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Shadowfyr wrote:
Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client.
Yep, which is a step in the right direction but doesn't fix their crappy and stupidly expensive technology (they can support approximately 4 simultaneous players/server).
They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces.
Have you never seen Insomniac for WoW? It's a compilation of dozens of interface alternations. Runescape fans have also reverse engineered the client and made a completely custom client (which Runescape doesn't like).
Allowing users to play with the client is nothing new and is quickly going to become fairly standard. In EE, we plan on opening up the client to users after it's stable, for instance.
But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting.
Combat is one system in many MUDs, but just one of many. Perhaps one of the most important, but saying that a MUD only deals with a few actions combat-wise is true, but also misses the fact that the actions in combat are just a small set of the overall actions available.
Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same.
The labels are content/nouns, not actions/verbs.
But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments.
There are certainly text MUDs that do that. Achaea does it for instance. I don't care what "most MUDs" do, as most MUDs are just people screwing around in their spare time, just like most graphical MUDs (few of which you or I have ever heard of as they have few to no players) are people screwing around in their spare time. I don't think there's much to gain by defining the potential of MUDs by the lowest common demoninators.
The only *gain* you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol
As the classic example (courtesy of Raph Koster I believe) goes, try doing this in a graphical MUD: "You bow ironically."
And try doing custom animations at all in any gamey-environment (WoW, Runescape, etc etc). Second Life lets you but it's that very pupeetering system that has helped ensure that they are still not profitable.
I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead."
Well, again, those labels are content/nouns not action/verbs and are not what I'm talking about.
--matt
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