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Return of Text-Based Games?
twivel asks: "I've noticed a trend recently. I've had many friends return to text based MUDs even after a couple years of playing MMORPGs like Everquest and WoW. When I've asked them why they returned, they've said that the virtual community in MUDs really seems to set them apart from the newer MMORPGs. In MMORPGs, you just get lost in the numbers. In the forums on places like MUDConnect, a popular MUD listing site, you find people claiming that the MUD community is actually growing. For those of you who've experienced both forms of entertainment, would you agree? While the cost is much less (many great MUDs are 100% free), how would you rate your overall experience with MUDs compared to newer forms of online entertainment?" A bit of this discussion was touched on not too long ago, but it would be interesting to note if the MUD community is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, as the article implies.
OK, reading through the original post, I think I can see the problem that some people have with MMORPGs. Thing is, though, I don't agree that this is a problem inherant in the genre, it's more a matter of how players approach it.
The key factor here is size. I've done one or two MUDs and most of these had player counts in the hundreds, or occasionally the low thousands. A large-scale commercial graphical MMORPG, on the other hand, isn't really commercially viable with less than about 50,000 players.
There are some obvious implications here. Even if the MMORPG in question takes the common approach of parcelling players on different servers, with average populations of 10,000 or so (which is a pretty low estimate for a lot of the games out there), it's always going to be more people than you can get to know. Hell, my secondary school had 1,000 pupils and I doubt I knew more than 150 or so, even on a passing basis. And that was without the problems of location and language barriers that you have in a MMORPG.
The result of this is that a player who doesn't have a good, consistent group of friends in a MMORPG, be they real-life friends or online acquiantances, is going to have a pretty lonely experience. In a MUD, on the other hand, with just a few hundred people, it's easier to become a known face much more quickly.
Now personally, I *much* prefer playing a graphical MMORPG. These games are designed to be played for pretty serious amounts of time and if I'm going to look at anything for that long, I want my eye-candy, goddamit. Moreover, I'm always impressed when the developers of a MMORPG manage to come up with a new visual location design that really knocks me back. Both FFXI and WoW have managed this fairly regularly (although you have to get pretty deep into the Zilart and Promathia strands of FFXI to find the prettiest areas). The quality of service and regularity of updates that you get from a well-run commercial MMORPG is more than worth the monthly fee.
I guess if there's a solution for people who are finding it hard to "click" with a MMORPG and missing the interractions of a MUD, it's to find a regular group. Either throw heavy things at real life friends until they sign up, or actively seek out a group of like-minded players in game. A good guild/linkshell of 50-100 people, with its own rivalries, goals and ethos, can completely transform your gaming experience.
It was bad enough we had to endure the onslaught of connections from *.aol.com in the mid '90s. Now we have to assuage hordes of disaffected EverCrack babies? Nooo!!1eleventyone
Speak truth to power.
My name is MUD!
With a mud, at least the ones that I play, you may not have numbers anywhere as high as in a MMORPG, but it's generally alot easier to make an influence on the surrounding world. I'd say that there are alot more MUDs that, when big things happen, the world is actually changed.
MMORPGs might be huge, but at least with MUDs, they generally at least have the RP that the so-called RPGs ascribe to.
Luke
----
Do you like ketchup? I just found the most hilarious stand-up monologue all about ketchup. Go read it!
Go nethack! OSS Dungeon scrolling, text based adventure!
It's only been a few months since I last played TradeWars.
I just, love the game.
Pretty Pictures!
Actually, the AOL MUDs were my first ones. Gemstone, I think it was called, was the first time that I learned about Role Playing (even though I never got farther than delivering tons of packages to people), and I've been hooked ever since.
Luke
----
Do you like ketchup? I just found the most hilarious stand-up monologue all about ketchup. Go read it!
By the way, the MUD I play is called Dark Mists http://darkmists.org/ and my character is Nij so if any of you want to stop by I'd be happy to show you around.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
Is there a web-interface for MOOs/MUDs that still allows user-programmed experiences? I'd love to see this available on the same wide-open terms as (eg) pbWiki, so that any old web community could use it as a chatspace...
