Wurm Online Roadmap: The Road After Steam!

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.

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.
PvP forum thread here

Proposed PvP Changes

• Weapons/Armour/Toolbelts/Horse gear will increase in quality up to 75 much quicker when improving them to speed up people gearing groups for pvp after a loss.(Defiance Only)
• Roaming Depo(Defiance Only)
• The intent of this is to get people out and looking for the depo every day or so, hopefully 10 sleep powder and some good possibly enchanted horse gear is enough to get people going out for it.
  • Same spawn rules as battle camps.
  • Will announce when it spawns on twitter/event tab.
  • Will first spawn with no indication of where it is, after 5 hours of not being claimed it will give off the effect from the old depo to better help locate it.
  • You claim the loot with a 5 minute action on the depo, after which the depo will vanish until it respawns again.
  • Spawns 24-30 hours after the last one vanishes.
  • Claim Reward
  • 3 lumps of adamantine or glimmersteel(picked randomly)
  • 10 sleep powders
  • 5 75QL horse sets(Shoes/Saddles)
  • Chances these sets will come with varying degrees of WOA precast on them.

• Upgraded Chest Loot(Elevation/Defiance)
  
• This is intended to give out more sleep bonus for things done while out roaming.
  • The first person to open a rare chest spawn after it spawns will receive between 1-3 hours of sleep bonus depending on the loot roll of the chest.

• Hota Changes(Elevation/Defiance/Chaos)
  
• These changes will revert hota back to more of an event than something running continuously. Moon metal is still awarded to people who did not win just by trying, and they should not be nearly as easy to find and be dominated by a single group.
  • 6 battle camps spawn at the same time all over the map with no location information anymore.
  • First to 4 captures wins.
  • First to capture a camp after spawning receives a few pieces of moon metal. Captures after will not give any more.
  • Happens 40 hours after the last event finished.
  • Your kingdom is alerted in event tabs when an enemy kingdom steps onto a battle camp your kingdom owns, it will not say what kingdom but will say which battle camp. This message cannot happen more than once every 30 minutes.
  • Building inside battle camps when you have it claimed still provide all the protections from before.
  • Pendulums will still help find them but will have the range at which they do adjusted to make them much harder to find.

• Increased raid windows for lager deeds over 50x50 tiles total in size to 8 hours to give more time to raid larger deeds.
  • Safe zones/deeds smaller than 50x50 stay unchanged.
  • The exact values of this are up for debate so please let us know what you think.

• Shield bash will have a separate easier roll to just cancel actions that may be interrupted along with the roll to stun.(All Servers)
  • Will allow all players a much better chance to kick a spell being cast right next to them without making stuns to common.

• Equipping or unequipping a piece of armor will cancel any spells/archery actions currently being cast.(All Servers).
  • Hopefully this should address the concerns about players swapping armor on and off while casting/shooting to get around the penalties.

• Tangle weave cooldown reduced to 60 seconds/ favor cost reduced back to 15.(All Servers)
  • The nerfs to tangle weave where too heavy handed I admit, we are stepping them back much closer to the original values.

• Increased healing resistance a bit more.(All PvP Servers)
  • This is subject to more testing, exact values will be updated when finalized.

• Aggressive creatures(excluding zombies/domestic creatures) you kill will have a chance to place a sleep powder inside the final hitting players inventory. (Defiance Only)
  
• This is intended to give out more sleep bonus for things done while out roaming.
  • The chance for this will be dependent on the CR of the creature and will be an uncommon drop.
  • This will not happen inside the safe zones or on settlements.

• NFI PvP/PvE characters will share more things like titles/sleep bonus.(NFI Only)
  
• Looking for feedback on what all people would like merged between the 2 NFI accounts.
  
• The goal is to make them feel more like 1 accounts with different inventories than 2 accounts with the same skills only.
  
• Random teleport will always take you onto land.(All Servers)
  
• Scorn no longer heals non tamed creatures.(All Servers)
  

Future Plans

• More pvp related points of interest in the world along with the exploration update planned.
• Reworking spell damage/resistances to find a better middle ground between them being useful vs them being spammed especially for pillar spells.
• Looking into WL vs BL priest balance with BL only having 1 god vs 3 WL gods.
• A revised version of player champions on much shorter timescales/less harsh penalties for reverting/different bonuses than just DR.
• Generally, they will be much less powerful than current champions but will still be useful to have with little to no penalty for becoming one, and short several week max duration for them.
• New methods of removing kings from office/deciding new kings for base kingdoms.
• Removing meditation level limits from defiance/elevation with balance consideration for the more overpowered one that it was intended to remove. (Defiance/Elevation Only)
• Open to suggestions here for what you would like to see as future content for All PvP servers in general.
• Mine doors locking off deed somehow.
• Pending some deep thinking and testing as this one will be hard to get right and could actually turn into a negative if people find new metas around it.

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!