What do you think of Wynncraft in its current state?

I like the idea (and self-imposed limitation) of Wynncraft being built in Minecraft. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have played it.

The content that is currently in the game is "enough" to keep players engaged for years, but I can't shake the feeling that anything endgame related (raids, loot running for mythics, hunted gathering, guild wars) encourages some toxicity that is unhealthy for the game. Out of the activities above I have only done loot running, but have heard some sad stories from my guild mates about the others. oh and can they make loot chests client-side already

In terms of lore, I have no interest in it - until the entirety of Fruma and Dern are released the lore will never be complete, and all we have now are cliffhangers or dead people who were killed due to random creatures (Charon, Dern Beast).

There is one thing that lowers the QoL of this game: lag. Nothing can be done about it (server-side); just pointing it out as it can completely ruin an important boss fight or horse travel. Another recent change was the dialogue revamp - I don't like the zoom in (despite the Oblivion reference), the fact that attacking is disabled during text, and the inability to progress dialogue on a horse.

The game was great when I was still discovering the world and the classes, but with that done it feels like there isn't enough content between each major update to keep the playerbase around. I know the updates take an incredibly long time due to the voluntary team and few coders (plus the trope that something is always broken on release days), and for them I wish the best of work and luck.

For a rating, Wynncraft would get a 7/10 from me.

 

I'd say right now as a whole the game is in a really good state in terms of its content, but its monetization with certain Champion features, limited-time cosmetics, profession bombs, it will definitely go downhill if the admins pull more questionable monetization stunts like I mentioned.

 

Imma make it in points, so it's clear and short (well only the first part of my post is clear and short lmao)

- Gavel revamp was great
- Not enough endgame content (I feel like there should definitely be more raids)
- Endgame content that already exists is mostly pretty toxic (guilds, lootrunning, profs(hunted))
- Wynn province kinda sucks and is mostly outdated and it definitely shouldn't be since this province's name is in the name of the server
- Ocean sucks
- Lore as a whole is kinda subpar if you compare it to other games (imo)
- NPCs that are in-game don't really make the game feel alive like I think they should
- Corkus is pretty good, but considering that it IS its own province, I think it should have more content

- Even though I probably mentioned negatives more than positives, I think Wynncraft is in a pretty good state, I just don't think it's nowhere near perfect, every update moves Wynn forward and I don't think it's ever been in a better state before now (though I really loved 1.17, I have to admit). If Wynn continues to steadily improve everything the community is complaining about, it can only rise higher.

- Also one longer point: Even though this will never get changed because it would require an immense effort from all parts of the CT - Build-wise, lore-wise, content-wise, just everything and it may even be an unpopular opinion; But I think that the map is kind of small. Once again compared to other games. I would think that game that has almost no limits (well lag is the limit when it comes to servers), the map could be much bigger. I mean there's only one town in the entire desert. I think it would be completely reasonable and maybe even preferable to build a town on the river that's there. There are no villages or even small nomadic tribes around the water sources. There are only 6 Big Cities in the entire Wynn Province with some of them not even having any points of interest after doing quests there (Rymek, Almuj, and tbh even Troms) And even though Nesaak has a bank, I don't consider it a big city or a city at all, I was even hesitant to include Rymek and Nemract. Only two cities in the entire province have a trade market, even though Almuj is literally begging for one with its market area in the front. I just feel like the desert and mesa areas are really poor in content. Main Wynn could also use more cities and more life to them, but I think in Desert it's lacking the most.

When it comes to Ocean, I think Corkus is hilariously big compared to the size of the entire ocean. I also think it's a shame that some islands are unreachable out of questlines. Also, it makes no sense that these islands are not on the map since the entire ocean is surrounded by mountains, (I know that's probably a game-design reason but still). So I think Ocean should definitely get expanded in size.

Regarding Gavel I don't have any complaints that are too specific, just overall the size - There could be more cities and villages.

One thing that I hope won't happen is the end of new areas after Fruma and Dern get released. I know that it's not happening anytime soon considering that we may get Wynn and Ocean rework before each of these Provinces or in between them. But I just hope that after Dern gets released (I assume that Fruma will get released first), that content won't just stop. I hope that Wynn will play around with the idea that more provinces exist beyond just Fruma and Dern and we will get to explore more. This has been my fear for quite some time when I realized that there are no mentions of any other province at all and I just hope that CT will have plans for more areas in the far future.

