Posted by Entity on August 8, 2000 at 13:26:54:
In Reply to: Discussion of the future of Muds, and how they effect us... posted by Not An Immortal on August 8, 2000 at 12:20:52:
This is a topic I've thought about a lot myself. 1.) A lot 2.) Tried Everquest, played it for about 6 months, ran out of things to do even being in a damn nice guild. 3.) see below 4.) Probably somewhat 5.) Dunno, I keep coming back here. 6.) I do look at it as an addiction somewhat. Perhaps an illness.. I had a friend who got addicted to CF back in Hopkins... ended up pretty messed up. But then how much is the game, and how much is the person? 7.) Since I'm answering this while at work... Anyone else think it would be awesome if the CF imms, or someone like them could put their design talents towards making a NWN shard? Secondly, connectivity and hardware. Basically, nill for muds, and that helped a lot. Now, we're beginning to see big bandwidth as standard, that will help the little people. And computers are reaching a nice plateau where you can design a game and have it last for awhile. Final thoughts. And, a couple of things to think about. 2.) With a lot more people, how easy would it be to keep things secret? Entity
On the longevity of text-muds...
I think a huge part of this is due to two-three, rather simple factors. The code to most of these base muds was open source, and basically anyone could come in and add their own ideas to it, and the ease of connecting to the games.
All the big 3-d muds out there are all closed-source. You have to put up with TheVision(TM). You don't have hundreds of programmers running around each building their own little world. People can't try new things out.. it gets old and stale. The future really belongs to games like NWN which re-empower people to go out and change things. Now, I doubt we'll ever see the ease (yes I know.. changing the mud code was never 'easy') of modification that we had. But it at least allows people to get in and start tinkering again.
MUDS are like radio, and the new 3-d games are like TV.
You can do stuff with radio you couldn't even think to do with TV 'OK, we're draning the lake now.. ok, now we're refilling it with whipcream'. Well, this is a little stresed these days with computer graphics. But, a ton of the challenges games like EQ and AC have faced have been with this transition. CF has no range. You're in the room or you're not. You don't have to worry about people kiting, or running. You don't have to worry about balancing ranged attacks vs non-ranged.
Now, the flip side of that, is that there is a ton you can do with TV. It's more interactive and easier to understand. Eventually, people will figure out how to do really neat things on TV. Will that ever kill radio/Muds.. no. I still listen to NPR in the mornings. But most of the time I.. well, I don't watch TV much but I use the web a lot.. which uses a display instead of sound.
1.) How would CF play with 2-5x as many people on it. (Assuming hardware was not an issue).
Annoyance of the 2nd Age