View Single Post
Old 05-04-2013, 06:07 PM   #126
the_logos
Legend
 
the_logos's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
Posts: 2,305
the_logos will become famous soon enough
Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Sorry about the multiple replies, but I wanted to expand slightly on something I said in the last post.

It's not that I don't believe that if you could take a text MUD and have, for instance, thousands of illustrations representing thousands of rooms on a more-or-less one-to-one basis (so that players aren't seeing the same small set of graphics repeat), that it wouldn't add net value to the game - I think it would. I think you'd be able to attract and keep more players that way.

And I mean, we may underlay generic environmental pictures beneath our room-by-room map in our client, and we have a background picture sitting behind all the windows, but those are mere ornaments - they aren't really intended to do anything but add some graphical interest to the game for newbies. Once a player has played long enough, he/she won't be particularly interested in whether those are there or not.

The thing is, producing all that graphical content is -very- expensive. It's not a matter of slowing new area production or any content production down by just a little - it's slowing it down by potentially an order of magnitude or more, or uncertain gain. When almost all of the actually important information in your game is conveyed via text, you better be conveying a lot of relevant info graphically (vs mere ornamentation) to justify taking the focus off the text - and conveying relevant info graphically means situationally-aware graphics, which means having a hundred illustrations or whatever won't mean much (except, again, as ornamentation, which I don't mean to dismiss the importance of - we've spent $30k+ on art that is there purely for ornamentation).

Just my opinion of course.
the_logos is offline   Reply With Quote