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Addition: A long time ago, I've read somewhere that lore-wise the Wynn world is actually much bigger, but if that's the case, it's even weirder that it's not populated at all.

 

the new shift dialogue system is very frustrating and i feel that its not needed and wasnt called for and the server is better off with the old dialogue system because I know many many people that do not like the new dialogue

 

In terms of gameplay, It's good how wynncraft has diverse builds playstyles. Though it would be better if 5 out of 15 builds (ETA, EWA, TWA, ETW, ETWA) were actually playable in endgame without godlike control. I don't get why Agility is completely RNG.

But wynncraft still has lot of potential and fun. Tri-clicking gives you some sense of excitement rather than pressing just a single key.

 

I can't say I disagree with this, or well, I disagree on the dialog system changes.
As someone with a reading disorder, the new dialog system is the single best quality of life suggestion Wynn has ever made.
My only real issue with it is that the dialog disappears once finished, not sure why they did this honestly, it was a very odd choice all things considered.

 

LMAO i accidentally posted this halfway done gimme a few mins

cool so i realize im kinda biased but im gonna give my thoughts



profs: a lot of the playtime i've put in recently is in profs so that's what comes to mind first: ill be the first to say i miss economy update professions. weight was bad dont get me wrong but refining was really perfect and it needs some kind of comeback. im a fan of the recent (by recent, i mean like 1.19 lol) prof xp curve changes that made the late game levels a lot more tolerable

quests & lore: gonna preface this by saying i've never cared much for the main storyline of the game - idk if that'll change if or when MSL drops in the year three thousand. i'm less of a fan of the handholdiness of newer quests but its understandable with 'big' quests (RoL, Envoy I & II, lore quests) wherein understanding and completing those quests is a bit more mandatory. personally i'm also not a fan of the new discoveries as much - i do miss the coolness of the OG corkus discoveries & how they felt a little more community build-y, but overall i think discoveries are in a pretty good state as is. i've been curious, but not invested, in lore for some time, but personally i care more about the implied lore of the signs in the camps along the ocean border between the fruma gate and the ragni coast than the entire dwarves and doguns questline (even if theyre still my favorite quests in the game, love you imaxe <3) (i have more to say about writing later)

combat: uh i feel like combat is also in a pretty good state as is, i only see it getting better if i'm being honest given the variety that major IDs have given. i feel like soul points are inextricably tied to combat as you die in combat more than anything else by a huge margin and soul points are flawed as is. i also feel like the flavor mobs of the world become far too easy and it only feels lethal around bosses - maybe this is just the currently replaying jedi fallen order on grandmaster talking, but i'm so far a pretty big fan of the "hit the enemy that killed you to regain XP and health" system - idk if that'd work for wynn, but thats just my notes. i feel like death is too rare of an occurence, you only really die from getting bullshited by swarms of mobs or to boss attacks - i feel like globally mob density should be brought way down and mob strength should be brought back up by at least as much as mob density is brought down. i think making the fights a bit harder and more sparse is gonna make combat feel a lot more satisfying. adding onto that, the combat doesn't feel very 'causal'. im using the word causal because i dont want to say realistic (nothing about wynn is realistic it shouldnt have to be either), but very little feels consequential. i think a lot of the skill in combat with wynn relates to class building rather than specific techniques and spell combos and 'techs' (i have learned this word from overwatch, shh). i think making it a little more skillbased would benefit my retention a lot - i know as an archer main i would find combat a lot more replayable if i had to actually aim for the head to get a critical hit, and if boss spells and special moves were based more around dodging than just tanking a hit or timing your heal potion right.