Zork
nuff said
o/~ Join us now and share the software
The difference between MUDs and MMORPGs is the same as the difference between a book and a movie. Sometimes nothing can beat our own imaginations.
This post approved by Shampoo.
With the advent of "Web 2.0", AJAX, and the prevalence of various CSS and JavaScript tricks, might it be possible to bring a popular text game to the masses via the Web?
MUDs have always seemed like the reserve of techies or people "in the know". With the aforementioned technologies, you could have MUD style games, even with graphics and avatars, on the Web and able to be played by anyone. Has anyone already started to make moves in that direction? Perhaps even Flash could used as the client technology. Anything that loads on a Web page quickly and easily.
Im glad you consider yourself the center of the universe and all, but have you thought that for this to be considered an actual "trend" you would have to have spoken with at least one hundred thousand people just to cover 10% of the worldwide MMORPG population? (which reaches more than one million users?)
.. if anything the number of sales for WOW show say the "trend" is for casual gamers to get INTO mmorpgs not out.
Also
How can this become an article is slashdot?
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
I co-founded and coded 100k lines of C for Avendar: The Crucible of Legends. I think they've remained steady now for about 7 years of uptime as far as players. But it's true - the admins get to know you, the players really know each other, and you can actually engender a lot more character vs character conflict without anonymous asses ruining the process as would happen in an MMO.
I also scripted and built for an NWN persistent world, City of Arabel. It was and remains one of the most popular PWs for NWN - pretty much pegged to capacity in prime time (and sometimes way beyond prime time) for the past 3 years. One of the reasons PWs get so popular and remain so is that the smaller playerbase allows you to develop intimate plots and interactions between characters. With just 50-55 players at peak, spread across a level range, Arabel resembles a tabletop D&D game as much as it resembles an MMO.
Moreover, one thing MMOs have really lacked is personalization. You don't interact in a dynamic manner with NPCs of note, gods, and GMs do not set up and run quests. That's decidedly untrue in the smaller scale games. For Arabel, for example, and other NWN PWs, it's common to have DMs running quests. I used to start all sorts of things - evil mage kidnaps PC, and her friends assemble a group to rescue her; a city official from Arabel requests help to accomplish some task; an earthquake opens a gateway down to undiscovered caverns where riled-up elementals guard ancient catacombs; a mage in town loses control of a summoning circle and demons begin to pour through onto the Material Plane. What made these events special is that everyone participating in them was experiencing them for the first (and generally only) time. This isn't like an MMO where you can hit a database to figure out how to solve the quest that's bothering you or find where to get the phat loot.
I think there's a big future for an MMO with a dual-subscription model, where there's a customized service that gives you unique opportunities to adventure and emulate the tabletop sort of experience. Or perhaps a game will come out like NWN, where there's a client, a toolset, a DM client, and an "official" persistent world that plays like an MMO, but also you can use the tools to create your own. Imagine if players could craft their own city areas and script their own quests in City of Heroes or World of Warcraft. Imagine having a small WoW server with a few GMs that were out to customize play like a traditional DM, and only 40 players on at a time.
What archaic technology will be employed next? Telegraph? Snail mail? Birthday bard? Just kidding, folks. We all know that nostalgia died in the 80s.
I've been playing MUDs for about 8 or 9 years now, and MMOs for maybe half that. I've found that the only two things the latter are better at are
1. Graphics (obviously) and
2. Sheer numbers
For everything else, from combat to PVP to player housing, I've found some MUD that's done it better. If I found a MMORPG that was nothing more than a graphical conversion of one of my favorite MUDs (say, DragonRealms), I'd be there in an instant. I have to also wonder how many additional people would try it out then, when they wouldn't give consideration to a MUD.
The Kingdom of Loathing is a sort of middle ground between them. Extremely tight community, mostly text-based puzzles, RPG-style gaming, and a buttload of goofy humor thrown in. There are others that are similar, too, but they didn't grab me, so I don't have links.
I forget what 8 was for.
Not only are MUDs still being created, but even the MUD engines are still in development. I can think of three off the top of my head that are being programmed in .NET/Mono (TigerMUD, PMud, and MITE).
