![]() ![]() I’ve seen everything from Final Fantasy MUDs to Dragon Ball Z MUDs, down to insane “Raw Dawgs” codes where you could select three classes, put them together, and just PK til your brain went numb. The styles and designs vary wildly, despite common ground on codebases. As far as level-based MUDs go, the ideal MUD is UOSSMUD – The Unofficial Squaresoft MUD. I could log in a few times a day, not be assaulted with “daily quests”, play games with my friends, and also work on my own creative tasks – making new characters, giving them bios/descriptions, and when I worked on a game, building new areas for people to explore and level-up in. Then in Ethereal Mists, I got to be a terror that people ran from/logged out to get away from, but that’s another story for another day. ![]() I got to do plenty of reading, see how these people put together their worlds, and then I got to be a part of them. MUDs felt like the next big evolution of books and RPGs to me. I could just message my friends on AIM/YIM/ICQ, and ask them to come run some adventures with me.Ĭolor-Coding your channels makes everything easier. I spent a great deal of time on these kinds of MUDs too, since it was easier to get that D&D fix without having to properly set up a game. Conversely, the ROM/ROT style MUDS are more level-based, having a more RPG/D&D feel. Though I know little-to-nothing about coding, I’ve worked on several MUDs and even ran my own (Genesis MUD, which was a derivative of Ethereal Mists MUD – a GodWars codebase). This particular style of MUD, you train your stats and skills, pick a class, and typically enter PVP pretty quick (10 hours of newbie time on average). ROM, GodWars, and Envy are probably the biggest MUD styles to come out of DikuMUD. However, though KaVir created GodWars, it itself was a derivative of Merc, which was based on DikuMUD. GodWars was the real big PVP/White Wolf code, but there were derivatives of it, where someone modified the original GodWars code to make it their own. ![]() There were, of course, cooldowns and things like that, but in the more PVP-oriented MUDs, the faster you typed (or the better you put together aliases/macros/triggers), the more skilled you were at the game. These were all real-time games, and for the most part, the faster you could string together commands, the better you were. The two styles of MUD that were most common to me were ones based off of White Wolf’s tabletop series (Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, et cetera), and ones based off of some kind of D&D setting. There were as many codebases as there are nations of people, so I’m not going to go into all of them, because that would be absolute folly. Everything was described, each room having a (mostly) detailed description of where you were, and where you could go from there. There were no graphics outside of the occasional ASCII art. I used to use ZMUD/GMUD, but now I use MUDlet.Ī MUD is a multi-user dungeon. Players had to log in via Telnet, or through a MUD client. Most servers were cheap, and so staff paid for them, and occasionally received donations from the players. The difference in these and a free-to-play MMO was there was almost never a cash shop. These were virtually all free-to-play, and I feel should at least receive some of the credit for paving the way towards F2P online MMOs. It was just easier to play UOSSMUD rather than find a party in Final Fantasy XI. I preferred these text-based games over EverQuest, over WoW, not quite over Final Fantasy XI. When World of Warcraft was just starting, I was still logging into my favorite MUDs on a daily basis. Some of my closest friends were met there, many of whom I still talk to this day. They were biggest in the late 90s I’d say, but there are still MUDs going strong to this day, including one I’m proud to say I worked on. Before there were MMOs, and after the BBS (Bulletin-Board System) craze, there were MUDs. That is unless I’m talking to someone I played them with. Most of the time, when I mention a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) I get blank stares of confusion. ![]()
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