"It's time now, after 10 years, to really focus on the endgame," jokes Francis, the lead dev and original founder of Minecraft's biggest MMO, Wynncraft. It looks and plays like a total conversion mod with remarkably deep systems and a huge variety of content, but amazingly it's all server-side, with no mods required from players. All it takes is Minecraft Java and the server IP: play.wynncraft.com. The game-within-a-game private server has been going strong since 2013, and has grown big enough to fund and require a team of paid developers working alongside a group of volunteers, with contributors from both sides generally starting simply as Wynncraft fans.
Francis got into Minecraft through YouTube content, and even after deciding to open his own private server with some friends, didn't expect Wynncraft "to last that long." The RuneScape-influenced MMO ended up becoming one of the mega-hit crafting game's biggest private servers, and still notches well over 1,000 concurrent players daily, with upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 unique players a month. There are 1,380 folks online as I write this, per the official website, which carries the same blurb I wrote in PC Gamer what feels like a million years ago after I first discovered and tried Wynncraft for myself and called it a full-fat Minecraft MMO.
Wynncraft remains a fascinating display of Minecraft used as a platform for other games, and an equally interesting look into MMO development. "Minecraft, in my opinion, is the original [user-generated content] platform," Francis says. "And they've been dethroned since then by Roblox and maybe even Fortnite, you could argue, but while it's not the perfect engine, it's a really well-made game to be an engine. And I really wish Mojang would recognize that a bit more."
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After a decade largely defined by exploration-focused content that's very solo-friendly, Francis and the Wynncraft team are now investing more heavily into aspirational endgame content, and consequently facing the same sort of challenges as genre giants like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14.
"I think endgame is the weakest part of Wynncraft," Francis tells me. "And it has been the weakest part for a long time. All the updates after [patch 2.0] have been in some ways endgame-related. So the first one we did, we improved housing, which in my opinion is some sort of endgame activity because it's what you do when you're kind of bored. After that we released the Lootrun update, and Lootrunning is a totally endgame activity where you're given a set of little tasks around the map and you have to get there and do them as fast as possible.
"The next update that we're also working on, that is not yet done, is also endgame related. So I'd say the main focus ever since 2.0 has been to improve the endgame, and I don't think we're fully there yet where we have a very nice, repeatable endgame for everyone to enjoy. But I think we're making good improvements at a good pace, and within a year or two years, I think we're gonna have a really kick ass endgame."
The endgame of endgame
The problem, of course, is that players can and will devour MMO content infinitely faster than developers can possibly make it, and then they'll immediately slam their hands on the dinner table and ask for more. "Even though at some point I think we're gonna get to a nice place, of course the players will never admit that," Francis says. "There's always going to be more endgame to do.
"I'd say endgame is in a good place when there's a variety of different activities you can do that don't feel like a chore. I don't know if you've ever played things such as Auto Chess or Hearthstone Battlegrounds, these kinds of games. I like what they're doing where they take things away, and then add something else to replace it. And it always keeps things fresh, it keeps things similar to what you're used to, but it's different. And it feels, you know, still a bit fresh. And you do that every few months. I'd love if our endgame eventually feels a bit like that. Once we have a lot of systems in place, which we're still working on, once that's done, we can add and move things around every few months to keep it fresh the best way we can. Once we can achieve that, I'd say our endgame is pretty good."
Fortunately, there's already a blueprint for this in Wynncraft. "The Lootrun system, for example, the way it works, it's a bit like a roguelike. You start a game and it gives you a choice between some challenges and they each give some buffs. You select your challenge and then you get another choice. It's like selecting a room in The Binding of Isaac or something like that. And there's a lot of layers to this system. You select the challenge, but the challenge itself can be different. The rewards that it gives can be different.
"There's a system called missions that are basically stolen from Hearthstone Battlegrounds, with their quests, where you do a little bit of tasks and then you get a big reward that stays for your entire run, and that can also be removed or it can be changed and something else can take its place. There's a lot of layers built upon this that are easy to hit."
This is all part of the ultimate goal, the white whale for Francis in particular, to make Wynncraft as distinct as possible, and maybe one day even a standalone game. Wynncraft's ongoing success and popularity is already striking enough, but a new MMO incubated in Minecraft would really be something to see.
"I think eventually, we'll be able to have a game that, when you log into it, it doesn't feel like Minecraft. It's still blocks and everything, but everything looks different. Everything feels different. And if we were able to, we could make a standalone version of it. And people wouldn't say, oh, it's a Minecraft server. They would say, oh, it's an MMO."
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