.Net to compile scripts on the fly in C# or Boo. Very cool stuff. :)
As the lead programmer for MITE, I can tell you that it's really nice having the Code DOM in
I think the issue relates to how you define community. I am an avid WoW player and completely hooked on the game still. To me the community isn't the entire player population. It is broken into subsets.
All Players -> Server -> Faction (Alliance/Horde) -> Level Range -> Guild -> Friends in Guild.
The lowest common denominator in WoW is really people in your faction, since you can't communicate with the enemy at all. Also, you don't really do much with people outside of your level range, so those guys are the ones you see most of the time.
I really only consider my guild mates to be my real community. We mostly do instances together, so I see them a majority of the time without a whole lot of interaction with other people. I have a fairly large subset of people in my guild I would consider friends and mostly spend my time with that subset.
I don't think it is fair to say that because MUDS have less people, you have more community. I just don't think you can define "community" as the millions of players that have accounts.
/. ++
I have been seriously considering trying my hand at a MUD.
With any game, especially RPGs, forgetting that you are Tim, Level 47 Copier Repairman, and getting really into being Dante, Level 27 Blackguard, is key.
Not to sound elitist, but the kiddies and the gold farmers and the ninja looters just f-ing *ruin* it for me. Would these kids have even *played* D&D?
D&D required imagination, as I imagine text-based adventures do. Who is usually in posession of that attribute? Intelligent, thoughtful folks. Right now I just want a group of gamers who share the same values I do, cooperation and selflessness.
The rush of overcoming an otherwise impossible obstacle using the entire party's talents is incredibly fun. As a WoW player, I miss it.
Area Loser Reports from Mom's Basement that Other Area Losers Returning to free MUDS after Mom Cancels their WOW subscriptions...
If you don't like something in a MUD you can write a patch, bug the IMMs to do it for you, or even become an IMM yourself.
If you don't like something in EverQuest you just have to complain in the forums and hope someone with power reads your plea.
All the kiddie jerks that play the MMOs that trask talk, l33t speak, etc that just ruin the games. Percival Role Play server in DAOC was simply the best place I have ever seen for any MMO. All the kiddies stayed off of it. Too bad Mythic just ran DAOC into the dirt.
Also, since MUDs are a smaller community and you know everyone, you play for different reasons. I stopped actively trying to level a few years ago and now I go to hang out with my friends and talk. We have large discussions and really echo the chat nature fo the medium. These kind of group interactions I haven't seen in MMORPGs.
Someone else mentioned how joining a clan can help your MMORPG experience and that is true, just finding a group of people to interact with. I have made my friends over years so it isn't just about playing the game anymore. Most i have never met in person but we sometimes talk on the phone and sometimes there are real world gatherings. Sure, you can go out and grind levels if that is your thing, but that gets boring very quickly. I like to socialize and have fun and be mentally stimulated. When I want mindless entertainment I switch to some video game (currently GTA 3)
Best thing about MUDs? You can play at work. Text-based, so not as obvious. You have a telnet connection, not a web-based interface that IT can track every click on.
My favorite, circa 1995, was the Crystal Shard...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
The generally smaller playerbase of a text-based game provides a number of advantages (when viewed through the lens of my personal tastes): greater attention from GMs, greater opportunity for non-combat roleplay, greater visibility as a player and a stronger sense of common interest among the players. With a smaller base of players, a text game relies more on each individual member of the game, driving up each individual's "screen time" (no pun intended) in the stories and their value to the game, those running it and their fellow players.
When playing M** games I've formed and strengthened what I felt were genuine friendships, both offline and on (some RL friends would join the same games and some fellow players would turn out to be local and become RL friends as well). When playing MMORPGs, I felt lost in an immense crowd. Even when I had friends playing DAoC, it seemed to take impossible acts just to get together to group. For my money, they're too much a pain and leave me too much another face in the oversized crowd.
I get why people enjoy MMORPGs, and that not everyone has the same difficulty trying to navigate the B1ff-screaming tweens to find friends, but the more ascetic environment of your average M** seems to do a lot of that weeding out for me.
