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Samool

Wurm Online Roadmap - What's after Steam?

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Hello Wurmians!

 

As we haven’t had a proper summary to the Steam launch yet, let’s start with that - the player counts since that time have been just unprecedented, and we are very excited to see how lively Wurm has become. Now that has also brought an extreme load to both our dev team as well as the entire staff, hence the initial hiccups - but it seems we’re well past that point and almost back to normal. (almost, since we still have some unresolved things to handle)

 

The surge in popularity has definitely exceeded our expectations and it seems like it can give us some headroom in expanding the development team, which should help us increase the development pace of both new features and bug fixing. Most of you might not know this, but we have had very few hired or contracted developers for quite a while now, much fewer than you would expect from a game of this scale - but we’re well on the way to fixing that. (and if you are interested yourself in becoming either a volunteer developer or a contractor, feel free to contact me with the relevant details at samool@wurmonline.com )

 

I ask for your patience in this part, as it might take us a while to actually get to that point, and the recruitment and training itself might be taking some time away from the direct development in the meanwhile, but after that’s sorted out we will be going ahead faster than ever. And obviously, any new developers will be put on the mandatory bug duty first, fixing those pesky recurring bugs! :) 

 

In addition to expanding the dev team, we’re expanding our marketing efforts as well, which we’ve already started on - we haven’t been great about that before, but we have a lot of ideas in store for promoting the game now and in the future, and you might’ve already seen some Wurm ads around the web.

 


Now, the thing most of you are here for - what are we doing next?

 

While we’re happy with how the improvements to the new player experience and the new tutorial have turned out, it’s obvious from the feedback that there is still work to be done there. As we continue to have plenty of new players joining the game, that will be our focus in the upcoming weeks - the tutorial will be getting some polishing, and we’ll be introducing additional in-game tips and tools to help the newer Wurmians learn the ropes and perhaps not get too frustrated by constantly digging through the wiki. (though we do acknowledge that at some point that might always be a requirement)

This will also include further UI improvements, which should make the UI more comfortable to use for everyone and bring some of the requested features and tweaks.

 

I’m sure that’s boring stuff to most of you reading though - worry not, during that time we’ll also be working on finishing up a large combat overhaul! This was something that was meant to be there for the Steam launch, but we have decided to postpone it to give it the attention and polish it deserves. The goal of the combat update will be to increase the interactivity and engagement of combat, by both providing much better visual feedback (significantly reducing the need to read combat chat) and changing certain mechanics, like making special moves more prominent and useful in PvE. This will be put to public testing before it goes live. We have done decent progress on this up to this point, but it still needs a good bit of work to be ready for us to show it to you in full.

 

Once we’re done with those first two focuses of ours, we have multiple major content updates planned out for the upcoming months - those will be released along large marketing pushes to bring even more players to the lands of Wurm, and should bring a lot of content for both newer and older players.

 

Included in those updates will be a large exploration focused update, intended to make the wilderness of Wurm more interesting to explore, with different random encounters to be had around the world. Something we are looking at as well is a unique creatures rework, as well as some more chances to brush up on some less used skills. This update overall should provide a less grindy alternative to other features of Wurm, and in general make PvE gameplay more varied.

 

We also intend to expand further on the construction features, adding both new building elements and decorative items and features. One of our desired features that we’ve been playing with are docks, which would allow you to create structures on water. On the decoration side, a popular suggestion (as well as something we want to see in the game) is hanging items on walls - we’ll be looking at how we can add that.

Animal keeping is another feature that we feel has much more potential to be realized. We’ll be working on expanding that part and making keeping different animals a more varied and in-depth feature, with perhaps a new animal or two thrown into the mix.

 

Other than regular content updates, we plan to continue improving the visual side of the game as well - certain elements of Wurm look aged compared to others and we want to fix that soon. One of our desired upgrades has always been an overhaul to how the characters look - while it might be a bit far off right now, we will be looking at improving the character’s appearance along with better customization options.

Along with any visual upgrades we’ll be working further on optimizing the game’s client, as we have identified some causes for the high memory and GPU usage issues that some of you may encounter.

 

Since we’re now talking about the client side of the game, another thing we want to tackle is the sound design, which is something we have to admit is quite lacking at this point. That will include adding more sound effects to creatures, as right now, your farm animals are a bit too creepily silent, but we also plan to have another pass at the general action sounds.

 

I realize this post is a bit short on the PvP side of the game - for more information on that part, you can see Darklords’ newest thread on our plans and ideas for the Defiance going forward.

