Syp’s out of town this week and has turned the keys to Bio Break over to fellow bloggers. Today’s post comes from Jeremy of Just One MMOre and Massively.
Multi-User Dungeons may have had their fifteen-minutes of fame, but the inheritance of modern gaming sensibilities may help them carve out a new, niche market.
They’ve come a long way in terms of technical achievements, but also have slowly dug deeper caves to hide ever further from the mainstream. They really aren’t that popular, but now MUD communities are practically aiding their invisible status.
There are new ways to highly customize a MUDs client interface to not only change style, size and colors of fonts, but to also create multiple windows to partition different chat-channels. There are now plugins that provide graphical maps and health bars, along with windows to display inventories and character statistics. You can also add music and sound-effects via Triggers.
The new methods of customization may still be too much for anyone who doesn’t know a healthy amount of programming, but mod-packages can be pre-assembed for easy installation into a MUD client. If more modding was done on just today’s most popular MUDs, and communities were more visible, MUDs may be able to find a home in today’s world of eye-melting graphical games.
when I was in college, MUDs were what every college geek was into. They blazed a path across American Universities and kept computer labs filled. It was every MUD players dream to get the coveted Lab Monitor job. MUDs also had a large percentage of players who enjoyed creating all the rooms and flavor-text that gave life to the worlds as much as they liked playing them. Many MUDs and the fans are still around, but they’re as inaccessible as that white tiger that’s always hiding in its cave on the most crowded days at a zoo.
I recently embarked on extensive searches, spending days looking for client plugins and scripts, only to end up with scraps of information. A player came forward, after I asked many questions in MUD game-channels, and offered me a plethora of links, with a wealth of knowledge that left me happy and dumbstruck. In all my searches I didn’t find any of the 7 links he shared with me, and those links lead to even more helpful info filled with player-created plugins and scripts.
Between all this information I’ve accumulated, I found how welcoming and accessible MUDs can be. Popular clients, like Muschclient, offer a wide range of tools and accept plugins programmed by modders to enhance the interactions.
I found a two year old YouTube video showing Aardwolf with a number of impressive plugins. The user shows a detailed inventory window where additional windows pop open when he moves his mouse over the individual items within the inventory. He has graphical world and area maps, health bars and a character statistics window. The two features that brought a smile to my face were the sound options and help window. Through programming responsive Triggers in the client, he has snippets of music and fighting sounds that play when he engages in combat. The help window displays a list of word-commands Aardwolf uses, but the words are hyperlinked in yellow and green. Clicking green linked words actually performs that action in the game and clicking on yellow opens a tool-tip window to explain what the command is for, with ancillary information.
We know graphics aren’t always necessary. There’s a plethora of small and large Flash-based games on the Internet that are played by many. Some of these MUDs have taken advantage of the Flash technology and built themed clients that run in a browser. Whether through Flash or a client, MUDs can look and feel inviting.
I’ve spoken to creators of some of these MUD plugins and they enjoy making them. I had one player repeatedly asking me to ask him for a plugin he could make. The tools, community and technology seems in place, but it needs organized, advertised and made available to the masses.
I’ve yet to fully explore today’s world of MUDs, but Iron Realms Entertainment is the only company or group that appears to be trying to make their small collection of MUDs easy to learn and access.
Many times the work does not equate to the reward. Maybe asking modders to create more plugins for more MUDs and pre-packaging them to be easily installed by the non-technical is asking too much. Even so, it seems if MUD administrators, creators and modders would crawl out of the caves they were half-pushed, half-willingly walked into and create search-friendly sites to aid more than other MUD modders, the games may find a much bigger foothold among todays smartphones, tablets and interactive books.
I remember back in 1997, when I first began having regular computer access at university, I looked over at the screen of the guy sitting next to me in the computer lab and seeing colorful text scrolling all over the screen. I couldn’t resist asking, “Hey, what’s that?”