I played Simutronic's text based MUD, DragonRealms, for 8 years and have played most every graphical MMORPG to date since then. I was lured away by the eye candy of the 3D world, but I have never had as rich an experience in any MMORPG that I have had in my MUD days. The communities in MUDs seem much more close. Roleplaying is much more prevalent. Experiences seem much more fulfilling. I find my imagined view of the world I am reading about in a text based game is much more enriched and detailed than what I am 'force fed' in a 3D MMORPG.. It is like comparing a great book to a movie made about the book.. Sure it wonderful to see your favorite world revealed in a movie (LOTR, for an obvious example).. but often people much prefer the details of the written works...
But NWN has already done it. It has a toolset that lets you construct and script (in a remarkably C-influenced language) to your heart's content. You "paint" down tiles, write dialogue in an editor, etc. Then you can start up the server, people can join your game. You, meanwhile, connect with DM client. It gives you an invisible DM avatar that moves at high speed, and a radial menu that let's you quickly "possess" any NPC and use it's attacks or speak as it. Meanwhile, you have a "creator" menu which can spawn placeables (like furniture or rocks), creatures (monsters or allied NPCs), items. Using scripts you can launch dynamic visual effects with the avatar (say, having an earthquake shake the ground as you spawn some placeable boulders to block the PCs path in a cave). There's also a selector and to let you move NPCs around from area or area, move PCs, kill things off, remove encounter triggers, and so on. And that's just the inherent stuff; using scripts attached to custom coded wands and dialogues you can do literally anything the engine can do. On Arabel, we did things like script DM wands that would clone a PC so we could attack them with their mirror self (in one memorable quest, we had pcs lost in a maze with random teleporters splitting up the party, and then clones of their party members showed up to "re-unite" with them; then at vulnerable moments, the clones would turn on them).
Now, NWN is less sophisticated than some MMOs - City of Heroes, most notably, is truly a completely 3D world. But the truth is, MOST MMOs are really 2d games rendered in 3D graphics. If there's only one "plane" upon which your character walks, then the game is effectively 2D for most considerations. World of Warcraft has water that makes this slightly untrue, and City of Heroes has full blown flight and superleaping and the vertical is a huge factor in combat, but look at Guild Wars... you can't go down a mildly graded hill unless they set up the walkmesh that way.
Anyhow, you can make things as fixed or as loose as you like with NWN, and I think the whole concept is equally applicable to MMOs, or to a hybrid MMO that combined an official world serve with a moddable user-usable server.
NCMUDD, a Diku that has been around since 1990. Player numbers have declined a bit over the last few years, but a lot of new features have been added.
telnet://ncmud.org:9000Connect to NC
http://ncmud.org/NCMUDD
-JP
I know it has been said in a number of ways but here is my observation. I am not a big online game player, I tend to enjoy my solo experiences rather than deal with people and all their downfalls online (cheating, ego's, n00b's, etc.) I recently bit th ebullet and bought Guild Wars as it was billed as a skill/strategy over hours played game. This was the case the first week, then it went horribly off course.
Now it is filled with all the usual crap. I put in three solid months and always hope for it to turn around but it isn't going to. So ultimately I spend all of my time solo or with AI henchmen to form my parties. I was in a solid guild but they all left for WoW. Not having any RL friends that play games I'm stuck.
The sheer number of players in the game and no real way to hook up with like-minded folks leaves you alone in a sea of people. This is no fun. A MUD has a more intimate setting and feel and even though I can go in not knowing anyone I can make friends and team up within a week and have a good feel for everyone involved. I wish it could be this way in an MMO. Multi-game guilds/clans are worse because they are a defined structure and everyone is not welcoming to outsiders.
It makes playing a game into a big social experiment... the exact thing I play games to get away from.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
You actually get to roleplay your character, which is an important part of the experience. Instead of killing X number of rats so you can gain points to kill bigger things, or mining gold so you spend more billable hours on the game, the range of options and quests is much broader.
Certainly the ability of the players to customize their environment is also much higher, as well as being easier to accomplish. Adding flair and pizzazz to a player can be as easy as modifying a text string.