 


There have been quite a few questions and suggestions regarding the future of Jackal. While the first iteration of that has been quite fun, it does require a ton of work and changes to make it worthwhile to run another edition of it, and that is not something we’re interested in - we feel that work is currently much better directed at improving the base game, and not the extending “episodic” content. Generally, you should not expect another Jackal run for quite some time, as we prefer to focus on the other things we have planned. But, never say never!

 

Since the questions about the status of the Northern and Southern Freedom Isles clusters keep appearing, we do want to reiterate that at this point we do not plan on a merge, and it will be a long time before we will start considering one (it is not guaranteed in any case). We’re happy with how both of the clusters are working out and there seems to be a healthy population on both of them.

 

While our promotion of the game with the launch focused on the new Northern Freedom Isles cluster, the future promotion we do will most likely focus on all of Wurm, so that all servers should have new players joining them, depending on each of the server’s qualities rather than our own recommendations.

 

The final thing that I want to announce today is that we're also currently working on a long desired and requested feature which is a complete account system, the main purpose of which is to consolidate character ownership into a single account, improve the security of your accounts and ease the management of them. This will also help us with adding some more features that you could manage about your characters without logging into the game, improve account recovery methods and more.
We'll reveal more details on this soon.


This should cover some of our plans for Wurm and hopefully makes things a little bit more clear. I want to mention though that this is not an exhaustive list of the things we have in store, and there are plenty of other features and changes coming to the game soon, many of which stem from your suggestions, so make sure to keep those coming!

 

For now, keep on Wurming!

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Thanks for this, lots of good news. 

Hope to see everything pan out well!

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If you're not addressing utter lack of decay (in everything, including skills), or the long-running problematic bugs that players have begged to be fixed for years, all the window-dressing in the world won't save the north clusters from becoming just as stale as every other WO and WU server out there. And to address decay, you have to address playtime (and alts by extension). Someone playing 6 hours a day isn't going to see decay remotely the same way as someone playing 3 hours a week. Without these core problems addressed, it'll be a few more months and the north and south servers will be indistinguishable, in scarcity and player counts.

 

Here's hoping you can get some of these problems solved, in a meaningful way.

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1 hour ago, Samool said:

perhaps a new animal or two thrown into the mix.

 

GOATS!  (Please)

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maybe diferent types of animals having diferent sets of traits would be nice. and actually fixing spawns. before adding more animals that we never see, because they never show up anywhere.

Edited by Tpikol
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1 hour ago, munster said:

If you're not addressing utter lack of decay (in everything, including skills), or the long-running problematic bugs that players have begged to be fixed for years, all the window-dressing in the world won't save the north clusters from becoming just as stale as every other WO and WU server out there. And to address decay, you have to address playtime (and alts by extension). Someone playing 6 hours a day isn't going to see decay remotely the same way as someone playing 3 hours a week. Without these core problems addressed, it'll be a few more months and the north and south servers will be indistinguishable, in scarcity and player counts.

 

Here's hoping you can get some of these problems solved, in a meaningful way.

 

Always one moaner

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1 hour ago, munster said:

If you're not addressing utter lack of decay (in everything, including skills), or the long-running problematic bugs that players have begged to be fixed for years, all the window-dressing in the world won't save the north clusters from becoming just as stale as every other WO and WU server out there. And to address decay, you have to address playtime (and alts by extension). Someone playing 6 hours a day isn't going to see decay remotely the same way as someone playing 3 hours a week. Without these core problems addressed, it'll be a few more months and the north and south servers will be indistinguishable, in scarcity and player counts.

 

Here's hoping you can get some of these problems solved, in a meaningful way.

We had skill decay for years and people who got to high skill begged none stop for it to be changed as it lead to such a point where people had to grind hours a day to keep 3-4 skills at the same level let alone progress then skill decay was set to 90 then 70 and then it was decided to just take it away as it didnt add to the game it only meant people had to play more or get punished for not being able to play

Same goes with item decay the game is all about long term playing not 1-2 months or a year max skill gains now days are so much faster then what they used to be because people bitched that it was to hard to catch up to those who had spend years already playing
Imagine the year is 2005 and the highest skill is some guy who lives with tich who has 55 blacksmithing and is charging 5s for ql 50 blacksmithing tools with no enchants and 30-40 enchants would cost 2s a piece extra there is no mass storage no wagons no horses no boats and only 2 servers the cost of a guard tower is 15s a tower and no one is crazy enough to mass make them
Back then going away for 2 weeks meant if you had 50 skill you could come back to 49.20 or less even it was horrible and people who got to 90 where basically forced to spend all day doing that single task or risk loosing their 90's easy

