has since changed with developers who do care and are actively trying to make wurm better) All that set aside the thing that you said about having to get their minds set on what to do right click menu vs crafting menu there is a bit of a story behind that For the longest time for years on end we only had the right click menu then after years of asking the crafting menu was added in a UI update then we were promised an UI overhaul and brand new way of interacting with the game(a more modern way to play the game with potentially controller friendly way of interacting) This overhaul was then over the course of months pushed back and shrunk down to just a UI reskin with some newer features and updated backend to fix wiki support and some other things and we got the UI we have now(including on screen text for take and drop also got the default action and repeat action added and so on) The old dev team had a history of promising a lot then under delivering which lead to years of secrecy and refusal to be honest about the ever slowing pace of development and lead to a lot of angry players Then the game got brought by a investment group and suddenly things started to speed up a lot(you cant tell me otherwise looking at what went on) of the bad developers and gm's were let go(some giving hilarious reasons why) new ones were taken on new positions were created outside help seems to have been brought in and now progress is being made bug fixes arent taken a year anymore the PVP and pve communities are being listened to again slowly wurm is starting to feel worth paying for again. For the longest time i played wurm as there isn't anything like it out there and i had spend over 5 years living and building up my mountain fortress and i loved the game(still do) but it was the staff that made it hard for me to justify spending money, it was the staff not the game that almost made me quit the game that i grew up with as a teenager since 2004 but thankfully before my village disbanded due to running out of money new life was blown back into it and a leadership change happened and a lot of those who were toxic to the game were let go. Is wurm a hard game to learn? Yes. Does it need a newer tutorial that is created not by 1 man/women but by the community and based on feedback from new players? YESSS. Do i want to see a rise back to 8k+ active premium accounts instead of 4500? YES please. Will wurm ever grow to have tens of thousands of players? No i doubt that but maybe reaching its glory days and going beyond that would be nice for me i will hold out hope that some day we will get a proper UI overhaul and alongside it a new player friendly tutorial and journal system that holds your hand more by explaining more. With explaining more i mean showing a simple video that explains how to build your house or flatten terrain via ingame tooltips, having a tutorial that holds your hand instead of the ghost town it is now. Anyway one last thing to say, wurm used to have notch and rolf work together then notch left due to design differences and clashing them it was rolf for a while then rolf with others then rolf alone then rolf with others then just others then rolf alone again, this went on for a few times then a few years of just others and then rolf sold the game leaving what were some rather bad people in charge who are now gone and replaced with great ones, the issue with the clashing of good animations vs bad ones, good art vs bad art, the lack of a solid visual experience stems from this design journey. There was a period in time where wurm was seen as "finished" and true to that wurm was a solid game then came the fighting overhaul(and more of them later on) and a new era of many features many of which seemed like thought of on a Friday afternoon and implemented the next week by Wednesday with little to no real thinking of "should we" to it. This is what has lead wurm to be so feature rich and overflowing with complexity as there are a lot of features all pushing for priority in a wide world, but honestly starting wurm and joining a community or starting with friends is currently the best way to get started and that is honestly sad as for me myself i started alone and it was a simpler game back then but boy I was hooked at a time where runescape forced you to stop playing after a certain amount of time and need for speed 3 was pretty still wurm was something amazing and it still is in a way. I have so much more that i want to say and I have written giant long posts about this game's history and what it lacks and what my gripes are with it on yt and the wurm forums and other places before and gone on 12+ hour long rants in discord(All while playing wurm haha) but I wish i could make the beginning experience of wurm better I really wish we were given that chance as I want this game to grow in players in developers, I want my grandkids to have the chance to play wurm like i have. I love this game and have spend over a thousand days online playing it across multiple characters lived on most servers played countless hours of wurm unlimited spend more money on this game then i have on any other game combined(my steam library cost me less then wurm has cost me) and I do not regret a single cent of that. This truly is a amazing game but its biggest weakness has been apparent since the start and I wish I was given the chance to try and fix it I really do wish for that to be the case.