MUDS at least to me offer another set of advantages in that I can often play them on any connection, on any computer and with any amount of time. When I played WOW sometimes I was virtually coerced by people I guilded with to spend 3-4 hours clearing a dungeon. That is a stupid amount of time to play a game for me so I quit.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
yeah I miss the old days of mudding. My personal favorite was Looneymud it was something totally unconventional compared to other muds which were usually D&D based. This MUD was more based on television, cartoons, and movies. It was a place where you could encounter just about anything, whether it be Bert and Ernie or Darth Vader. I would spend hours exploring its intricaces. I check in now and then and it is still up after all these years, just not as busy. If you are looking for a place to kill a lot of time and some very strange mobs, check it out sometime. :-)
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
all solo-player though (so possibly off-topic)
All the MUDs, MUSHes, MUCKs and MOOs I've ever been on have been communal efforts that still carry out the self-policing the Net of Yore was capable of providing its users.
People on MUDs are well spoken, too. These are worlds made of words, and if you want to be a real character or stick out from the crowd, you have to chat and write well.
Not to mention the general quality of person you find there. I have never once been called 'n00b' or 'fag' or 'looser' [sic] on a MUD.
I enjoy CS and Halo and all (sorry, I've avoided the MMORPGs all these years for time & finance benefits), but not enough to completely counteract the negativity of a bunch of illiterate 12-year-olds trying to out-curse each other with the same five words over and over and over and over... you know?
Just a quick post to pimp my favourite Diku-based MUD, Turf.
Not many people seem to be on there nowadays, you virtually have the server to yourself. Unfortunately, that means it sucks for grouping when you're trying to level up.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
My ISP doesn't support a Telnet client. *sob*
Help me, web-based app. You're my only hope.
I agree with most of your thoughts, and this gave me an idea:
What about MORPGs that are designed for a small number of players and run off a clan server, in the way Half-Life mods like CS usually do? This would allow the developing company to do without a large server farm and thus cut down on operating expenses.
Think of it as a cross between Morrowind and Counterstrike. For games with some FPS action built in, this might work even better than traditional MMORPGs. After all, Counterstrike and Call Of Duty multiplayer works fine, with much less lag issues than the big MMORPGS seem to have.
Microsoft has halfway done it BTW with Freelancer. It misses most of the usual leveling schemes and tends to be shallow in the long run - but the basic concept is there.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yes, after reviewing specs on the graphics chips in new consoles, I'm *sure* they are preparing for the return of text-based games...
Christmas is the opposite of theft. See?
When I've asked them why they returned, they've said that the virtual community in MUDs really seems to set them apart from the newer MMORPGs
This is probably true as long as you avoid MUDs with less than ~30 people on-line at once. In these MUDs everyone who's anyone seems to know each other, and they are usually very cliquey. Playing on servers like that can become 6 months of fraternity hazing instead of 6 months of gaming. The smaller MUDs are even worse, usually occupied by a ring-leader admin and a handful of 'admins' who bully and abuse the server. I remember this one wasteland themed MUD where the admins were so abusive that they threatened to ban me because they didn't like my character description.
Lots of people have experienced this kind of thing on CS servers, where 95% of the people who apply for admin do so in order to bully the other players with threats of being kicked/banned/llama'ed if someone says or does something the admin doesn't like. This is very prevelant on some of the smaller MUDs also. There are exceptions, but they seem to be in the minority.
In short, if you've never played a MUD before but would like to try one...do some research first and try to find a MUD that caters to at least 50 players online at once. This increases your chances of finding a game you'll enjoy.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I've heard plenty of people rejoice at reaching level 50 of their favorite MMORPG, but my high school friends had MUDs to thank when they wrote their homework at 100 WPM.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
End of the Line: One of the oldest
LP Muds inexistence -- since 1989!
Here is a nice quote, that is as
acurate today as it was nearly
10 years ago:
"Once in, avoid everything that moves. Only
the swift thinking and swift moving survive.
Don't touch anything without checking it out
with a toss-away char first. Power is currently
held by a group of petty, cruel people. They
will do what they can to prevent you from
suceeding in any way they can. Things change
constantly and without much notification.
You will have your ego crushed, your time
destroyed, and if you complain, there are
many people whose sole job seems to be to
ridicule you. This is their job, and they
take pride in it.
Welcome to Hell." --Minister, 29 Nov 1995
Website: http://www.eotl.org/
Play Here: telnet://mud.eotl.org:2010/
skout perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
In fact, my username basically everywhere is based off the name of the MUD.
