I used to mod /r/MUD on reddit - if you fancy getting back into MUDs that's a great place to start.
For my sins, I became very addicted to Shades on Prestel back in the day. Due to this, I prefer MUDs that are not deep on class progression, and just easy fun.
A lot of the still running MUDs have deep learning curves, due to some of them having been running for a good few decades. To the new or casual player, this makes them impregnable.
Whereas I don't think we need to change the beauty of the text based medium, I do think that the genre needs updating to make new MUDs more accessible.... Even D&D finally accepted it needed to simplify again to gain new players.
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.
> 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.
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.
My university had terminal labs in the early 90s, tables full of Wyse terminals hooked up to the central UNIX cluster. PCs and Macs were common in other labs, but a terminal lab was still a convenient place to check email or get on IRC between classes. I would log into two terminals next to each other in order to have a screen for IRC while coding on the other one.
One early morning, I walked into a lab that was vacant except for one person. He was slumped over the keyboard with a hand around an empty Coke can. The amber screen was scrolling upward every few seconds:
YOU ARE HUNGRY...
YOU FEEL TIRED...
>
YOU ARE HUNGRY...
YOU FEEL TIRED...
>
If anyone wants to try something less fantasy themed, I strongly recommend hackmud (https://store.steampowered.com/app/469920/hackmud/), in which you play as a recently sapient program in the ruins of a network long devoid of human users. The community is very savvy and have implemented some complex stuff in and out of game, including bridges between all the popular text channels and mirrors of them on Discord (https://discord.gg/h5K5fYuuMj), so you can monitor and even play the game without being logged in (to hackmud, you would still need to be on Discord).
As audio increasingly becomes a platform in-it-of-itself, experiences from the CLI world will become more and more relevant. Because audio as an interface has a lot more in common with the command line than it does with GUIs.
If it doesn't already exist, I could see a serious market for audio-based MUDs.
for a real audio based mud, the players voice input needs to be interpreted as commands but also sent to the other players in the room so you can have real voice based interaction.
So basically the brutal Lord of the Flies-esque culture that dominates multiplayer survival games like Rust and Conan: Exiles is nothing new.
From the article:
> I worked out how to login (not easy), I worked out how to load the game and... I got killed. I tried again, I got killed again and eventually, when people were bored of killing me, I tried to talk to a wizard about how the game worked and was told to bugger off and then killed again. ...This was most people’s initial experience of MUD.
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.
After 20 years I still play on Discworld MUD on a regular basis. I find there being a strong community - if a bit smaller than it used to be. The one thing I enjoy most with playing on the MUD (apart from the people) are the fact that I feel less limited in the game play compared to most graphical games.
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.
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.
My first experience with an online service was Prodigy sometime around 1995 or 1996 and one of the first things I stumbled across was the MUD Gemstone 3.
It blew my mind that hundreds of people were all existing in a shared world. I directly attribute my love of computers and software development career to MUD's.
For anyone who has had extensive experience in MUD and early MMORPG, including Ultima Online, is there anything you would like to be implemented in modern MMO and is technically possible? For example I heard from time to time that people claim UO is actually more complex than modern MMORPG, but because I don't play either I'm wonderig what's missing here.
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.
And if you scroll past the D&D links here, he's got a whole series of stories from his time on the Shadowdale MUD though I forget if they involve any scripting.
> There was several courses I had to complete to "graduate". Each of these were run by a real player who took their job WAY too seriously.
I found this kind of things very fascinating. Isn't immersion the ultimate goal of MMO games? Don't the designers want to create a full virtual world so that people can join and forget about real life for a couple of hours? In that perspective, maybe having terrefic graphics actually hurts the real objective. I'm not saying we should go back to MUD, but I'm saying that MMO development teams should invest more in world building.
Thank you for introducing such a great poster to me. This guy is a gold mine.
The game I played (NCMUD) allowed this and it had a lot to do with me becoming a programmer (MUDs in general did really).
At one point I wrote something to generate zones somewhat randomly using the editor the game had built-in - it would transition from "zones" of a particular type (forest/water/desert) and take a few random strings to create (hopefully) reasonable descriptions of a place that could exist.
Not the most interesting zone but it allowed me to create blank canvasses to put more interesting elements into.
Thank you. This is very interesting. I know some MMORPG provides you plugins for automation but many new games don't give you solutions for scripting.
I'm wondering if there is any MMORPG that actually gives some serious scripting to players for building their own worlds and sharing with others. It's going to be a hell lot of job to balance out but could be really fun.
In older text-based gaming: MUCKs tended to be more oriented towards creation and social interaction than MUDs. Many MUCKs would allow players to create their own areas, with a limited degree of scriptability.
In modern gaming: Second Life, VRChat, Roblox, et al.
thanks, those are interesting games. I'll check out the MUCKs and see how they balance things (or maybe they just didn't care).
The game Neverwinter Nights(2001) introduced a powerful editor so that players can create their own world and join servers. But those servers have to be separated because of different scripts. It would be really fascinating if somehow we can have a connection center (thinking the Sigil city in Planescape) and players can join different "worlds" which maybe have completely different sets of rules (but have the same meta rules to make the connection possible).
MUCKs tend to be primarily social; any "game mechanics", beyond absolute core functionality like movement and communication, exist only by consent of the players. Game balance isn't really a concern.