Honestly? I'm kind of tempted to try this, as I really enjoy old, janky RPGs. Unfortunate that it seems so hard to get into, because there's a lot of potential here. The devs still seem to be a bit active, so who knows, maybe they'll improve. I certainly hope so, since this game could actually be pretty fun.

Freaking live for this series. I started sharing this with my little brother who is... 14 yrs younger than me. I just show him like, "This what he had to play back then. I mean, that one's from acouple years go... I don't know what the hell happened there".

Omg I have had some of the best memories with this game, why can't games nowadays feel as adventurous and impactful?

This is still to this day my favorite game. It is so unique, nostalgic, Grindy, and there is so much in the game that you learn new stuff every time you play. If you like long term grindy games that you can play everyday for years then this is your game. There are like 100 different skills to level and they are very slow to grind. This isnt a game you can just play for a little while, you create goals and achieve your goals over years. There are limitless possibilities

I really appreciate immersion in MMOs. A gate with a massive sign saying "Tutorial" is the exact opposite of that.

I can't explain it, but this is what growing up in Germany feels like..

As a fan of this game myself it was sad seeing the game pop up in this series but also justified, it takes a very specific kind of player (those who consider the excessively complex crafting systems to be an entertaining feature and/or consider their core gameplay loop to be weirdly therapeutic) to truly enjoy and it can be really tedious to get into because the UI is a bit dated, a bit over-convoluted to control and just very slow to play. I few things to note: -The time you need to wait on a compass depends on its quality, the shitty starting compass is actually great because of being soul-bound (and trying to navigate back to your corpse to recover the rest of your inventory is when you need it the most), but I'll generally carry a better one with me to have it settle faster the rest of the time. -the game actually had legal Real Money Trading (though only because the moderators made very clear that they couldn't moderate external transactions, players were on their own if they got scammed with RMT but in playing the game for years I had never heard of anyone taking advantage of that potential for abuse, it was just lucky to go under the radar for most conmen I suppose -The steam launch was a mess, the RMT tolerance was sacrificed to comply with Steam ToS, but it was a completely separate set of servers, its own isolated ecosystem, there was no need for it to affect these already existing servers that way; And it wasn't really welcomed on steam, it opened up a whole new potential playerbase but those who'd actually be interested in what it has to offer probably would have found it without steam anyway so most of the players it got were not target audience. It was also the first time in around a decade that people got to experience starting from the ground up on a permanent server without infrastructure or hand-me-downs from more experienced players, which was very interesting. -You can mostly ignore the combat complexity completely on PvE, you attack automatically, if you get decent gear and keep the high ground and most mobs are trivial, they should probably revamp combat at some point because it is not engaging in the slightest on PvE.....but at the same time I really don't mind it being that was because I just consider it a nuisance. -The in-game currency actually functions as a real currency, it can be bought for real money and sometimes be found randomly when butchering or foraging; And it can be used on by buying premium time in-game, neglible postage fees when mailing items, paying rent on your deed (living on deeded land reduces item decay and extends the grieving protection PvE players benefit from, and it is encouraged to live in communities so that facilities can be shared and everyone's personal share of the rent is less than they would have needed with a solo house) and a few non-craftable items sold by NPCs (though for anything that can be acquired by other means like looting from an abandoned house the players tend to undercut them) but most of this money stays in circulation as players sell goods and services to each other. -Some actions have a consequence for having the wrong tool equipped, anything with a sharp edge can cut a tree but most tools/weapons suck at doing so, some systems like fishing and archaeology give similar options. Sometimes these penalties are actually taken into consideration as making the skill check harder is sometimes optimal for grind (another example of that logic is that most people will intentionally get their character drunk to improve grind, which actually turns brewing into a relevant niche). -Staying solo for most of this video is both very representatives and not representative at all of the new player experience: Trying to figure this all out by yourself is long and boring, and most people just quit somewhere in the process. A lot of the people who actually stuck around will remember their early game experience as getting halfway this process, maybe having their house for a week, and then joining a village (effectively comparable to joining a guild/clan, but of course with the more "physical" aspect of also living in the same area in-game) where they will get some hand-me-down tools from experienced players grind up their basic skills and figure out what they want to specialise in. The skill system heavily encourages this, it would take you years to be an effective jack of all trades, but you can specialise in one thing like Carpentry, and then exchange your high-level services with a neighbour who is a high-level smith, and have another friend that likes to take care of the food and so on. -I'm surprised you barely even touched on the monetization, I think that is one of the biggest obstacles I've seen for new players, it advertises itself as Free to Play so a lot of players will come in with that expectation but in reality, it is a subscription service with a limited free trial, there's only so much you can do with your skills capped at 20. The most common complaint I hear from new players is that they assumed they could earn their subscription by earning premium currency through trade with other players, which is technically correct, but mostly applies to established players. The High-level services you can provide with high skills are profitable enough that one might be able to do that, but with skills capped at 20 all you can really do is bulk manual labor (selling stuff like planks by the thousands, not exaggerating, bulk goods tend to be priced a 1-2 silver per 1k and it takes 10 silver to renew premium), which has become a pretty oversaturated market because of this.

