[TerXIII]

I'm actually trying to go for a more role-play strongly encouraged demographic, while providing incentives for players accustomed to later MMOs to give the MUD style a spin.

This is all good and great, but I think the reason I'm steering away from multiple playable races, is that I find the idea of inter-species cooperation to be somewhat improbable, and for inter-racial (Elf to dwarf, dwarf to human) cooperation to somewhat rare. I think in the beginning, we're going to start with one race (proto-humans) until we can get an acceptable amount of content built up for players to encounter. The problem with dividing up players into racial groups is that the way our world is structured (racial mixing is discouraged), we would have to generate increasingly greater amounts of content for each story arc.

Eventually, we're going to work our way up to character templates, allowing cross-racial character customization through actual in-game interactions, such as syndrome-based character templates, magical blendings, etc. This will allow rare players to become vampires, liches, or some other form of construct or afflicted.

There is always the possibility of allowing players to be one of the other sentient races in the game, but again, sentience is almost completely limited to proto-humans and their subraces in our world. This creates a significant hurdle to the implementation of multiple playable races in the game, and in my opinion, implementation of multiple races will tend to distract from the other methods of character customization that we plan to have available. We have also not witnessed races significantly changing a character's playstyle, as you mentioned, the generic biped really seems to be the default for most MUDs.

We're attempting to introduce factions and affiliations, so that players can progress through the ranks of NPC factions by completing quests, hunting down mobs, etc. We're planning to do this quite differently from how MMOs handle it, though, and are really attempting to implement it more the way the Elder Scrolls games have handled it.


We have been experimenting with a flash application to act as a visual map alongside whatever telnet client we've been using. I personally, have always used PUTTY. We may end up looking into another client, though, once the basics are complete.

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I'm trying to avoid levels, and instead handle "levels" semi-arbitrarily. I'm trying to handle classes by a fluid web of skills, allowing players to select their next focus, which will lock and unlock other areas of focus, and essentially tunnel them into a line of specialization based on their play style. This gives players no realistic way to assess their skills except by progression through the world and quest lines. This will make for a much more vibrant world, I believe, forcing players to focus on their personal goals, rather than gaining the next level, or watching experience points accumulate.