1980: MUD

Wow, Shades on Prestel (while using a BBC Micro). That brings back memories - especially of getting screamed at and grounded/penalised for racking up huge phone bills.

I remember two characters getting "married" on Shades. A scene that was usually described as a derelict church with a grim, cold interior, was for the occasion bedecked with flowers etc - and rather than being empty save for a random player perhaps wandering in when my character was there, it was full of people. Date/time for the ceremony had been widely disseminated.

Cracking game.

> I do think that the genre needs updating to make new MUDs more accessible

I know what you're saying. Iron Realms MUDs are a good example of a MUD with modern conveniences.

But on the topic of a different sort of accessibility, you can play MUDs with a screen reader. I was playing http://www.balzhur.org/ (Spanish) two years ago and found out most of the people I was meeting in it were blind. Just using a stock screen reader to read out the game at incredible speed.

Aside, playing a MUD in the foreign language you're learning is a fun way to get daily drill. Especially once you try to engage socially ingame. Having someone depend on you in real time in the game really makes your brain gain levels quickly.

Here I am, about 90% done with a completely custom approach to a classless system in a MUD, and you've got me worried that I'm overcomplicating things all of a sudden.

It's not a game, Roguelike made a MUD inspired online conference for their conference. I keep coming back to this. While they built it for a time-limited conference, I could see variations for long-running online communities, or even "modern" MUD games.

https://dev.to/lazerwalker/using-game-design-to-make-virtual...

Surprising the number of ex shades players on here - I used to play a bit but via the internal network (I worked for telecom gold back in the day)

Later on we had an ex phreaker working in TEC who had been busted for Prestel hacking, one day the Internal Security guy who had busted him - met him at work and almost had a heart attack.

I remember playing Shades an awful lot as a young teen. That was until my parents saw the phone bill!

3rd and path finder are a lot simpler to the complex method AnD 2nd became

It already exists. Modern clients like Mudlet (https://mudlet.org/) support both old (MSP) and modern audio protocols: https://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Standards:MUD_Client_Media_Protoco...

There's games like StickMUD that make use of this, too.

Starfinder have done this on Alexa just say "Alexa Play Starfinder"

I’ve been playing a bit of Discworld and Aardwolf MUDS lately. Just to try out the genre, and I’ve had the opposite experience. In Discworld, you have to assign yourself as a “player killer” in order to both kill or be killed by other players. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to Discworld. I know early RuneScape has the same setup.

I’m brand new to MUDs and 100% of my interactions have been ether helping or being helped by other players to learn and play the game.

Have you looked at https://mume.org/ ? I've been playing that one off and on since the early 1990s. It's a pretty amazing experience.

EDIT: Just logged in again, and saw this message from a couple of months ago:

The Third Age of the Sun is over: the War of the Ring was fought; the One Ring was been destroyed; the Ring-Bearers and the last of the Noldor have departed from Middle-earth. For the eleventh time in the history of MUME, the clock starts over.

Again, it is the year 2850 of the Third Age. Gandalf has just obtained the key of Erebor from Thrain in the dungeons of Dol Guldur. The events told in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" are ready to happen.

- Dáin

I’m just starting out in Discworld, and I have trouble interacting with the NPCs. For instance I’ve just signed on as a thief, but when I go to the guild building to train, I cant get OST the initial interaction with them.

I’ve also been blown away by how friendly everyone I’ve encountered has been. It seems like a great community

I was very sad my character got scrubbed for not logging on enough. Alas and alack, another relic of life passes because of old age and inattention. The last time I'd logged on was the night PTerry died, and that was a fine capstone for a long career as a Feef on the Disc.

Was really bummed when my character got wiped there.

I played on a private shard (server) of ultima online for a long time. Official server players might have had a different experience. I have tried a lot of online rpg's since then but never even got close to feeling similar to these days. - Core experience was free. - A lot of emergent gameplay all around. Games today feel more planned-out most of the times. - There were no quests. (sometimes there would be unique quests for a limited time - events) - The necessity to kill a same monster 700x times to try and find X item didn't exist. Because - Items were created using skill, which you had to train from 33.3% to 100%. - When you attacked a player inside a town, the guards would immediately kill you. But when we left town, there was a message saying there were no guards around. PK allowed. And if you got killed, your corpse would be standing there with all the items you were carrying. - Stealing was allowed as a skill you could train (and steal directly from another player backback - he could flag you if he noticed though and guards would come). There was also snooping which was the skill to see other player backpack. - Scamming, home invasion, and all that stuff was allowed. This may seem cruel, but it allowed for so much emergent gameplay that it was incredible. Also - The economics felt more playful, not so hard. Players not necessarily had to do the same stuff or take long time to achieve wealth. You had to be smart. - Scripting. Because to train most skills you would have to do repetitive tasks. - Small server with not that many players, but intense interaction. - There were a lot of bugs to explore, more loose systems, and it was fun :)

"... is there anything you would like to be implemented in modern MMO and is technically possible?"

I don't play any games like this anymore but I did play a lot of MUDs and, later, years of UO.

What I always wanted were procedurally generated items - like weapons and armor and so on.

roguelike games randomize the names and colors of items, but we all know what they all are and there are a fixed set of them. UO was even worse - you knew exactly what every item was and what it did and that was that.