This was one of those games back in the day where playing it actually felt like a true adventure and the world felt massive and actually dangerous. It really was on a whole other level. Good memories with this game. I took part in the multiple Facepunch invasions that happened over the years and they were always a blast. Wurm Online holds a special place in my heart and always will. Reading through the comments and seeing all the good memories and stories really brings me back, might have to come back to it sometime. Long live Minges Tirith and Blood Gultch.

This might be one of my all time favourite PC games. While it's convoluted and tedious at times (Wurm Online mostly solved this issue via increasing XP rates), everything you accomplish feels more meaningful due to the effort you put in it and there's quite a lot of unique gameplay elements other than just busywork. As for the graphics and the presentation - it's 10/10 comfy. These Myst-like 2000s graphics are just so warm and wonderful and imho don't look that bad if you turn everything (and there's a lot of graphic options) to maximum. Building up a small settlement with a mate or two (good luck on finding anyone willing to play it, btw) is just the best - going from barely being able to flatten ground to advanced masonry, building docks etc is just awesome. Oh and the people you meet really are lovely and helpful af.

I remember trying this, feeling immediately both over and underwhelmed, and quitting halfway through the tutorial when I realized just how much of a grind it was gonna be. On the flip side, there are a couple of guys on youtube that are so serious about crazy crafting mechanics that they're doing this irl...I still am amazed at the kid in Sweden that just went out into the woods with a few old hand tools and an ancient tractor and built a proper traditional house.

The ending is legendary! 😂 To be honest this doesn't look too bad. Gives me a RuneScape+++ vibe. If i knew about this game 20 years ago maybe i wouldve played it. But for now it's a no-go.

A game I always go back to, you can do tons of crafting, exploring, animal husbandry etc. Wurm Online was at one stage worked on by Notch who had the idea to do Minecraft during Wurm online's beta. Wurm online did at one stage have some Minecraft graphics in its early days.

I'd argue the whole "you must have the correct tool in hand" approach is more of laziness. They couldn't even program a boolean to check the player inventory for an axe of all things before chopping down a tree. Runescape 07 even had this.

I actually really love that Wurm Online exists. This feels like it's someone's very very specific dream game with all the nitpicky details imaginable and while that game isn't for everyone, or even for most people, there's some sub-set of players that love it and deeply appreciate that it exists. That feels like a great thing to me.

My Wurm Online character is an Atkins Diet build that focuses entirely on eating proteins instead of carbs, which increases my speedometer by 2.5% over carb eaters. Anyone have any tips on how to stop mold from growing in your house in the game, or keep door-to-door salesmen away? Realism is awesome.

"angry donkey getting slapped around" should be a quote in everyone's D&D games from now on.

