Hi everyone,
We’d like to update you today on how and what we’ve been doing in the last few months, as well as showcase our current plan for the near future of Wurm Online.
First, we would like to brief you on how Wurm Online and Code Club AB have been doing.
As indicated in Game Chest Group’s report (Link), our parent company has improved the quarterly revenue by +11,8% compared to Q4 2022. This means the company has finally turned a profit with new corporate leadership and the increased focus on Wurm Online. During the year the game has performed better, with more players and increased revenue due in large part to maintaining a stable premium player count and the newly introduced silver shop.
We’re still learning how to use the shop to best provide you with extra cosmetic items, even if we, most definitely, missed the mark with pricing at times. Going forward we aim to get out more attractive offers as well as a release more craftable items, not limiting it to skins.
We have more active players than a year ago (close to 1000 more monthly unique logins), and that seems to be climbing steadily. That number is higher than you might think while playing the game, while we don’t have exact data on it, it seems in large part to be new players, who at this point often don’t stay in Wurm for long, which is something we’re actively trying to improve on.
We currently have around 4550 premium accounts, which we consider a healthy number. Still, for us to grow the development team, we need to attract more players, something we think our plans laid out below can accomplish.
Action rework
We are in the process of finishing multiple major projects. The largest, action rework, is nearing completion and will be released onto our test servers very soon.
This feature is partly an internal refactor of the code that handles many of the player actions. It adds plenty of quality of life features that will make Wurm better to play, including new toolbelt mechanics, where every item there is activated at the same time, and adds a new quickbar that replaces the old toolbelt UI. The new quickbar also includes the functionality of the current select bar. We’ve also added a visible action queue and new default action mechanics, where you can bind a lot of different actions to a single key easily.
For pictures and examples of the changes you’ll encounter after the action rework goes live, see here:
Public testing of this feature will follow shortly after we finish the UI part of the changes and we run it through some more intensive internal testing. Expect an announcement on this in the upcoming weeks.
Client work
Graphics rework and client optimization have both grown in scope and we’re looking at releasing that work on test servers sometime after the action rework goes live.
Other than the previously announced lighting improvements, it now also includes a complete terrain overhaul. Terrain will not only look better, with all of the terrain textures being remastered in a higher resolution, but the performance should be drastically improved as well.
These changes will reduce stuttering when walking around and will take up less memory, which, in turn, should allow you to run the game at higher quality settings without sacrificing performance - or you can just run a few more clients with alt accounts at once, if that’s your jam.
New Haven
Finally, I want to reveal one of our biggest recent development projects, a total revamp of the new player experience.
Codenamed New Haven, this will be a starting island on which you land right after you complete the tutorial.
The game rules of that area will be adjusted so it’s less dangerous and faster for new players to start on, giving them a better environment to learn on, before they dive into the real lands of Wurm.
This may remind you of what Golden Valley once was, except a lot more friendly and guided than starting on GV was, back in the day.
Players will be guided through their first hours in the game by an entirely new quest system, at first unique to that new server, providing small rewards for players performing certain tasks that showcase various mechanics that they need to learn in order to survive Wurm. We hope this will help newbies avoid getting overwhelmed with everything they can do, and instead being able to better understand the game a small piece at a time.
While “quests” as you may know them from other games may feel out of place for the sandbox of Wurm, we believe this is the way to go for us to reduce the amount of new players leaving the game early on.
This server will use new land protection mechanics in place of deeds, instead linked to fenced areas around houses, to both make it simpler for new players to understand and to mitigate the possibility of claiming large areas of land.
The goal is for players to be able to play close to other players, while still having enough wild areas to explore. We will most likely extend this mechanic to work on all servers, to make off-deed living just a bit more viable.
A large challenge of this project that we are yet to finalize, are other limitations so that players will be motivated to eventually move onto the regular Wurm servers. We also need to make it so they don’t feel like they’re leaving their hard work behind. We do have a few ideas for solving that, like being able to pack your house to move it to another location, but we’ll share the details with you once they are more fleshed out.
The aim for this project is to lessen the drop out rate of new players. We hope new players will also be able to join the community early, as we are going to allow everyone to visit that server.
Portals
Together with New Haven, we’ll be introducing a new portal mechanic, allowing you to teleport from any server to any other server, as well as between starter deeds on the same server.
We would like to not ever have to ask players to make new accounts if they want to change their playing server, as that often is what happens now, as well as allow everyone to play with their friends at any time, wherever their account is.
Mind you, this does not mean a complete NFI-SFI merge, although we do intend on having almost everything, other than your items, transfer. That means your character, coins, skills, will now all cross between those two server clusters.
Due to economic concerns, items are currently excluded from the transfers, but we have looked into skill statistics and found that at this point, the skill gap is not significant enough for us to have a reason to keep it separate. We hope this will make the new server transfers a more popular feature, since your skills will no longer be locked to the Freedom cluster you've been playing on, so it'll be easier for you to explore or move to any of the other islands.
Upcoming months
Shortly after we release all the previously mentioned work, we would like to focus on more content for all players to enjoy. A good bit of this will be things we already announced in the past, but priority changes came in the way.
PvE content
We plan on releasing this as an update soon after New Haven. It’ll include goblin camps, a new feature focusing on exploration and combat, as well as a building expansion, currently planned to include ceilings, docks, and new wall types.
Character customization rework
We’re in the initial planning phase of a character customization overhaul. This will address most of the complaints with the current player character visuals, while looking better and adding a lot more possible variations, including more detailed faces and new hairstyles.
In-game auction house
Another project being developed is an in-game auction house, which will handle both auction and WTS offers. It’s meant to facilitate trade between players - you’ll be able to sell and purchase items through a new UI window, currently planned to be accessible through any mailbox in the game.
Longer term projects
Most of our plans for the future will depend strongly on the outcome of the releases of changes described above, so we would like to avoid creating a definite roadmap for the entire year here. There’s just not much point in that right now, as we historically haven’t been great at following our own roadmaps, so our aim is to only promise what we’re sure we can deliver, and to bring you the things you’ve long waited for.
Among previously mentioned changes you might be wondering what happened with, is the new account system and PvP work. The account system is something that is not currently the priority, but we likely will focus on finishing it in the later part of the year. Our developers are actively looking into PvP tweaks and balancing, but we have no progress ready to share yet in either of those projects.
I hope you can forgive me for this post being so text-heavy, as these aren’t things we can easily show off right now, but you can expect more posts from us to pop up over time with details about each of these works.
Thank you everyone for your continued support, and we can’t wait to have you try out what we’ve been working on!
Happy Wurming!
PS: This year's map dumps have just been released. Check them out here:
