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Around Christmas I started to lose interest in Wurm Online. The PC Gamer village was well established, with little remaining undeveloped land, a complete system of roads and lights, and plentiful supplies of tools, materials and food. There was little more left to do but polish, tweak and gradually improve our surroundings and characters. That proved not to be enough to maintain my interest, and with the adventure, the excitement and the constant newness gone, I moved on to other games.
Getting to this stage took me probably a little over three months, but in that time I played the game for roughly 200 hours. Few gaming loves burn that brightly and quickly for me.
In that time, as a semi-work/mostly-spare-time project, I began the PC Gamer Wurm community website. A simple blog and forum where the PC Gamer Village – which had started without our guidance, it’s worth noting – could discuss the game. In four months the forum has reached 80,000 pageviews and 2700 posts. That’s not bad for a community of, at any one time, around 30 people, some of which never take part in anything outside the game.
After not touching or even thinking about the game for almost a month, I dropped in on the messageboard last night to see what people were doing. It turns out they are doing very well.
A village member called Jekev started a PCG Village Wiki, which people have been updating with information about their homes and themselves.
A village member called KGB has been mapping the village in Google Sketchup, with some great early results:
The screenshot that tops this post was taken by member Arkatufus and edited just slightly in Photoshop to make the game look better than it has any right to.
This is just the tip of what they’ve been doing. They’ve also been continuing to update the PCG_Wurm Twitter account to a gradually increasing audience, and the IRC room has a dozen or so regular visitors at this point. The forum contained pages and pages of new projects and friendly discussion when I returned to it.
Best of all though, they’re planning a move to the Premium servers after the game’s creator, Rolf, hinted at letting free and paying players exist side by side. Premium currently contains things the free Golden Valley doesn’t: PvP combat, vastly more challenging enemies, territorial deeds, stone houses, a higher skill cap. Those changes combine to turn the world into something far more dangerous.
Moving there would be an adventure, and exciting, and new, and already the forum discussions involve screenshots of prospective land and 3D maps proposing the new village’s structure.
The thought of starting fresh has re-energised my love for the game. Coupled with the wonderful things the community has been creating – on their own, unprompted, on a polite forum of human beings with next to no moderation – and I’m powerless to resist. I cannot stress enough how fantastic these people are.
I spent some time tonight making changes to the layout of the forums, splitting the previous mega-board into a few more managable subject-specific areas. I’ll spend some time soon jigging with the website, as well.
If you’re interested in checking in on the progress of the existing village, this board is the place to do it. For discussion of the coming switch to the Premium servers, check out here.