guilds: id have to be paid to care about guilds tbh - the only reason for me to join is for prof xp - i feel like there should be some 'guilds-lite' system for prof people that allows them the benefits of networking (crafting material) and extra xp (level gathering)

aesthetics & accessibility: okay im gonna lump these two together because i had a point about aesthetics that ties into accessibility and i dont feel like theyre big enough topics on their own. i personally am all for the modernization of wynn's build style. it maintains the very detailed and lived-in feeling of some of the older styles we've had while reducing eyestrain - i avoided detlas pre-1.18 because it was visual overload and i have a visual processing disorder (dw about it) that made it physically painful to be in, same with old cinfras. alongside that, i'm a fan of the new dialogue system, but i wish dialogue history was longer. i think there's also a point to be made that the handholding i complained about in my quests and lore section is to some degree an accessibility topic, i want to talk more specifically about haptic feedback (is that the word choice i should be using?). recently in the content team we've been really careful to always provide multiple kinds of feedback. the example that comes to mind for me is the gimmick in aldorei's secret part one - filling up the bucket you get multiple sounds and particles, and it's always highlighted very obviously where you can get water - growing the plants almost always has multiple frames of animation, also accompanied by a lot of particles and noise - for me it's really easy to suffer sensory overload from all the feedback im getting ingame (yay, ASD). i think on the whole the feedback you get makes the game feel more satisfying but for me personally it can ruin it for me.

world design & setting: okay im gonna say something super controversial: i am fucking done with medieval fantasy. medieval fantasy could not be more boring. that's not wynncrafts fault exactly, but the medieval fantasy genre is incredibly saturated and wynn lacks any special theme that makes it worth it to stay - i think forays into more specific niches of medieval fantasy would make for a much more interesting setting - in terms of settings i like that are in the game, i'm a big fan of the sky islands in particular - the architecture goes beyond rustic and the sky islands lore revolves around a lot more than memorizing proper nouns and names (no offense to the proper nouns in the audience: Decay, Light, Dark, Corruption, Taproot, Time Valley, Ancients, Pigman Ravines, etc.) uhm, in terms of world design, i'll not lie, wynncraft has a huge world design problem for a number of reasons. okay, number one - the world is way too small. i mean, that's a lie - the world is plenty big but it is so saturated with content i cannot throw a stick without hitting an NPC, quest, town, merchant, cave, miniboss, boss altar, discovery, or landmark. it's just too much to process at any one time, you're not only presented with so much that the world feels like it has no time to breathe, but every piece of content is a choice - what order to do the content in, what to do and not to do, etc. that you spend more time standing still deciding what to do than actually doing the thing. if we simply had, i don't know half the content density, or a quarter of the content density, this problem would definitely be solved. secondly, and this ties into the aesthetic and setting problem mentioned above, the biome diversity is not there for me. i can't tell the difference between dark forest and the swamp, i can't tell the difference between nesaak tundra and the lusuco canyon, i can't tell the different between time valley and the wynn plains (barely), if a kidnapper took my husband and child and told me to differentiate screenshots of the maltic plains and the detlas suburbs im already on the phone with a mortician giving them the measurements for their coffins. it's not just that a lot of the biomes lack differentiation, it's that so few of them tell stories with their environments. the only examples of proper environmental storytelling i can think of in wynn is sky islands and dark forest/light forest but they could both definitely be improved - for one, move the river separating the two forests, make a visible series of borders where you can see the light being sucked out of the trees - make mobs along that border that elude to the fact that the forest is actively being taken over. and in the sky islands, adding structures torn apart by the gaps between islands would do wonders. third, rectangle dream is horrible. it makes the world design so much more limited for no reason, makes it way more predictable, horrible to look at on the map, and makes it the border terrain just look silly for no reason. fucking screw rectangle dream

god i wrote too much about that i still have like two more sections to write

literary analysis: god my psychiatrist warned me not to do any type of literature analysis past midnight (its 1:15 in the morning as i type this sentence ive been writing for 40 mins) but wynncraft, and i say this with love, is thematically empty. completely. look, i'm not saying the writing is bad - i mean it is, a little bit, but writing isnt the point of the game - there are two times in wynncrafts history that i have been able to actually discern some meaning beyond the face value - envoy questline's "colonialism is bad" message and realm of lights comparatively more interesting theme of the dynamic between lari and the player being the dynamic of the older generation and the younger, that the entire plotline is about lari meditating on her past failings and passing on her lessons to the player in a symbolic passing of the torch ritual marking the end of one era and the start of the next, which is, i think, a great message. as a member of the youth, it really speaks to me. however, no such deeper theme resides in any other quest or story thread. "quint you're forgetting dwarves and doguns and you said the envoy-" i'm not here to harp on them in particular - i'll summarize my feelings which is that the envoy questline still remains colonial propaganda in that the corkians are vindicated by virtue of having maxie on their side and no genuine reparations are made, and colonial propaganda is an extremely cold take thats very comforting to listen to, but ultimately says nothing. D&D is moderately better in that it genuinely floats the idea of reparations, but it was so incredibly close to saying something with the retaliation of the doguns being something like justified until that's ultimately thrown out the window for a very milquetoast "violence is bad because its morally wrong" message when it could have just as easily become a "does morality matter in survival" message, which is a much more interesting lens for the quest to be viewed through.

