Tibia is adding sound to the game after 25 years | Hacker News Reader

Tibia is adding sound to the game after 25 years

tibia.com

127 pointshaunter15 comments

Tibia shaped my childhood. It was, and still is, quite a unique game:

- The chat was used not only for player communication, but to interact with NPCs ("hi, buy 1 plate armor, yes") and casting spells (you say "utani gran hur" to cast Strong Haste).

- Items could be dropped on the ground and moved. Some of them blocked entity movement, or made stairs, creating all sorts of strategies.

- PvP was ruthless: clans would "blacklist" players they didn't like, killing them on sight until the player lost almost all their levels and were sent back to the tutorial area.

- Monsters were (ab)used for PvP: players would often lure strong monsters to major roads, or use stairs/holes to pile up many monsters in one tile for a deadly trap.

- Death penalty was very strict: 10% of your total exp (easily weeks or months of work), all the items in your backpack, and an independent 10% dice roll of dropping each equipment piece.

I actually think the PvP and death penalty was too harsh for young me, I still remember the panic of being chased, or getting disconnected (your character stayed in the world, helpless, for a few minutes).

Tibia has inspired me to learn programming and then to become a game developer. Almost 20 years later, when I no longer need to code in my professional work, I am creating a game that is heavily influenced by Tibia and its mechanics in my free time.

Their PVP system was insane - you really felt the death of your character. Like, you could lose weeks of your game in one second.

Yeah and this death system is one reason why casuals can’t play it.

Tibia is how anarchy plays out.

Even on non-pvp servers one had to watch out as more powerful users were luring monsters and blocking people to get killed.

Cipsoft made adjustments so you could not lure monsters too far but it was not fun to bump into much stronger monster.

I think Tibia players are fine with that. I play it with friends from time to time, the game is exciting in a way no modern title is, in my opinion.

Me too, I started programming while hosting an OpenTibia server

I remember that dying in this game is extremely stressful. Moreso than in any other game I played. Each death removes the XP from your character often equivalent to XX hours of effort to level up. And it is not that hard to die, so you have to put a lot of attention in what you are doing and it creates an illusion of importance. It is very addictive. I do not recommend it.

I remember dying in the MUD i played. You respawn naked in town, finally get to your corpse and find that the mob that killed you has looted pieces of your gear and is now holding your sword. good luck beating them now. and as bonus you have aged. now it takes more movement points to move from room to room, eventually you are just too old to more about practically and have to re-roll. To avoid dying there was a panic threshold, where your character would pick a random direction and flee. Fun memories of being chaos of being chased by angry mobs, while i was bleeding with a broken leg, lost, in the dark.

Dying was awful, you became heavily invested.

Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324846 - Feb 2022 (105 comments)

Addictive as hell

Ive probably spent close to 10k hours in it

Well, seems like I will need to get some 600+ ms (too rusty for ed :P) and have some fun

Was there a reason originally that sound was not implemented? For the players here, what did you do instead? Did you have a "Tibia playlist" in winamp or similar?

I mean there still isn’t any attack animations so it lacks quite a bit in those terms. But it’s an awesome game

I believe there are older MUDs out there.

Furcadia is older and still active. (And uh, like most graphical MMOs from the 96-97 period, already had sound.)

Ok, we've taken the oldness claim out of the title now. (Submitted title was "Oldest active MMO, Tibia, is adding sound to the game after 25 years"). Let's discuss the interesting bits now please!

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