About a year ago I loaded up this game, and chanced to find a community event where players from far and wide had gathered to slay a dragon together. It's remarkable that, for all its flaws, there still is a community that continues to play this game. Compared to a lot of other games Josh has reviewed, the sheer fact that there are people actively talking in the global chat, as well as active moderators, shows some of the love that Wurm continues to have. I hope the current developers take your review to heart! I recorded 'Red Dragon vs. 500 Wurmians', and I think it is a 'show of force' of the community side of this game. I believe it may have been the largest event of the past couple years. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oInP6fx1_WI.html It's important to also consider that Wurm had been a multilingual game, with people around the world sharing servers. I remember memes like "Peat is neat" coming from Finnish or Polish players, before we even knew the word "meme". Each settlement has a long and rich history, from its first days, to its peaks, to its eventual decay. It can be very slow if you play alone, but if you have a community of players who can help you with tools, food, etc. it plays much faster. Playing solo is a bit like bashing your head against a wall -- eventually you will relent and either quit, or join an existing community. The game *wants* you not to build a home alone, but to join some existing player and learn from them as a mentor. I would love to see some kind of quest line reflect that!

Literally the best moments in my gaming life were in this game. Some of my best friends to this day were met in this game. RIP Wurm elevation

At one point I was one of the strongest characters in the game. I put a lot of time into this. The kind of time it takes to really see everything there is to see. The time it takes to see the ugly details at the end of the game. The love/hate kind of relationship. I still love that it exists! Any questions, let me know!

37:12 the Magical Donkey Ride Experience (with ambient sound)... Had me in stitches 🤣🤣 Thank you. 🤗

Spot on review with a great ending. This is the game I often look back on and wonder how no other game has quite captured it's beauty.

I love your reviews, would you review the game Blood of Steel? It needs more eyes on it, both the good and bad bits of it. And yes it does have flaws but its a great game that deserves a few more players!

HOLLY CRAP! THIS WAS GOING ON SINCE 2006?! How did I've missed it?! This is amazing and terrifying, at the same time! Seems like he was inspired by Ultima, but considered it not hardcore enough.

When you got to the digging part I was like 'oh man did you try putting the shovel through your thigh?' and sure enough you tried that

absolutely love the untextured butterfly at 18:00

This almost sounds like a parody of an MMO you’d find in an episode of a sitcom.

Shout out to the boys that built Brohalla, it's paradise now compared to the croc infested coast we built it on.

I can understand, why this game is appealing to a certain kind of players. It's a nice sense of accomplishment, after you figured out how the things work, gathered the materials, figured out the crafting and were patiant enough to build something up. So for the niche community I'm sure it's a nice game. :)

I wish I new about this game back when it came out, when I had all the time in the world to get deep into this!

I haven't played Wurm for a long time, but I remember loving it back in the day. Even though it's pretty complicated at times, I used to play it as a break from other MMOs as it felt so calm and slow-paced. Building anything took forever; however, creating your first house and garden just felt like such an achievement because of this. The lack of animation made things seem somewhat janky, but this game always held a sense of suspense because there could be danger around any corner. People would also carve canals and walkways through mountains to enable more accessible travel. Given how labour-intensive the game is, it was super impressive because it must have taken forever. I'll never forget this game, even though I no longer play it.

"The Milkiest Cow" Now that I have your attention. Are posthumous Worst MMO reviews a terrible idea?... I'd love to see some of the real stinkers we lost... Who remembers Tabula Rasa? Not many I expect 😅

I love your style of commentary/humor soo so much :'D the end was goddamn gold!

This game reminds me of my time when I tried to get into Space Engineer 😆 This kind of game is hecka fun with a community tho. If everyone can pool their knowledge and contribute.

I saw a review where someone reviewed with 5000 hours of play time, said they wouldn't play again, and now have almost 10k hours playtime. Sounds about right, for an MMO review

I love your videos Josh appreciate your focus on videos that don't "expire" and I can go back and watch from when you first started them

