[Vatiken]

12 Years
Basternae
As a developer, naming anything other then my own "Ebendale Online" would just be an insult to myself, however a lot of the feel of my design stems from Basternae and Duris: Land of Bloodlust.
Although I have no credible source for this, I do believe "C" is still the most popular language used in MUD design. That being said I do know CoffeeMUD is programmed in Java, and there are select codebases that utilize other languages.
Although I do play both, when it comes to "MMO"s, at there heart they are all "Text Based". I have at one time or another held an account with Everquest, City of Heroes and EVE Online. Each game displays a text window upon the screen which informs you of who says what, what is attacking you, where you are, how much experience you have etc... 99% of my game time was fixed on that one single box anyway.

As a player of MUDs, the other big draw to me is the ability for MUD developers to think outside the box when it comes to design of their game worlds and game mechanics. A company like Blizzard is investing millions upon millions of dollars in their product, and as such needs to, above all else, make sure their game design will return a profit on their investment. Where as a single developer like myself is only investing my personal time and $7-10 a month on hosting fees, I have the ability to experiment with ideas that large companies never could because the only return I'm looking for on my investment, is the enjoyment of my players and myself. Many of the successful MUDs on the "market" have used unique and/or untested ideas and succeeded.

From a solely developmental perspective, the ability to quickly and efficiently install new features and modify existing ones without have to co-ordinate with a sound guy, graphics artist, and the other specialized skills required in the larger MMO's makes the reward of design come much sooner. Also, being that creating a MUD, for most people, is a hobby and done out of enjoyment, I have the benefit of implementing features that I would enjoy, not necessarily the public at large.

At the end of the day, with the capability of newer MUD clients, Many MUDs are now blurring the line between graphical game and "text" game anyway. So even though the high budget online RPGs are coming out with amazing graphics and sound quality, once the glamour of those perks fade away, all you are left is with game quality. And with that in mind, I've never played any MMORPG that was better then a half-decent MUD.

Well, that's my two cents.

Vatiken

aka

Joseph@Ebendale Online