You do not want skill decay as it adds a chore to the game that is not a fun gameplay loop you want the game to be more enjoyable and last longer find proper fun gameplay loops to add to the game not reintroduce mechanics that where taken out because they where hated by everyone

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1 hour ago, munster said:

If you're not addressing utter lack of decay (in everything, including skills), or the long-running problematic bugs that players have begged to be fixed for years, all the window-dressing in the world won't save the north clusters from becoming just as stale as every other WO and WU server out there. And to address decay, you have to address playtime (and alts by extension). Someone playing 6 hours a day isn't going to see decay remotely the same way as someone playing 3 hours a week. Without these core problems addressed, it'll be a few more months and the north and south servers will be indistinguishable, in scarcity and player counts.

 

Here's hoping you can get some of these problems solved, in a meaningful way.


Lack of decay is a core problem?  why? 

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2 hours ago, TheTrickster said:

 

GOATS!  (Please)

 

and Ducks! (pretty please) quack quack

Its not said enough so thank you for the info posted. It is always nice to see communication from the team to the players. I'm excited to see where wurm goes! Keep up the great work!

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3 hours ago, munster said:

If you're not addressing utter lack of decay (in everything, including skills), or the long-running problematic bugs that players have begged to be fixed for years, all the window-dressing in the world won't save the north clusters from becoming just as stale as every other WO and WU server out there. And to address decay, you have to address playtime (and alts by extension). Someone playing 6 hours a day isn't going to see decay remotely the same way as someone playing 3 hours a week. Without these core problems addressed, it'll be a few more months and the north and south servers will be indistinguishable, in scarcity and player counts.

 

Here's hoping you can get some of these problems solved, in a meaningful way.

To all the people thinking in this way. People don't play this game to do the chores of saving everything you accomplished over the years every day... We don't like to loose what we got, nor we like to do any extra stuff to maintain that what we got.

If i have to regrind my skills everytime i log in or to spend even hour every day repairing everything on my deed, ###### it, its not worth it, wont play it.

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Quite the post, I wish you guys all the best with getting this done in a hopefully good way.

There is a lot of candy in this post that I sure like. :3

 

Looking forward to when these things materialize, thanks for the update - it was well needed. ❤️

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5 hours ago, Samool said:

I’m sure that’s boring stuff to most of you reading though - worry not, during that time we’ll also be working on finishing up a large combat overhaul! This was something that was meant to be there for the Steam launch, but we have decided to postpone it to give it the attention and polish it deserves. The goal of the combat update will be to increase the interactivity and engagement of combat, by both providing much better visual feedback (significantly reducing the need to read combat chat) and changing certain mechanics, like making special moves more prominent and useful in PvE. This will be put to public testing before it goes live. We have done decent progress on this up to this point, but it still needs a good bit of work to be ready for us to show it to you in full.

 

This combat business scares me. I like Wurm's casual combat. I know the skilled button-mashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_gameplay) players will demand they receive advantageous rewards for their perceived superior performance. This means those of use who want casual combat will have to play the twitch gamer's way.

 

I perdict this:

old school wurmer "I want an auto fight so I can just stand in front of mobs and kill them like before."

twitcher "Hey I work hard to push the button just right and it just isn't fair that you can get the same rewards as me for using your lazy auto-fight system."

old school wurmer "hey if you don't like the auto-fight no one is forcing you to use it, do what you like playa. If you find the challenge of manual fight fun, the fun should be reward enough."

Twitcher "why in the world would I disadvantage myself like that? Sorry but in order for a mmo to be fun we all have play the same way."

....yada yada yada ...folks contune to argue about stuff that doesn't really change

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4 hours ago, Samool said:

The surge in popularity has definitely exceeded our expectations and it seems like it can give us some headroom in expanding the development team, which should help us increase the development pace of both new features and bug fixing. Most of you might not know this, but we have had very few hired or contracted developers for quite a while now, much fewer than you would expect from a game of this scale - but we’re well on the way to fixing that. (and if you are interested yourself in becoming either a volunteer developer or a contractor, feel free to contact me with the relevant details at samool@wurmonline.com )

 

That is the best news possible and most important since any ideea or bug needs manpower to be implemented/fixed so this is great!

