Anyone here played Ancient Anguish?
Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#22MUDs are great, and I think the gameplay of the best ones is still untouched by modern MMORPGs. Implementing new features, scripting new interactions, and so on takes much less work after all, being text based. You also have incredibly rich text descriptions, and the lore can get very deep as a result. Many hours of my youth were spent playing and hacking on various MUDs. I added MCCP to CircleMUD for example, and honed most of my C skills on MUD code bases.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#23A good friend of mine was really into Carrion Fields [0], back in the 90s early 00s. Amazingly, it is still around! I also played for a while, mostly doable even on the slow internet connection we had at the time (good ol' 14/28k at best). It was amazing how big and popular some of these were, before Everquest/Ultima/WoW made such ideas really mainstream. Anyway, I did enjoy playing it, though big multiplayer games w…
By which name do you wish to be mourned?
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#24Anyone here played Ancient Anguish?
Yup - huge fan 20yrs (!!) ago. Great community with plenty of players back then. I still log into my main character every couple of years just to check they’re still going.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#25MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com
Former player of Achaea here (if anyone recognizes the name Soludra) -- can attest, the Iron Realms MUDs are top-tier. I tried to get into volunteering, but my work ethic wasn't really up to snuff at the time. Sorry ^_^;
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#26MUDs are great, and I think the gameplay of the best ones is still untouched by modern MMORPGs. Implementing new features, scripting new interactions, and so on takes much less work after all, being text based. You also have incredibly rich text descriptions, and the lore can get very deep as a result. Many hours of my youth were spent playing and hacking on various MUDs. I added MCCP to CircleMUD for example, and ho…
I think there's a game type somewhere between today's MMORPGs and MUDs that can bring some of these features and text based interactions to an MMO. For example, I started prototyping a game a last year that was old school cyberpunk-ish style where you had a console that you can interact with a internet-like network, and this console let you do a lot of the mud-like text interactions and automation, but there was also a part of the game to visualize and let you interact with the network without the console.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#27My favorite mud was Frontier Mud - not sure when it went down. Back in college I was writing an LPMud called MirrorMud that featured a mystical mountain. You'd appear to finish your quest to the mountain top, but then when you'd return to town, the description of everything and everyone around you would be different, and evil, almost like everyone had been replaced by evil versions of themselves. I was playing with l…
Sounds like a great and very creative idea for a game! Shame it never saw the light of day.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#28Anyone here play BatMUD?
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#29Way back in the day (1985) I was figuring out how to do timeslicing on a 4MHz Z80, and once I had it working on multiple terminals I slung a simple MUD on it (Shades). Connecting it to a couple of modems (this was the days when BB's were the thing) got people playing, at which point British Telecom's Prestel/Micronet decided they'd like to run it on their system.
The demand was sufficient that it kept crashing the entire national network, and one of my prize memories from back then is the night I was working late in this huge multistorey BT building (Baynard House) in London stuffed with big cabinets filled with computers and modems, and as I was huddled over my little Z80 the double doors burst open and the shift leader stormed in, shouting "There is NO WAY I'm going to put up with your system taking down the entire network". So I looked down my little Z80 box, then looked up at the seried ranks of GEC computers in their 48U cabinets, and did my best to puzzled, in a "Who, little ole me?" kind of way.
Ok, so it was 1200 baud max per user but we did get up to 128 users spread over 2 Z80s, each with 256Kb bankswitched RAM and 2Mb hand-made RAM disks.
The rest of it is a long story but it's still around [0] and I know a few people on here remember it (fondly I hope - though I do still feel guilty about those bills!).
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#30MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com
Wait, so people not only still play, but also actually pay for MUDs?
OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite heavily pay to win...