ANYWAYS continuing on wynn doesn't have any story thematics that are very apparent, much less interesting - the main thing i can make out is "balance good" but theres never genuine analysis as to why balance is good - the world appears to be miserable, dark souls took this in a much more interesting direction by making the age of fire a very clear metaphor for late stage capitalism "what is better, to be pushed outside our comfort zone with the promise of a better world after chaotic change, or to forever remain miserable under the warm blanket of familiarity" but that choice is never presented to the player, the question is never asked, and we will never get to answer it (for reasons i do not want to risk being hammered for saying) because wynncraft's answer to that above question is spoonfed to us from the start.

the moral of that story is that wynn's lore and writing needs to take a look at what its trying to say

continuing my expert literary analysis, nearly everything about the way the story and plot of quests is structured makes me want to violate the terms of service, the biggest reason D&D is my favorite questline still is that it actually knows how to pace itself and how to write in plot devices - part 1 is the inciting incident and some rising action, part 2 is a continuation of rising action, end of part 2/part 3 is the stakes get higher & plot twist (gara reveal), then downtime for the calm before the storm, part 4 is the climactic end that pays the rest off. where is this pacing in the realm of light? i understand we had our hands tied there as it took place across a lot more levels and isnt played back to back (even when played back to back, both ways tbh, it suffers those pacing issues)

if we want to go forward in the direction of central-storyline questlines, we as the content team gotta learn what this means

everything about the literary analysis of wynncraft, from its themes and messaging, to world settting and aesthetic, all the way past that to quest pacing makes me want to just re-read the song of achilles because madeline miller knows what the above diagram means


right so i have some other notes here. im not gonna bother to write these out into smaller mini essays like i did above, mostly because these are 90% positive and its harder for me to gush about how good something is than it is to dissect and critique it
- the soundtrack is fucking banger. 11/10 never been better
- raids and dungeons are fucking incredible (except LS and GG lol) huge fan of them, great work
- the item system is so good. its super complex and customizable but its never confusing. its super beginner friendly and lets you, for most of the game, make simple builds that accompany the RP experience (except mana and health ticks those will never make sense to me - why tf is it every 5s when it says /4s?)
- weird thing but i love the quirkier NPC dialogues so much, if somebody printed out all of the fantastic voyage captain dialogue and bound it it would actually be my favorite book
- all the classes feel fun to play for the most part - obv less so early game when some classes dont have the necessary tools to survive (cough cough no AoE damage until lv 21 on archer)

okay i have one more section to get through before i finally go to sleep:

WYNNCRAFT 2...
...will unfortunately probably never happen!

but a lot of my critiques involve hacking away and replacing some of the core pillars of the game - players are accustomed to having their hand held, etc. and changing it now would be better down the line but would fuck up player psychology for a while.

so in a parallel universe where wynncraft 2 happens, here's what i'd change:
- change the world design in the ways listed above, steeply reducing content density
- change quest design to be less handholdy
- limit some of the audiovisual feedback to still be noticeable but never cause sensory overload
- make the aesthetic setting of the game more specialized - dark souls is specialized to dark fantasy/dark romance/gothic in a lot of areas, skyrim is specialized to a viking aesthetic, etc.
- give the game a more concrete message and thematics
- change the way quests are written and structured to better reflect good writing practice (i tried to make that not sound mean i swear i did)
- alter combat to be more skillbased than build based
- alter the professions system to be much less grindy and more intertwined with other aspects of the game (see below)
- survival mechanics


no, i wont improve this all for readability it would take too long to re read and edit this and i just want to go to bed it's 1:46 in the morning

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im such a concise writer

 

While I think they unnecessarily complicate things overall, this is my main gripe with them as well. It’s a pretty crippling flaw. Now how long are we going to be stuck with it, you think? It’s a bit of a microcosm for my whole post, if anything.

