Thoughts on WynnCraft 2.0 from an old veteran

Yo, I'm Magic and I've been a WynnCraft player since 2013! I'm currently doing a challenge in which I have to write about something different everyday. Even though I've always been pretty reserved on the forums as a player, I always loved reading forum posts here diving deep into different topics, and I miss the sense of community I had with the game. And with WynnCraft 2.0 on the horizon, I had some thoughts that I wanted to share with the community, both constructive criticism in regards to the player experience and praise for the things the Wynn team have been able to accomplish!

First off, the trailer. Man, whoever creates them needs a raise. The edits are so impactful but are also simple and not overwhelming. If there's one thing WynnCraft has taught me, it's how to generate hype.

To me, Wynn 2.0 is reminiscent of the Gavel Update, which in my opinion, was the best update (sorry Corkus). I remember watching the 30 minute gavel update video on repeat for hours and staying up all night waiting for the update to release.

The new ultimate abilities from powders, even though they weren't incredibly powerful, made me feel unique and like an actual person in the WynnCraft universe. Same with mythic items, I wanted one so badly that when I finally saved up enough liquid emeralds to buy one, I spent all my remaining emeralds building around it (shoutout grimtrap). I also enjoyed reading the different questlines, which had a lot of personality. The passion of the team was incredibly clear, and made me even more excited than the time I first discovered Wynn.

Now, I really enjoyed reading through the questing aspect, but the star of the show was undeniably the combat. And, I believe that this is true for the average WynnCraft player. The average player is someone who gets really hyped for the combat and seeing all the cool environments to fight in. With that in mind, I think the current beginning WynnCraft experience can be pretty restricting and hard to get into. I was recently playing with a friend who was completely new to the game, and we constantly found cool areas we wanted to explore and couldn't enter because it was restricted behind a quest. I hadn't played the game for awhile so I couldn't remember where the NPCs were and all of this made the adventure feel a lot more hollow. Now, I know that the Wynn team have done research on player retention and have made changes to the beginning experience to help better this, but I think Wynn still has so much potential to become more accessible if there was a way to make NPCs optional for accessing all areas.

One example of this is Elden Ring, an open world RPG game, that has recently made headlines as one of the best games of the decade. Elden Ring's lore is incredibly rich and expansive, yet there's not a lot of dialogue and most of the game is not locked behind talking to NPCs. You can quite literally explore anywhere you want, even parts of the game that could have questlines that you haven't activated yet. The Dark Souls genre is known to be notoriously difficult and hard for beginners, yet Elden Ring somehow managed to break into the mainstream with over 10 million copies sold in a couple weeks. Now, obviously, there were many other factors for Elden Ring's success but I think this is one of them. I don't think WynnCraft and Elden Ring is a fair comparison (ER is made by an established game studio with lots of support structures and also it's a standalone game) but I think there's always something valuable about learning from the success of others and seeing how it could be implemented effectively in our own projects.

Another critique about accessibility is the crafting system. Now, I don't know what the community sentiment is on this currently, but I imagine it isn't that overwhelmingly positive. I could be entirely wrong, but looking at it from an impressions standpoint, the crafting system feels too complicated. There are so many different types of materials, and although I think the team has done a good job on making it feel straightforward, all the different little complexities make me feel overwhelmed. I would bet that high level crafting is probably one of the least used mechanics in the game.

However, I am a fan of the gathering resources aspect, seeing different quarries in which you can hop on by and mine some stuff is a great addition. But, making it so every tree in the world can be cut down, although I admire the ambition, is a bit overkill. Seeing the levels of each tree I come across makes me feel less immersed in the environment and less able to appreciate my surroundings when I'm always subconsciously making a choice whether or not to cut down a tree.

Also, having levels in chat include someone's crafting level feels confusing when combat level is more relevant in most situations. There is a toggle for it, but for new players, it just adds to the complexity. If I'm feeling overwhelmed, I can only imagine what the average new player might be thinking. These things could 100% could be just a me thing, so I would be interested to hear what your thoughts are!

This brings us to WynnCraft 2.0, which I think is steering Wynn back in the right direction. Seeing the different skill trees and character archetypes, I have no doubt it'll have the same effect as the elements and powder abilities during the gavel update, making each player feel more unique and immersed into the combat and world of Wynn. Imagine being a specialized sniper as an archer or an assassin that has necromancy skills to summon the dead. This freedom is what I think is crucial for player retention, since the end-goal is more of an open-ended question based on the player's preferences and highlights the most enjoyable aspect of Wynn: the combat.

It also enhances the social MMO aspect because each player will have the option to be unique from each other, and it would be exciting to have a variety of playstyles in guilds. I'm sure the update won't be perfect, but I'm really glad to see WynnCraft continuously innovating and steering back into the direction on enhancing the core gameplay. I probably have some basic takes, but hopefully I provided a unique perspective from a standpoint of player retention and growing the server. That's about it. Looking forward to it!

 

Glad to see you around again, man. This update will hopefully be one of Wynncrafts best, I think I speak for the whole team when I say how excited I am to see how everyone else enjoys it :D

 

One thing I will say about looking back at Gavel is that most of the issues which made it bad at launch have been fixed so while it's really easy to say it was good, and it's fine for that to be your opinion, I think it's a bit unfair to Corkus considering that was almost perfect at launch and didn't need any patches over time to iron out its issues. Another thing is that while we associate a lot of stuff with Gavel, a lot of features people think came from Gavel were actually from the gameplay update which kind of just highlights all the issues Gavel had. 2.0 definitely looks like the Gavel of spells but ideally it won't be anything like Gavel at launch since I don't think the community can really handle something like that right now.

Beyond that, I agree with your sentiment towards crafting, even the people who have put in the hours think it's bad, though I don't think your reason is right. I'm not sure the issues are with the crafting system itself, people tend to like the complexity since it gives lots of options, the issue more so with how long it takes to access the actual potential of it and that most of what you can make once you do is pretty much garbage and is a pain in the ass to use. Only a handful of professions are useful and to make anything worth using it takes either way too many emeralds to avoid gathering all together or it takes hundreds of hours, even with triple gathering/crafting XP and double speed. Unless you have access to bombs or parties, getting to a workable level is basically impossible and even once you're there, the gear you make is almost always worse than alternatives which are easier to get and have no durability. The only really good crafting professions in my opinion are cooking, potion making and scribing since they're basically just free buffs and can be crafted to give minor bonuses really easily. Getting to the point though, there have been some minor improvements but I don't think anybody is happy with how it is, most people just tolerate it since it's something to do.

 

Salted, he makes the trailers.
Not sure it's possible for him to get a raise beyond people buying more shit from the wynn store.

He makes all the trailers.

 

Oh also powder abilities didn't come out in Gavel, in fact, the Gavel update removed powders entirely.
The gameplay update about a year later readded them.