I love MUDs.
I would be willing to bet there's a corellation between numbers of MUD players and IT unemployment statistics...
After all... if you're unemployed you can play WoW or EQ...
But a MUD you can play at work and your boss thinks you're coding!
"42"
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if there is a resurgence in interest for MUDs, that it directly correlates to the sheer number of new gamers coming to the internet for the first time, and some percentage of them exploring the history of online games.
Jhyrryl
So what do I do in spider and web to get started?? I'm studying that dang plate for an hour
What about MORPGs that are designed for a small number of players and run off a clan server
I think you missed Neverwinter Night...
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
My old MUD(which I don't run anymore) has recently gone through a resurgance of popularity. Average online players is back up to over 100, with peaks in the 150s and lows in the 40s.
Like most MUDs it's been in one state of development or another for over a decade. It's code pedigree traces back even further to the early days of DIKU and MajorMUD. It's seen staff come and go, changed servers, lowered the GPAS of several groups of college students, and still it endures.
Honestly, I still prefer MUDs to MMOs. They are far more polished, the systems are better, the admin staff is better, the communities are far more tight knit, and well... everything is better except the UI and eye candy.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Again, not inherent in the medium. There are 3D games that actually encourage players to transform the world. A few years back, I played something called AlphaWorlds, which was basically a ginormous plane on which you can put 3D objects, referenced by URL. Stack them, connect them, add JavaScript events, but it's the players creating the world, not the developers.
/me would get you, while the technology allowed for so much more.
Of course, I really want to see something like WoW do more of that. Somewhere in between, really. I don't want people loading gigantic custom penis models into a medieval world, but I do want to, for instance, be able to chop down trees and build a house with them. Or, remember when a community took down the Sleeper in EverQuest? Like that -- maybe a way to actually win the game, make the developers scramble to change the world fast enough so that it visually looks like what the players have socially created...
I've actually had some pretty bad experiences in MUDs. The MUD that was technically the most like AlphaWorlds, one which allowed users the same level of freedom of the original designers, except that you can only attach your stuff to public objects or stuff you own (you can only add a room to a door that you've claimed as yours).... It was a reasonable system, though understandably not too flexible, but the community sucked. People just used it for chat. They claimed it was better than a normal chat because of the "props", but the whole experience there was nothing more than what a
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I started with the internet on text based muds. In fact I've spent the majority of my time on the net playing with them. Most are free. Some, however, manipulate you into paying cash for other things, or they except donations. The majority of muds are very unique as well. Most are built over a codebase like Circle, Diku, Merc, Rom, LPmud, etc. so you can see similarities in the way they play, particularly if you play alot of them. Most muds are very small. Achaea and Aetolia, a couple of the best muds out there, (and produced by the same company; it's a rarity to have a company produce any text based mud), are essentially free, but require you to pay to advance your skillsets after a certain point. Despite being very good MUDs they're also very small. 50 to 100 people on at a time usually. The most populous muds, I know of, Realms of Despair and Aardwolf get, perhaps, 300 to 500 people on at a time. That's fine, because most MUDs can't even handle that much traffic. Typically they are single man operations being run by an admin, off his own paycheck. Usually, he will get people off the web to help build new area's, create new code, and run the MUD, though this is 95% of the time on a purely voluntary basis. The MUDding community is filled with stories of shitty admins (known as Imm's, Imp's, etc.) who hop on for a few days or weeks then are never seen again, ruin the mud, fuck things up, or just turn everything to shit. In my time, I probably looked at, played in depth, skimmed through, or maybe just barely glanced at probably hundreds of MUDs. These days I don't do much with them, though. My recommendations for play: Aardwolf, Achaea/Aetolia. MUDs based on the Godwars codebase are fun, but usually the imm/player immaturity, lack of imm creativity, and general laziness/stupidity ruin the concept of most GW muds (pure player killing and fuck plot). Oh yes, also, Dawn of Demise could have been a good mud, except one of the head coders, Gangien is a worthless piece of shit.
I always compared MUDs to books, and MMORPGs and stuff to movies. Book leave things to your imagination. A dragon there is a *huge* fearsome creature.. You're bent over the keyboard, reading the text, going north and back south immediately to have a quick glimpse.. your imagination does it for you.