Now can people please stop asking me about individual mechanics? My post is about a broader pattern in updates and really not about my opinion on any of the specific things I mention.

 

not doubting you, i just haven't heard this - what's the source? like, logically it makes sense but wynn's not known for its logic

 

This is 100% true.
There's actually a game design rule called the 40 second rule, it's specifically supposed to space how often players will come across something of interest.
(Note, this isn't exactly a set amount of time, it can vary depending on the project. Usually, it's between 20 to 50 seconds.)

Anyone reading this thinking "bUt MOre ContENT BeTTER."
Well, you should know that over-saturation in content can easily lead to not knowing what to look at, not knowing what to do, and most importantly in Wynncrafts case, not knowing what to explore.
I'm more than willing to say that the reason a lot of players don't explore in Wynncraft is that there is so much stuff that it's never quite clear what players should explore.

The quickly decaying houses in Elkurn.

You're just looking for visual and auditory feedback.
Haptic refers to the sense of touch.

Ok what? XD
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to derail this and turn this into some kind of argument or anything, but this is NOT what dark souls is about.
Dark Souls is a retailing of general mythology.

This isn't even debatable, this is literally what dark souls is about.
Like, the whole game is literally a fire rally race, I mean, the game literally starts with the opening saying
"In the Age of The Ancients, the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees, and Everlasting Dragons But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark."
Which, by the way, I'm guessing you don't know this due to the fact you assume Dark Souls is about capitalism, but duality, or in this case disparity is the most common theme in mythology.
By the way, this is all mythologies, which is the whole point, Dark Souls is just that: The player is the chosen one or the christ figure, going on a fire rally race in order to kill the old gods.

I would say I have no idea where you got that idea, but that's a lie.
You got this really dumb idea from a article on Vice from 2020, who gets this literal representation of Mythology:

And then stretches it beyond belief to fit their own agenda:

P.s. I should mention this is literally their whole argument.
I'm not taking this out of context, here's a link so you can read it:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gz9m/dark-souls-is-a-game-about-living-under-capitalism-in-2020
It's literally just trying to make the argument that conservatives want to keep the world serving themselves and demarcates don't, and therefore the fire serving no one is about capitalism because it's also about keeping things as they are. That's it, that's the whole argument. Just so you know, what I'm saying has nothing to do with my political opinions, I can disagree with Vice without leaning to one side or another.

I'm sorry, but not everything in the world has to fit into a political agenda.
This can be what you take out of Dark Souls if you want I suppose, but in terms of what Dark Souls was supposed to be about, not your own interpretation, or messages you got out of it, then no.
Dark Souls is not about capitalism.

Sorry, I was going to respond to more of this, because your point about the world map was pretty good, so I expect I will at least understand a lot of what you said, but the "Dark Souls is about late-stage capitalism" actually confused me so much that I went on a bit of a rant.

 

hadn't notice this - i do my best to spend as little time as possible in elkurn as possible

thanks for the correction, meant audiovisual* point on sensory overload still stands

ive literally never read this article in my life i can actually say with some degree of confidence ive never written anything published by vice

every game has a political agenda whether you like it or not - games are made by people with their own politics and whether or not they put it in intentionally it will have a message. im not here to have an argument over if that article is correct or not

im of the opinion that both parties should be ground to dust im not defending either viewpoint


i'm not saying it was made with the intent to be about the gradual decay of latestage capitalism i'm saying that a story set in a world where people are pushing themselves to their limits to protect the familiarity of a miserable world for no clear benefit in a cycle that will eventually end of its own volition but could be ended earlier very much fits the bill of whats happening right now

wild proposition: stuff can be about two things at once

what could this possibly be a metaphor for!

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other people have joked to me that wynn is a game for people with ADHD because it requires zero attention span and i agree that thats fun for a bit but from the moment you step into ragni you have 10+ choices of stuff to do at all times i hate content saturation so bad

 

Um... Killing the Old Gods?
Again, another common theme in mythology, so unless you're attempting that mythologies from over 2000 years ago are about late-stage capitalism... um.