Second Life and VRChat roughly follow this model as well. Roblox worlds are more isolated, kind of along the lines of what you're describing for NWN.
I also thought about some MMORPG that have events, but no real quests. You can figure out whatever quests you want in an event. Events could even be triggered by players. You setup the rules (by powerful scripting) and wait for players to trigger them.
For example, maybe some player discovered a summoning book, read a page, and somehow opened a maw to another plane and attracted an endless stream of demons. This is a player-triggered event and other players can do whatever they want. They can ally with the demons, they can fight them and craft items from their remainings. The game designer just make sure that every event doesn't break the whole game.
Maybe I went too far there with my imagination, lol.
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.
I played a bit of MUD II. Did anyone know how to get the 2 crowns? The one in the swamp vs the one in the tower? They forbid us from telling each other as it was one of the easiest ways to get experience in the game.
I'm hoping maybe some experience MUD players can help me out with this: every time I try to get into a MUD, the text just moves past the screen too fast and I feel like I miss important parts, and then I can't see it again. Or if I run a command, before I can interpret the output it flies off the screen in favor of some non important text. I can't imagine combat in text mode, trying to figure out what command to type while also trying to race against the buffer.
I've tried several different MUDs over the years because I like text based games, but they never stick.
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.
Thanks, I'm using Mudlet on Linux and trying CoffeeMUD. I got rhough the training last night. I need to figure out how to set up the multi-pane view you mentioned.
I still haven't found any monsters to kill yet, I'm going to try to do that over the weekend!
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 tried CoffeeMUD again last night, and took your advice to just slow down. That helped. I also looked into muting channels, it took me a long time to realize that NPC's were talking to me, not real people, and could be politely ignored haha.
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.
I use Emacs at work, so I should give that a try (maybe even at work!). I've been using Mudlet at home, it has a buffer, but I just feel like I'm constantly scrolling to look for what I just 'looked' at. I started CoffeeMUD again last night and got through the training level, so I'm making progress based on other tips from this thread.
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.
I've been using Mudlet, it still seems like I spend a lot of time scrolling to read what I just looked at. I got through training on CoffeeMUD last night, so that's progress. I'll try MUSHclient as a sibling comment also mentioned it, thanks!
Turkey had its share of MUDs in the 90's too. Turkish players would play on Bitnet on a MUD server hosted in Greece (IIRC), using 3270 terminals, before Internet arrived. There later came BizimMUD, a customized version of CircleMUD, hosted at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I used to play there a lot back in 1995. There was permadeath and PvP was always open which made it quite exciting. Then, the last one I remember was opened up at ADANET, a local ISP in Ankara. It was a stock DikuMUD instance. It might be called "Darkwood" but I'm not sure.
My favorite international MUD was Mirkwood, which was still up and running recently.
I was also enamored by MUSH servers as how detailed they can be, but could never get to play them for long.
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.
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
I wrote a frontend for CompuServe's British Legends using Crosstalk Mk.4's scripting language CASL. It had a complete dungeon map and let me navigate using the PC's numeric keypad for directions. An onscreen keymap with labels for each number key showed where pressing that key would lead. It even randomized choices, so if NW and W both led to the same place it would pick one randomly if you hit either key. (This was to confuse wizards who could tell who you were by your habitual choices.)
I spent many hours of my youth spending $6.25 (in 1987 dollars!) an hour to play British Legends on Compuserve at 300 baud (plus telephone fees, which were, by today's standards, extremely expensive). Compuserve used to charge you $12 an hour if you logged in at 1200 baud.
Shoutout to Duris: Land of Bloodlust, which has been around for over 25 years and is still up and running.
Incidentally, I was looking into the possibility of hosting my own MUD a while back and it seemed rather complicated for someone without web deployment experience. I do wish there was a simpler way to do it and customize your own world for a few friends to play around in. I guess we could just invade a less-active MUD but it seems more up our alley to roll our own so we can make a few extra areas ourselves and so on.
Great article. Messing around with MUDs in the late 90s was probably one of the factors that got me deeper into computers. Graphical games were super impressive, but there was something really cool about playing in a multiplayer simulated world that, by virtue of the fact it was text based, you could envision the underworkings of a bit more easily.
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.
With a scrap of paper holding the PSS codes and login info I was introduced to MUD by 'Innocence the Witch', school computer lab admin by day. I played from 1982-84, usually ~5am-7am on weekdays and 2-7am through on the weekends. It was enchanting being in this imaginary world with other people. The PvP was exhilarating.
The F50 article munged together Essex and MUD2 a little, iirc Essex went dark ~1984 and at launch MUD2 was a refactor, unplayably slow and expensive. It went dark quickly.
I made some MUDs of my own... and that scrap of paper led to a startup career in MUDs and MMO development.
I sometimes wonder what the formative experiences my kids are having in Roblox, Minecraft etc. will rustle up in their futures.
For my sins, I became very addicted to Shades on Prestel back in the day. Due to this, I prefer MUDs that are not deep on class progression, and just easy fun.
A lot of the still running MUDs have deep learning curves, due to some of them having been running for a good few decades. To the new or casual player, this makes them impregnable.
Whereas I don't think we need to change the beauty of the text based medium, I do think that the genre needs updating to make new MUDs more accessible.... Even D&D finally accepted it needed to simplify again to gain new players.