It's certainly a game that requires friends to truly enjoy.
I play alongside four other people who each have their favoured skill set that they put the most time into, for example, VincentRuth is very much the blades & armour smith alongside a high quality mason (building houses and walls etc), I'm a leatherworker & bowyer and all of us have fighting/hunting skills to defend what we own.
The combat is very much like a first person old style RPG, such as Baldur's Gate. So sort of D&D in essence. You have skills, you have equipment & that all adds up to percentage chances to do things, such as block with your shield, parry with your sword or land a hit with your maul. Each individual weapon has it's own skill set alongside an overarching weapon type skill. (Same for quite a few skills really)
All those skills add up to give you your ability to fight, so when you initiate combat, you do have a few options, and more when you increase in those skills, but for example, I am 70 fighting skill (so I have hit a reasonable level over my four months of play) so I have the ability to choose where to attack in a compass type way, and I can do "special" moves dependent on where I am choosing to attack. For example I can do a flourish of light attacks to help stop the opposition from doing a their own special (interrupt) or I could simply pommel strike them in the ribs to make them lose stamina, and therefore fight less efficiently.
It's not a "basic MMO" type of combat, it's very much a take on D&D I feel.
On the rest of the stuff, it can be quite tedious, such as the skill grinding, repeating actions & it can really make you think about macroing, but the best way to sort of ignore that is to either do it in short bursts, or do something else at the same time. I personally have youtuber/tv playing on 2/3 of my screen while the other 1/3 is my Wurm client with all the items laid out in the most click efficient manner.
As someone previously said, most of the world is player made, entire cities to the smallest of villages have been created by players, the land has been shaped by them to accommodate their ideas. I personally love the sense of achievement of seeing a hilly area become a flat plane let alone before you've built what you want there.
I was lucky enough to be taken in by the Templars when I first started, they took me from the spawn, they gave me armour & set me on my way to being useful to them. I would do the same for anyone who wants to play too.