I can't help but feel not bound to the MMORPG characters.. it's just a few pixels on a screen.. it's like pacman for me. It's not me, and if it died, *I* didn't die. My remote control midieval guy did.
And just as when you read a book and then see a movie and are dissapointed because you imagined it all differentely, I am dissapointed at the graphical stuff. Maybe I should try a massive first person online roleplaying game or so. Any suggestions?
One of the best: http://www.achaea.com/
I'm currently playing: http://www.imperian.com/
Main site with other MUDs: http://www.ironrealms.com/
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Try walking away from the door and exploring the city. Also try opening the door, pressing the plate, etc.
Community wise, i would say that a MUD definately takes the win here. The main reason for this though is the amount of people. Your average large MMORPG can have hundreds of thousands of people playing total. The MUD's i have seen have a few thousand. I'm sure have more, but not in that large a scale. When you join one of these really large games, do you ever hear about the time long ago when people used to hang out with the creators in game? that was when there were so few people, they could walk around and be respected. This thing happens in MUD's still (from ones i've played, atleast) because the amount of people. Spam is less, player abuse is less, the people who help players react much faster just for this reason. Choosing which you prefer is just a matter of opinion. Want to have a great community? Try a MUD. Want something more visual because your brain is fried? Try a visual MMORPG, not to say all that everyone who plays visual MMORPG's are terrible, but quite a few ;)
Okay, okay....
Geez, now that there are going to be people INTERESTED in this project taking off, I suppose I'll have to get off my arse and get it done (I'm the lone coder at the moment...).
Anywho, the temporary link to the game is http://www.ravenandsons.com/fallen/ and there is a link from there to the Beta Signup.
I look forward to getting this thing fully off the ground! -Tlanuwa (Fitz DeLancey)-
This was actually part of a reply to the web-based "MUD"-style game question, so it's still on topic.
I'm working on the beta-release of a web-based-client text-based, and very open-ended, game called Fallen. The goal is to give the player the ability to do almost anything one can imagine in a role-playing intensive, close, but large, world.
The homepage is http://www.ravenandsons.com/fallen/ and there is a link for beta signups.
I'm a big fan of Babel Engrossing as hell.
Babel -- is it PC-only? where can i download it from... can't see a link on that page
Don't forget about MAngband!
http://www.mangband.org/
It's pseudo-open source, so you can make your own variant if you're so inclined. And also insane.
Click the link that says "IF Archive" next to the label "Where to Get It" on that page to download the ".gam" file for it. GAM files are played with TADS (Text Adventure Development System, IIRC) interpreters, which are available for just about every platform. I use QTads under Linux. There's dozens of them for Windows, and I'm sure there's a few for Macs as well.
I haven't played too many MUDs but the ones I tried I didn't enjoy as much. I think the thing with me is that I don't really like RPing. A decent balance between MUDs and MMORPGs I found is a little gem called EVE Onlinehttp://www.eve-online.com/. In there you have a very rich and detailed back story, a completely player driven market, huge galaxy, small and tight-knit community of around 13,000 or so. People become known throughout the galaxy or you can do your own thing with a few friends and strive to become great. It leans towards the MMORPG side but I find elements of MUDs lingering in there.
Our players tell us that they enjoy Medievia because of the relationships they form with their fellow players. Many of Medievia's players have been logging in for 5 or more years - some even 10 or more! They keep coming back because the friends they met on Medievia keep coming back. They form clans, they have deep bloodlines. They basically have a family away from their family. This is one major reason why MUDs are better than graphical MMORPGs.. you just cannot achieve the level of closeness that you can on a MUD.
Of course there is also the gameplay. MUDs like Medievia that have been around since the early 1990s have been developing for almost 15 years now. Although the development teams are much smaller than that of the larger graphical MMORPGs, they have had much more time to develop deep storylines and complex gameplay. There are so many different aspects of Medievia and the gameplay is so deep that it is impossible to explain the game without spending 2+ hours or just experiencing it yourself. Most of the highly-developed MUDs are the same way - years of development ahead of the more modern games.
http://www.medievia.com/
Soleil