He showed me how to connect to one, and from that moment on I was hooked. I can even remember the name of my first MUD, which was a terrible stock ROM (Tempered Steel). I also decided on the worst character combination ever — a pixie thief, who had terrible stats because I didn’t know you could reroll, and I remember I couldn’t even level past 15 because I couldn’t kill anything and kept dying myself.
I decided to branch out and tried a number of different MUDs (Rogue Winds being one of the more stand-out experiences back then), before I found my true home in Achaea, an Iron Realms MUD. I played Achaea for 5 years — five times longer than I’ve continuously played ANY graphical MMO ever — and I absolutely loved it. I was a druid, and I had my own shop and became known for my jewelry designs (since MUDs are all about text, the items you could create were differentiated by how well you could write their descriptions).
I enjoyed my time immensely. Even the majority of my dreams featured screens of scrolling text, heh.
The funny thing for me is how I loathe any sort of FFA PvP or whatever nowadays in MMOs. It’s funny because Achaea is as FFA with regards to player killing and player stealing as you got — the sneaky classes had skillsets that allowed them to steal from other people or hypnotize them into giving their stuff away, and you could attack anyone (even your guild mates). What stopped it from being a crazy-fest with people dying willy-nilly was the fact that all your actions had CONSEQUENCES. Sure, that person could decide to hypnotize and steal from me, but that meant having to deal with every druid and other forestal class “enemy”-ing him and thus he was unable to purchase any of the healing elixirs/potions he would need for combat-related activities he wanted to do. Sure, you could decide to smack a priest, but then you’d have the whole city of Shallam descending on your head for attacking one of their own. Some people still did all these things, but they understood the risks, and they’d use their home city as a place to hide out the wrath of others.
Unless, of course, they got a bounty hunter (a player who’d bought a special bounty hunter license) after them. Bounty hunters tended to like hunting the thieves and killers and rooting them out in their own cities. It added to their cachet.
I miss that. I miss that actions had consequences, and that you had to weigh the smug satisfaction of being a douche with the risks involved in what you did to other people. There were still jerks, of course, but at the very least the sheep had a way to counter the wolves instead of always being the prey that got picked off over and over!
I was pulled into the world of graphical MMOs at the end of 2006, and that closed the chapter of Achaea. But damn do I miss it. I miss my druid (which could morph into like 20+ different forms — this made the WoW druid, with its 3 forms, so hilariously off-putting that I didn’t touch a WoW druid for the longest time, feeling that it was completely inferior!). I miss the RP, the immersion, the people I once knew…
There will never be anything that can quite capture the magic of those years.
I’m right behind you. I discovered Achaea and it is very vast and immersive. I’ve been playing it regularly, now.
You presented an interesting prospect when you mentioned there was a time when you had to weigh the smug satisfaction of being a douche. Very well put, by the way, but one that implies games aren’t getting worse out of simply more players; hacking, botting and douche-baggery. Curtailing that stuff may be as simple as what’s in the design.
One of the premier PvP muds (called MUME) currently has multiple community-based efforts to make it MUCH more accessible than it has been in the past. Come check us out at Mume.org! You can also youtube search MUME and find at least a half dozen videos explaining what it is, and how it’s played. I ALSO have it on good authority that a PvP guide for newbies is currently underway and should be finished sometime August 2012.
Hey Jeremy — oh, I agree that there are more people and such. I guess the thing is that a lot of people act like jerks because they can. There aren’t any consequences, really. It’s like, “so what if I ninja everything in a group run? I’ll never see those people again.”
If Achaea hadn’t actually had social consequences that were actual consequences that came to bear on people who acted like jerks, it would have likely been a far different experience for me. I think it’s why I detest PvP-centric MMOs — it fosters a ‘eff you, got mine’ mentality, and all people want to do is screw the other person over to get at the shiny prize (whatever that may be).
I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just a happy-go-lucky carebear who throws rainbows and flower petals around and I’m just not cut out for the, er, cutthroat-ness of those MMOs. I play games to relax and have fun, not get high blood pressure and being furious at someone who doesn’t give a damn there’s an actual human being on the other side of the monitor, and think that it’s okay to step on everyone — so long as they get to have fun.