[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Valerio Santinelli]

Matt Mihaly wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Valerio Santinelli wrote:
>> Matt Mihaly wrote:
>>> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Sean Kelly wrote:

>>>> I think there's the potential for some balance between the
>>>> circus ride feeling of most MMORPGs and the personal feel of
>>>> LAN games.  What bothers me about MMORPGs isn't the
>>>> overpopulation so much as the feeling that my presence is
>>>> completely inconsequential.  If NWN had better PW support I'd
>>>> say that it may be an end to my quest.

>>> Text MUDs, my man.

>> NWN is much like a graphical MUD :)

> God I hope not. Everquest et al aren't very impressive in terms of
> the complaints the person above had.

>> You can customize it a lot. But it lacks a decent PW support but
>> a lot of people (including myself) are making more and more tools
>> available to manage PWs.

> You also still have to make new content to be really compelling,
> and that is the difficult part. The graphical MUDs to date just
> don't have the resources to give you what a text MUD can when the
> text MUD can easily add new mechanics, without dealing with how to
> work it into the interface, producing expensive/time-consuming
> graphical content for it, etc. (Of course, that interface - typed
> commands - is a pretty poor one for those who aren't pretty
> hardcore players.)

This is where NWN becomes strong. You can build areas in a real easy
way, and you can customize all the aspects of gameplay through
scripting. Of course you cannot change the interface appearence, but
you can add new commands through its scripting engine.

As for models and all this kind of contents, I've seen people do
amazing stuff with just 3DStudio MAX and the exporter for NWN models
format. Adding new static objects like buildings, trees, items, etc
is easy and does not require too much work. Making characters or
monsters is much more difficult but it's much like making Quake's
models. And I think that soon we will start seeing a lot of new
models popping around just like it happened with Quake.

NWN has a lot of potential but devs at Bioware did not make it with
persistency in mind and that's what causing problems to people that
wish to run online PWs.

--
Valerio Santinelli
One Man Crew Gaming Community (http://www.onemancrew.org)
My Lab (http://tanis.hateseed.com)
HateSeed.com Founder (http://www.hateseed.com)
In Flames Italia Webmaster (http://www.inflames.it)



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