It seems obvious to me that a very enjoyable and delightful aspect could be added to games like this if every time you picked up an item you had no idea what it might be, or what it did, or how it could be used.

Obviously there would be some kind of templating involved and a number of attributes that could be randomized, etc., and perhaps even some kind of generalized discovery mechanism where you could divine exactly what this plain looking sword does.

Bottom line: I, as a brand new player, just outside the beginner town, should get a plain old short sword off of this dead orc 99 times out of 100. But 1 time out of 100 I should get a short sword that glows blue when I get close to undead creatures and has +X against wolves. Or whatever.

To put it another way, there should be an infinite number of different items I can run into throughout the game and they should do lots of unexpected and fascinating things (albeit rarely).

In my time with a MUD, my absolute favorite parts were: 1. Social interaction 2. Automation!

Maybe not all MUDs allowed it, but the one I played was absolutely fine with you using specialized clients such as tintin++ and writing scripts. I started with smaller scripts to automate movement between zones and managing inventory, and I moved on to full bots in there that would take "spoken" commands from trusted players.

From what I hear, that'll get you banned in most MMORPGs these days, which is a shame.

I guess it depends upon what you mean by complex. UO was a 2D world, MUDs are text worlds, and modern MMORPGs are 3D - that right there is going to make any given feature more complex in a modern MMORPG than UO or a MUD.

What I think they mean is MUDs and early MMOs were more sandbox-style. This can create complex and unplanned interactions in the game. But the market has mostly decided they don't like these style of games. So you won't get a AAA developer making them because the money just isn't there.

Many people loved these interactions. But even more hated them. These days you have options. Back then you didn't. Back in 2000, if you wanted to play an MMO, you had 3 options. Nowadays you have dozens.

MUDs also have the benefit of not having millions of dollars on the line. And a million monkeys typing all at once. There's literally thousands of MUDs out there. Most of them are really bad and uninspiring.

It's funny to think about how things have shifted. Back when WoW was released, instancing was controversial. Some didn't completely consider it an MMO because it let you opt out of a shared experience with others you don't know.

There are some mud clients (I can't remember the one I used on Windows, but it did this) which parses out a lot of information and lets you have a multipane/window view of the text. This can help. It's also possible to turn many of the notifications off. Also, you usually start in something like a common room/town and those tend to be very active with people moving in and out constantly or carrying on non-shouted conversations. Once you get out of those areas the speed of text tends to drop off. Finally, with room descriptions you can always "look" again. I became very good at reading 1-3 lines of text before it disappeared, pulling it up, and starting right where I left off. But honestly that didn't happen too often.

In combat, depending on the MUD and the class of character you may not need to type frequently during combat. Usually you will attack automatically once it begins. Spells, healing commands, and other things are all you need to type and usually not every round (which is about 1-3 seconds usually). Every MUD I played on had some form of alias, and if not the client did, which let me take a 5 word command down to 1-5 letters. `draw crysknife` became `dc` for my Fremen character. I had similar aliases for putting it away and drawing other weapons or switching to other attack strategies.

That's a matter of having a telnet client that has a screen buffer. I haven't tried this one, but try it? http://tintin.mudhalla.net/

If you can get it to run, the best way to play MUDs is using a MUD client. My favorite was always GMud because it could fit on a floppy disk with a world file, but ZMud was kind of the de-facto standard/best client, although paid. You can use a normal telnet client, but it needs to support ANSI colors and have a screen buffer to render most MUDs properly.

Also, it depends on the MUD codebase they use, some of the older codebases are more friendly to very basic clients, newer codebases typically rely on using a telnet client like TinTin or a MUD client.

Funny you mention that. I started playing MUDs @ 2400 baud. You could literally watch each letter being written out. When 16.8k came out, my first thought was "how can anyone read this fast?" I thought MUDs were doomed...

but, you get used to it. You will figure out what's actually important and what can be ignored. Someone else mentioned the 'brief' command, which shortens room descriptions, and that is a good start. After you log in, just take your time, there's no rush...

I don't know if it will work for all MUDs but for the one that I play on, I usually run telnet in an shell buffer in Emacs, so that I can always scroll back up to see what I've missed.

There are (or were?) MUD clients for Emacs, but I haven't used one for a long time - just having Emacs and the buffer available has been enough for everything I've wanted to do.

Try MUSHclient (Windows), Atlantis (Mac), or Mudlet (multi-platform) for dedicated MUD clients that separate input and output areas and give you scrollable output, as well as various features to turn matched text into live-updating status bar bars and other info displays.

Some muds support a "brief" mode, which will limit the room description to one line.

LambdaMOO is mostly people being idle. There is, however, a spiritual successor called ChatMUD. It's based on a fork of a fork of the original LambdaMOO server called ToastStunt (forked from Stunt). It seems to have a bit more pep in its step if you're looking for a semi-active social / programming MOO.

https://chatmud.com/ https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt

played a huge part in my programming evolution, too. learned OO from programming in it, and then learned C from hacking on the server and various offshoots of it

Me too

I used to play the Essex MUD as well from probably 80-82 -- I can recall the huge speed boost when we got a 1200/75 dialup modem! I got to be a wizard (Gorpli) and I did meet a couple of the other wizards IRL.

Fun times.