[MUD-Dev] Text MUDs; in need of an (r)evolution?

[Sam Pointon]

On 14/11/05, John Mauney <montyculligan at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, do any of those who enjoy text based games agree? Do you see
> other things the genre needs or could benefit from? I will assume
> it has been discussed in this forum before the concept of
> including graphical MMO concepts to the text MUD worlds, since
> that has been attempted before.

The point about telnet formatting is invalid, as there are some
-very- fancy things that can be done with pure telnet, assuming your
client is fully VT100 compatible (which, unfortunately, most MUD
clients aren't). I would flag this as a problem in the client
developer's court, rather than the MUD developer's. I must also
disagree on the staticness of the telnet specification being a
disadvantage - HTTP is years old but it's good enough for our web
browsing needs, and it's the same with other specifications: the
older it is, the more tried and tested it tends to be, with fewer
wrinkles.

Your next point about the expertise needed to play text MUDs is a
moot point, as different people expect different things from
different games, and even the same person, six months on, would
expect something different.

I am intrigued by your final proposition - give some examples
please?  I consider the fact that you can log on anywhere there is a
telnet terminal and not be massively disadvantaged (hey, who needs
MXP and that stuff anyway?) to be one of the great advantages of
MUDs, but, say, custom GUIs would put a stop to this, effectively
rendering these MUDs EQ-in-text, rather than being closer to online
interactive fiction.

However, I don't disagree that MUDs could use a brand new idion to
follow, but I believe that aping the graphical MMORPGs would simply
lead to MUDs being crushed by the graphical behemoths. Rather, I
think that there is a whole other world that could be done with
VT100 and well-written prose that takes us down a completely
different road.

Regards,
 -Sam
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