 

I really hope the team will manage to attract talented hard working devs by offering pay and i hope you will consider giving paid contracts to some of the existing volunteer devs in order to increase the time they can actually work on Wurm everyday, as i would imagine  the volunteers devs have to go to a paid job then come home and work on Wurm during their spare free time which is never ideal but is very much apreciated.

 

I also hope talented hardworking and passionate devs like Sindusk will get hired, i know there could be some reservations from the dev team regarding such a move but honestly the players as customers dont care, we want good content to be added constantly and he can definately help out with that.

 

 

Overhauling combat to have more emphasis on player's actual input and participation is something we cried for a while and am gratefull is being worked on and with added incentives to exploring the map it will definately help motivate people to leave the deed more often and have some active fun while taking a break from the on deed skill grinds.

 

Idealy i would want combat to feel real time but that would imply a drastic change from a Wurm second to a real life second which i dont think is possible considering it will affect time passing and seasons etc but for me personally getting into combat making a choice and then having to wait for a wurm second to pass to see the effect of my choice/input is less than ideal and it also promotes weird tactics like circling each other in pvp moving in and out to get a hit in can get old and feel draining.

 

Definatelly excited to get more feedback on the screen/UI while in combat and not have to read the combat log window that is excellent news!

 

Also making special moves more viable is a really good move in the right direction as it would give the advantage to an active player vs an semi-afk one.

 

 Right now if you are out woodcutting digging etc when you get attacked by a mob it feels almost annoying because now you have to sit there and wait doing nothing untill you stop missing and the mob dies while you dont have to press any keys and then ahve a sigh of relief and go back to grinding.

 

By making combat more player input oriented and maybe by giving an IN_COMBAT modifier to keybinds you could make that transition from skill grind to combat more fluid and seamless as you could have a key assigned to an action while out of combat (for grinding) and another combat related action while in combat (say you have X on improve out of combat and special_move1 while in combat).

 

So lets say you would want to add a keybind with the console you could press F1 then type: "bind x improve" and then type: "bind_in_combat x special_move1" or make it more simple like bind and bindic etc. and then the game will check if the player is in combat or not and based on that will perform a diff keybinded action for that keys.

 

The wurm second vs real life second could still make that system feel a bit sluggish as you would ahve to wait up to what is it 8s? sometimes to get the in_combat check or could tie it to some action in the combat log.. say you get a: "moves in to attack you" message in the log so then the game automatically tags the player in combat and activates the combat keybinds even tho the wurm second has not passed, to make the transition feel more instant. 

 

Finally, account system is bae!:)

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"We’re happy with how both of the clusters are working out and there seems to be a healthy population on both of them."

 

And there we are ladies and gentlemen; solid proof that everything is going as planned.

 

On a brighter note, the exploration content sounds interesting; could make exploring the world more worthwhile than just deed camping.

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Like the news about the combat overhaul, but may I ask what's going to happen about Epic?

 

6 hours ago, Samool said:

We’re happy with how both of the clusters are working out and there seems to be a healthy population on both of them.

 

There's a 3rd cluster you know. Just in case anyone forgot. That keeps being ignored for quite a long time now as those playing there are also paying customers, albeit in smaller numbers.

 

I mean really, I know it's the elephant in the room but any news? Are we moving epic to chaos? Will epic receive any updates ? It's a ghost town there. New players aren't attracted to dead servers.

Edited by elentari
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Thank you for letting us know a little more about what is going on, your thoughts about the new cluster, difficulties and of course some ideas about the immediate future.

 

It is always easy for your paying customers to have a moan about things that perhaps are not working to their maximum potential but hopefully most can see that you are aware of these concerns.

 

I hope that you are indeed going to expand your development team and bug-squashers and perhaps even look at some surprise improvement that catches us all unawares.

 

I write here as someone who has not ventured from the old cluster to the new but was delighted to see the huge increase in player participation. I feel sure that numbers will drop back but suspect that into the medium term they will remain at healthy levels. Long-term numbers will to some extent depend on how development continues and that is a little pressure on the developers!

 

Good luck!

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1 hour ago, elentari said:

Like the news about the combat overhaul, but may I ask what's going to happen about Epic?

 

 

There's a 3rd cluster you know. Just in case anyone forgot. That keeps being ignored for quite a long time now as those playing there are also paying customers, albeit in smaller numbers.

 

I mean really, I know it's the elephant in the room but any news? Are we moving epic to chaos? Will epic receive any updates ? It's a ghost town there. New players aren't attracted to dead servers.