I really hate this argument.
First off, it's a logical fallacy, specifically Affirming the consequent:
Meaning, because one thing is true (People have political opinions) means something else is true by default (Games always have a political opinion.)
Second off, games are made by more than one person, it would be a miracle if this was somehow true.
Like, unless a development team agreed to make this their theme, I highly doubt it would just work its way into a video game.

 

not saying they were about that when they were written, saying that its very easy to read them as a metaphor now

lol what
okay one at a time how is this affirming the consequent
secondly, its not that games in and of themselves have opinions - they arent people, they dont hold opinions, they cant think for themselves, they are merely platforms on which values can be conveyed. the english language has no opinion on whether you pour the cereal or the milk first, but i can still use it to say "hey, pour the cereal first" while its still inaccurate to say "the english language thinks you gotta pour the cereal first"

this happens all the time what are you on about
as somebody whos been on the content team for nearly three years i saw the whole realm of light questline get created and the theme i talked about above of 'passing the torch' was a hundred percent not intentional. it was in no way planned to read like a confession from lari, nor a meditation for her to make peace with herself, but thats what it became. to put it mildly, i'm a left leaning person, and although i made aldoreis secret part one with zero intent to leave a message in it its very easy to read it as a question of "does intent matter when doing things that traditionally have an assigned moral value to it?" did i intend to put that question in there? fuck no. was it somewhere subconscious in my mind? abso fucking lutely.

 

yeah i think i gotta agree with you here, good game and good people

 

vouch

 

sure some relatively

 

I've already explained this, in fact, I stated why in the thing you quoted, let me say it again?
It's affirming the consequent because it suggesting that due to one thing being true, something else is true, I.e.:
because people have political opinions, games also have a political opinion.

Secondly, I was literally just responding to this:

All I did was use opinion in place of agenda.
It wasn't even like a part of my argument, it was just how I reworded what you said, so I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing against it, considering it's what you suggested in the first place.
And please don't argue over such a specific word choice. I mean you were so focused on the fact that I said opinion instead of agenda for some reason that you failed to even actually say anything about what I actually said.

This, honestly, don't agree with.
Political agendas don't have to be intentional, I will agree with you on that, but I disagree that all games have political opinions. I mean, I actually didn't get this at all from this quest, but seeing as you're the creator, I can't disagree.

That being said, I feel like we should either stop arguing or move on to discord/private message on the forums.
I personally like debates, but we are 100% derailing the thread now.

 

-Class balancing could be a bit better
-i personally think its very hard to run a hyperoffensive build. There is always that one spell a boss has that 1 shots me and I legit can't dodge it (no indicator or it happens insanely fast)
-any lore that involves lari is terrible imo

 

causality is a fallacy btw. i fell down the stairs and because i fell down the stairs i got a bloody nose. literally affirming the consequent (yes im ironically strawmanning)

yes, theres a lot more to that statement. i guess i wrongly assumed you could fill in the gaps but id be happy to explain some other time

my point isnt even exactly that all games have political opinions, should have phrased that better, but rather that all games can be viewed with a political lens that can reveal something about the philosophy of the people that made it - im coming from the point of view where i find that extremely interesting, and i understand that's not for everybody, all i meant to say was that all games can be analyzed politically and that it speaks to the ineptitude of writers when there's no theme (not just no themes but no original themes). thematics and metaphors are pretty universally recognized as a good thing among writers

fair, i think my confusion came from the idea that in my mind, at least, there's an important distinction between opinion and agenda - agendas, as i've been taught, means that you are attempting to convince someone (in our case, a player) of something, you're trying to call them to action. opinions on the other hand arent about attempting to convince, but rather putting some new idea out there - its fine for games not to have an agenda (which is much more about intent) but when they lack any opinion it becomes boring from a literary perspective. i don't believe minecraft for instance has a political agenda (ehhh) , ie it never attempts to actively convince me of something, but can still be analyzed politically, and appears to be opinionated to some degree. my criticism of wynns thematics (lack thereof) was intended more to be "its fine for wynn to have no agenda but the fact that it has no opinions and parallel to that has no overarching themes or metaphors makes it super one dimensional and really boring to pick apart"