This reminds me of Shadows of Time MUDs on telnet, I wasted hours of playing those games.
Skyrim rendered in text
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#22How old is the author I wonder? Did he not play Wizardry or any other similar game back in the 80s/90s, which implemented exactly this kind of gameplay? Wizardry 7 had so much - good quality - text in it (probably enough to fill a book) that it significantly accelerated my English learning at the time as a non-native English speaker. And the fighting system was very similar to what the author arrived at in the end. I…
> because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance
What do you count as "substance"? Have you played The Witcher 3? Life is Strange? Until Dawn? They are games with heavy narrative where your choices impact the direction of the story (in Until Dawn, any and all of the 8 characters can die or survive, depending on your choices). Or games like Bloodborne or Dark Souls, which, at first glance, are just action games, but when you look beneath the surface, they hide extremely rich and deep storylines (but its up to you to dig for it if you so wish) and incredible environmental storytelling. Or a game like Machinarium, which manages to tell its story purely through pictures. Or The Last of Us, which, while its a 3D action game (kind of), is the first game that, for me, surpassed movies in atmosphere, storytelling and getting me emotionally invested in the characters.
My point is that games have moved on and there are a lot of games out there that aren't "3D action with no substance". A lot of indie games aren't even 3D or action. There's a vast spectrum of games out there, I bet there's plenty that you would, in fact, enjoy.
> I for one would be very happy to see the return of this style of gaming
I used to play MUD's back in the day and even worked on my own MUD engine a few times. My most recent toy was about two years ago, but I abandoned it because I felt it was too depressing if I was the only one playing a multiplayer (text based) game. :(
What is it you are looking for in such a game, out of curiosity?
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#23"...an arrow slams into the ground less than an inch from your knee." Nice touch there :)
Context for those who haven‘t played Skyrim: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#24Back in the early 2000's there was this driver/library to output any graphics in ASCII instead of framebuffer or whatever.
A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us.
Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#25Back in the early 2000's there was this driver/library to output any graphics in ASCII instead of framebuffer or whatever. A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us. Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)
That would have been interesting, if a bit rehashy.
This is a guy blurfing at length about text game design. The "Skyrim" is just thrown in there as a callback to something recognizable but has almost zero to do with Bethesda's game.
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#26How old is the author I wonder? Did he not play Wizardry or any other similar game back in the 80s/90s, which implemented exactly this kind of gameplay? Wizardry 7 had so much - good quality - text in it (probably enough to fill a book) that it significantly accelerated my English learning at the time as a non-native English speaker. And the fighting system was very similar to what the author arrived at in the end. I…
> because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance What do you count as "substance"? Have you played The Witcher 3? Life is Strange? Until Dawn? They are games with heavy narrative where your choices impact the direction of the story (in Until Dawn, any and all of the 8 characters can die or survive, depending on your choices). Or games like Bloodborne or Dark Souls, which, at first glance, are just act…
>Or games like Bloodborne or Dark Souls, which, at first glance, are just action games, but when you look beneath the surface, they hide extremely rich and deep storylines (but its up to you to dig for it if you so wish) and incredible environmental storytelling
In a similar vein, Overwatch, one of the biggest 3D action games at the moment, has gameplay that exists entirely as non-canon action segments borrowing characters from the world. But it's still not shallow; there's a ton of worldbuilding in the environments, voice interactions between characters that hint at shared histories, and stories told in Blizzard's incredible animated shorts.
Just because something looks like a shallow action game doesn't mean that's all it is!
Related: the most recent animated short, Honor and Glory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQfk5HykiEk
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#27sigh I thought this was going to be a realtime AI which described the world from the frame
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#28I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt this game to read the text adventure out loud and allow visually impaired kids to play it. The author here has done tremendous work into the mechanics of a text-based game, and I think it would be a relatively small task to port it to an "audio-based" game. Every year I volunteer at as event at the University of North Carolina CS department called Maze Day. Students build g…
I don't think that would be difficult. In fact I think it would have a side benefit of improving the design of a text game... you could work on developing it with your eyes closed and the quality of the descriptions would become more apparent
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#29If anyone is interested in the Sorcery! series mentioned in the article, I highly recommend them. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but with a highly polished board game feel. Once you finish one, you can bring your character over into the next in the series. The devs (Inkle) also were the ones who made 80 days, which won some amount of awards.
Re: Skyrim rendered in text
#30I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt this game to read the text adventure out loud and allow visually impaired kids to play it. The author here has done tremendous work into the mechanics of a text-based game, and I think it would be a relatively small task to port it to an "audio-based" game. Every year I volunteer at as event at the University of North Carolina CS department called Maze Day. Students build g…
Back when I played (text-based) MUDs I knew several blind players who played using screen readers. Some MUDs had features to support this, e.g. ability to disable extended descriptions. The savvy players wrote scripts that processed the text to extract the most important data during movement and combat. Some of them were quite good in player vs player.