View Single Post
Old 04-20-2013, 04:21 PM   #50
plamzi
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2009
Home MUD: bedlam.mudportal.com:9000
Home MUD: www.mudportal.com
Posts: 292
plamzi is on a distinguished road
Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

The answer to that is a long laundry list. But to put it very simply: more depth, more content, more community = much longer avg. player career.

I'm sure that if you think of your favorite MUD, you'd have no trouble coming up with a long list of things you can only find there, or else you wouldn't be playing a 20-year-old genre.

As for player career length, it's pretty much a universal feature of all good MUDs, and it is something we should tout at every opportunity. Suffice it to say that you played MUDs for 6 years and don't think of yourself as a veteran. Compare that to most modern MMOs (especially mobile ones) where everyone who has played more than a few months is an ancient, and where the whole game life cycle (game is released, people come, people go, game dies) sometimes unfolds within a year. The exceptions to that rule are the big names that can be counted on the finger of one hand.

You can tell from my app that I'm particularly focused on mobile. Take a look at what passes for a mobile MMO these days, compare it to any of today's top 200 MUDs, imagine a non-weird and non-clunky client for those games, and then see if you still need to ask the uniqueness question.

The same applies to today's social BB MMO's, some of which have player bases the size of all MUDs combined. The gameplay is so thin, limited, and formulaic, that even a stock Diku or LPMud from 1992 would be a revelation by comparison.

So isn't there an opportunity here, if the product is packaged right, and assuming that there are folks out there who would rather play a deep online RPG than a shallow one? I believe there is.

Yes, it's a huge amount of work. I've already offered some major components that I've spent thousands of hours collecting. I don't expect that there would be any interest in teaming up. I expect to just keep going at it solo. But maybe this thread will get some other folks thinking. And if more of us focus energy on this, I strongly believe that the community as a whole will benefit.

+100

Last edited by plamzi : 04-20-2013 at 04:27 PM.
plamzi is offline   Reply With Quote