Really miss playing this game. Used to play a long time ago and you still had to pay to play to get any skills over 20 which was pretty much necessary to do anything substantial. You had to own the land you built on and couldnt just build anywhere which also meant you had to earn money to pay the tax. So you had to pay to keep you skills, and you had to pay to keep the land you were developing. You could play for free but were severely limited in what you could do. As the reviews stated, most the lands were grabbed up so was even harder to find decent land to build on. They only had the 1 map back then so it was even more crowded. The creatures were also very very aggressive and without armor and skills you were sure to die to almost everything. It just felt like a walking sim where you get attacked by giant spiders, scorpions, or various animals. They also ask for WAYYYY too much money ($10 a month) to have skills and land which made the game seem almost pay to win. Basically a money sink that you have to constantly feed in order to actually enjoy the game because many many many items require the higher level skills in order to craft, ie. boats, armor, weapons, etc.. Honestly not worth paying to play with how bad and slow the interactions are. HOWEVER.. With the new Unlimited version of the game where you pay $30 us, you can have the full game without paying monthly fee's to do the same thing except you no longer have the community unless you bring them with you. So you can choose to pay a yearly subscription of DOUBLE that amount and get a community or pay HALF the price 1 time and build your own. I suppose you no longer have land deeds and taxes on the unlimited version as there would be no cities to sell goods to in order to make the money for the land deeds.. Either way, I did enjoy the game but couldnt justify a monthly sub for outdated tech that requires you to spend every waking moment grinding out items to pay a rent on in-game property. Maybe the unlimited version is more my speed, but still a hefty price tag for a VERY dated game.

I look forward to the day that an mmo comes out that starts the game off with nice classical music and then, out of nowhere, transitions into Skrillex.

You riding a donkey in the forest with that music, was kind of magical.

The ending skit absolutely killed me I'm crying

Watching this video has me going back and forth between "that's a fun idea" to "that is insane, who WANTS to do that in a video game?"

The horse riding reminds me of Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.

Grindy games like this are the kind I could see myself having fun in if I'm essentially doing it in the background while watching TV or something.

"But hey look!! Swimming animations!! That's how you know, this isn't New World" had me ROLLING good sir lol

I felt Wurm was one of the best MMOs I played. None of the stupid leveling crap, none of the character class crap, no grinding reputation, no time wasting "collect 20 sticks" quests, and when you achieved something you really felt like you had achieved something.

Genuinely one of the greatest games of all time. Nothing can compare to it really. Entire servers built and terraformed almost entirely by players.

😐I wonder...have you or will you cover the old (and apparently still alive) MMO "A Tale in the Desert"? Absolutely worth a look. It was and is still something genuinely different/novel.

FACEPUNCH ... I played wurm for years and years. I got my sister into it and WO became one of the funnest things we've ever been able to share. Whatever you want to do, you can do in Wurm. Over the years, we joined villages and eventually found a virtual home. To this day I know I could hop back online and have a friend to talk to. We formed towns, sailed the seas, obsessed and pored over systems and made our way to mastering most skills. We still joke around about the first time we encountered a bear and discovered that not only can they swim, but they will kick your $%#& in in the middle of an ocean. We still remember the first 1x1 shack we built, and the argument where I viciously mocked a "neighbor" who was threatening to kill me for roping a chicken that had wandered into our build site. I remember playing non-stop for well over a month, my sister, a german friend, and I, building a pair of colossi overlooking our village's dock. Wurm will FOREVER have a very, very special place in my heart and thinking about it makes me nearly cry. Also, I will NEVER have the spare time to play it again. If any Free Bears see this, I hope life has been good to you. ❤ PS wurm might be the hint that you're at least a little autistic 😂

I would love to see this updated gameplay wise. Not functional, because it's all perfect, you can make a house, a castle, the immersion and community is so fun. The combat could be more involved. Like an actual attack button or dodge button. Nothing like dark souls, but something similar.

I'm listening to this in the background while playing Star Equestrian- a game about horses and admittedly loot box horse collecting- so when you started talking about the extreme in-depth horse breeding, my head snapped around SO FAST lmao. Also don't judge me, I'm desperate for horse games with even a modicum of good gameplay.

This kind of makes me wanting to see Josh playing some ECO , as they are similar, busy work, community required and extreme time sink .

I'll tell you this much, Josh: The ONLY reason I haven't been playing Wurm Online since 2006 is because *I had no idea it freaking existed.* Holy shit I would have TOTALLY GOTTEN LOST IN THIS if only I had known about it back then! 2006! Jesus, that was a lifetime ago, I wasn't even MYSELF yet - but this one kernel of my being remains constant: A game like this was exactly what I was looking for back then >_

This guy could critique a potato that’s shaped like a rubber ball and i would still love it