I suppose that Epic just need radical actions, and that kind of actions takes time and could make many people mad and argue about merging/transfering/deleting, skill transfers, stuff transfers and probably many other things, thus noone wants to touch it, even with a stick.

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Will the automatic mode still be available in combat? As a person with ASD and therefore problems with eye-hand coordination I almost never engaged in combat in games, in Wurm I am FS 71 and I really appreciate the fact that I can perform my moves automatically and that I can defend myself from most of the critters, this is actually one of things that make me to like Wurm so much.  

 

Fire making should come to the tutorial to avoid problems like MassivelyOP editor trying to get steel and coal in his first days in Wurm. 

Edited by Platyna
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9 hours ago, Samool said:

One of our desired upgrades has always been an overhaul to how the characters look - while it might be a bit far off right now, we will be looking at improving the character’s appearance along with better customization options.

 

THIS!

 

Can we please add more skin colours? It's 2020...

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Most things I will not form a opinion until I see how you imaging then to do them like the increes romin incentiv. Can be well done or totaly horrible so I will wait on the first dwarfs that are more then "It will be great and maybe come as soon as bridge"

9 hours ago, Samool said:

Animal keeping is another feature that we feel has much more potential to be realized. We’ll be working on expanding that part and making keeping different animals a more varied and in-depth feature, with perhaps a new animal or two thrown into the mix

But to this I would liek to see diffrent Name Tables and traits for other Animals then Horses. (Copperfluff, Northwolly, Lignthnigmolly etc. if you wnat to keep the current way of naming). A Lighning fast Sheep is well quite funny but pointless while a Sheep breeding to produce more wool sounds way more like somthing peopel would like to see.

 

9 hours ago, Samool said:

Included in those updates will be a large exploration focused update, intended to make the wilderness of Wurm more interesting to explore, with different random encounters to be had around the world. Something we are looking at as well is a unique creatures rework, as well as some more chances to brush up on some less used skills. This update overall should provide a less grindy alternative to other features of Wurm, and in general make PvE gameplay more varied.

 

And about waht less usesd Skills are we talking? There are the joke skills Yoyo and Puppetiring, but then you have skills like: Praying, Weaponhead- and Bladesmithing, Traps are in PvE compleatly usless and near impractible in PvP to my knowlage, Clubs are a Joke weapon since ther are no real hight end Clubs in the game, do the Parentskil Misculenius items anything? Or the ones from the Characterisics? And at last somthing llike Thatching realy need a own skill if it use for a singel thing you will not do to often in Wurm? I man yeah if I want a straw Roof fine but I don´t see me building like 10 compleat villages with it that would need this sort of skill in a greater deal.

Alone without mutch thinking there is a lot that need to be thought of in skills but general saying "less used" skills is a bit broad to be some waht exitet for this part.

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Skin colors for wagons red black whatever be nice not to have just the old green ones.

 

Thanks for the update guys good job..

Edited by Tigerclaw
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8 hours ago, munster said:

If you're not addressing utter lack of decay (in everything, including skills), or the long-running problematic bugs that players have begged to be fixed for years, all the window-dressing in the world won't save the north clusters from becoming just as stale as every other WO and WU server out there. And to address decay, you have to address playtime (and alts by extension). Someone playing 6 hours a day isn't going to see decay remotely the same way as someone playing 3 hours a week. Without these core problems addressed, it'll be a few more months and the north and south servers will be indistinguishable, in scarcity and player counts.

 

Here's hoping you can get some of these problems solved, in a meaningful way.

 

5 hours ago, kochinac said:

To all the people thinking in this way. People don't play this game to do the chores of saving everything you accomplished over the years every day... We don't like to loose what we got, nor we like to do any extra stuff to maintain that what we got.

If i have to regrind my skills everytime i log in or to spend even hour every day repairing everything on my deed, ###### it, its not worth it, wont play it.

 

 

Like kochinac said, if I log in to just do the chores, and regrind skills, its not wort anymore.

 

I play Wurm because i can play casual, sometimes i spend a month building my deed and making it pretty, sometimes i spend a few days in archaeology for new statues to decorate my place, sometimes i just like exploring the servers, sometimes i just want to create dye or improve my chest of rare items to cast on later.

 

Wurm like no other game offers me that casual playstyle, its basically You can do whatever you want game. If that is removed due to skill decay and deed decay, then it becomes a village simulator, which its a no for me

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