Wurm Online

This wasn't a foregone conclusion. There was potential for Wurm to devolve into anarchy the moment it opened, but it didn't, and it didn't because we're better than that. We build, and we help each other. Wurm has one of the friendliest communities of any game I've ever encountered, and while it has its fair share of violence, this almost exclusively takes place on the Wild server, where it's fostered by the developers in inter-kingdom warfare and skirmishes over powerful artefacts.

In fact, a recent patch that allowed Wild server players to send raiding parties to the safer Home servers caused the community to erupt so fiercely that an entirely new Freedom server was quickly sculpted, where PVP, stealing and lock-picking is disabled. Anyone who had a problem with the new patch was welcome to up sticks and sail away to their new home. As in, actually sail away. One of the many neat touches in Wurm is that different servers take the form of different islands, and travel between them is not just possible but encouraged. It used to be, before drowning was implemented, that you could even swim the gap.

You might have gathered from all this that Wurm Online enjoys somewhat chaotic development. That'd be an understatement, but it's also something you can forgive the game for. It was originally the pet project of just two Swedish programmers, Rolf Jansson and Markus Persson, back in 2003, and it still uses Java Runtime Environment. The reason Wurm continues to be developed to this day is that, as well as adoring subscribers, it's picked up support from an army of volunteers scattered across the globe who simply love the game and want to support it.

A few of the Wurm GMs spilled some details about who they are in real life for the purposes of this article. Blackout enjoys playing with vintage Bentleys, and keeps playing Wurm because he loves helping people. Oracle lives in New Zealand with his wife and family and has just retired from his job as an antique dealer and furniture restorer, and plays Wurm for the same reason Rolf and Markus started work on it - because there was and still is nothing else like it available. Diana, age 52, is the owner of a small organic pet food company. She talked about how she was present at the first in-Wurm wedding, back when there was only one player model and it was a man.

Pacer lives in Ohio and fondly remembers being lost up a mountain in Wurm with his buddy, lost and scared in one of those uniquely dark Wurm nights. Mithika makes stainless steel jewellery out of Vancouver, Canada, and is proud of succeeding at her in-game goal of owning a dragon. Niobe lives in Illinois with her husband and fell in love with Wurm when her neighbours helped her with the Lava Fiend that ended up wandering into her mine. Tich, 50, lives in Perth, and among his Wurmian achievements is designing and constructing a giant chess set.

All this adds up to the principal reason MMO developers should be paying attention to Wurm. It's blurring the line between players and developers. Players are free to create and alter the world, GMs are recruited from the players and are still free to play the game, anyone with the knowledge can contribute to development, and the development reacts to the player-base. And, amazinglyy, Wurm still works. More than just holding together as a competent MMO, it's infinitely more entertaining than any number of the commercial releases we're told to enjoy. It's the Wikipedia of videogames, a shining example that as long as humans are told to build something instead of just play along, we're pretty alright.

If Rolf's to be believed, the best is still to come, too. Before the summer's over the Wurm developers are aiming to get a new Epic server up, a land where players from different empires will compete in grand scenarios that'll last between three months and a year. At the minute we can't tell if details are under wraps or simply totally undecided, but what we do know is that Rolf's aim is to create a structure wherein the players themselves will tell the story, naturally filling all the roles in the cast and thereby becoming the game's future lore.

Wurm Online is well worth a look, especially when that look requires only the smallest of downloads and costs nothing. Subscription fees only enter into things if you want to get off the Newbie server or you start hitting skill caps, and it'll take at least 30 hours before either of those things happen. That said, the crippling guilt that you should be giving these guys some kind of money kicks in at about 25 hours. And that's because you should. Getting into Wurm, and then imagining what it'd be like with proper funding, is bound to make you a little weak at the knees.