Text games?

[Deleted]

Hey guys,

I lurk around the forums quite a lot and tend post some fairly arbitrary things on various forums! Been addicted to Wow, did the whole single player thing for too long and got a bit burned out on it.

I've been rediscovering text based games (MUDs); maybe not the best forum for it but I wonder how many of the millions of MMORPG players know the origins of the genre. Here's a copied post from another site talking about Avalon's 25th anniversary. Avalon is the game that invented the concept of cooldowns and individual player classes / ongoing personae. Well worth a look!

Avalon is proud to announce that we are fast approaching our TWENTY FIFTH anniversary.

For those unaware, Avalon was the first online roleplaying world and has been running since 1989. To this day, Avalon is still actively developed and managed and has recently become FREE to play with the sponsorship model.

What is sponsorship?

Sponsorship is a means of acquiring gametime as an alternative to our paid subscription service. ALL players, new, old and returning can seek sponsorship from their City, Guild or Priesthood associates and in turn enjoy ALL the benefits afforded full-subscribed players. There are NO hidden charges or barriers to progression; a sponsored player can achieve and participate in ALL things that subscribed players have access to.


What is Avalon?

Avalon is the oldest online roleplaying world, a fantasy-themed MUD boasting the most immersive gaming experience in the genre. Whether it be politics, warfare, PVP melee or economics, Avalon has something for everyone.

From demon-summoning sorcerers and holy crusading paladins to puppeteering-seers and shadow-manipulating assassins, each of our professions has hundreds of unique abilities, all of which have, in turn, hundreds of cures, defences and countermeasures. Our ethos for combat is "anti-automation" which is designed to reward human "in the moment" decision making input over what a "bot" can achieve, ensuring that our combat system is the most intense, intuitive and rewarding on the internet.

Avalon's economic system is the most advanced of its kind, boasting a complete Farming and Labours system in which players can grow their own crops, harvest their own fruits and vegetables, blow glass, drill for oil, mine for ores - the possibilities are vast. Each of Avalon's villages produce their own commodities which can be traded, sold and stolen, adding a further layer to our economy which also boasts fully player run shops in which it is fully possible for the fledgling trader to turn multi-entrepeneur and reap the rewards.

Each city in Avalon has a fully fleshed out, player run autonomous government, from the Prince down to lowliest peasant and everything in between. Elections, ministries, laws and exiles all feature; all is controlled by the players and through warfare and military strategy, invasions and conquests are a very real possibility.

Our warfare system is peerless. Cities enlist troops into legions that have to train in as many as fifty unique military abilities from deployment orders, formations and marching to digging trenches, laying minefields and razing barricades. The battlefield is vast and cities compete for influence and income across the land's sphere of influence, bringing forth to bear siegetowers, oil-cauldrons, mortar bombs and archery across a landscape of trenches, tunnels, barricades, fortifications and more.

Is Avalon "Pay for Perks?"

Avalon offers PROCUREMENT as a way to obtain lessons more quickly (standard gain is 4 per hour played) but in NO way is it possible for a player to buy a leg-up on another using real money. Our ethos for these transactions is "faster, not better" and while it IS possible to purchase speedy character advancement, the end result of this is in no way better or different to a player who reaches their crowning point using the traditional, patient method.

Create a character today at www.avalon-rpg.com - we can guarantee you won't be disappointed.

[NightZero88]

I was a big fan of MUDs. Had been playing them for years typically in a builder/admin roll. I'd still be playing but I felt it was not conducive to my health (avoiding being with people) so I gave it up. I'd say I played various MUDs for around 12-15 years.

Does seem like a thread to promote your MMO though or an MMO you're involved with.

[unfilteredJW]

Soooooo many better choices than Avalon out there.

[Sj]

Soooooo many better choices than Avalon out there.

Yeah, Avalon wasn't exactly terrible, but there are tons of great ones out there based. MUDs and MUSHs are a lot of fun. I was looking into maybe finding another community to get involved in a few months ago then life crit me hard so I don't have time anymore.

[Mahourai]

Unlike interactive fiction, where the all-text approach generally serves a purpose in game design, text-based MUDs just seem like a purely nostalgic throwback. Am I wrong? What's the appeal to these compared to a game you can look at?

[Sj]

Unlike interactive fiction, where the all-text approach generally serves a purpose in game design, text-based MUDs just seem like a purely nostalgic throwback. Am I wrong? What's the appeal to these compared to a game you can look at?

Same reason tons of people still play D&D instead of playing video games. It's still fun, and you can set up pretty much anything imaginable with a MUD/MUSH.

[Mahourai]

Same reason tons of people still play D&D instead of playing video games. It's still fun, and you can set up pretty much anything imaginable with a MUD/MUSH.

Well, D&D offers clear advantages over traditional videogames with stuff like a breadth of character creation options far beyond any computer game, infinite scenarios for narrative and encounter design, etc. Whereas a text videogame seems to have all the disadvantages of D&D (no pretty pictures) along with the restrictions of a videogame.

[stumpy]

I'd rather play Coloratura.

[Spiral Mage]

Lost me at "paid benefits" and subscription talk. MUDs were an interesting method for gaming back before the raise of MMOs and I remember them but I spent very little time on them. In my eyes, they are a poor medium for actual gaming and therefore undesireable, and are better suited to roleplaying since they allow you to clearly fashion the world around you and be creative, which is far more of an RP forum than it is a gaming one where stricter structure and rules are needed. In this era, if we wanna game, we have MMOs. If you wanna roleplay, MUDs may still very well be an excellent idea since there are no widely used chat or text services anymore, with the fall of AOL years ago. Just my view on it.

Also, mods tend to delete threads obviously trying to "sell a game", which yours is clearly promotion. I'm not in favor of that but I'm just saying, it's happened.

[May90]

Unlike interactive fiction, where the all-text approach generally serves a purpose in game design, text-based MUDs just seem like a purely nostalgic throwback. Am I wrong? What's the appeal to these compared to a game you can look at?

Let me ask you something else: do you believe that books are purely nostalgic throwback and movies is where it is at now? The thing is, our imagination is, pretty much, limitless, while visual depiction of our imagination has certain limits. In a text-based MUDs you can make things that are nearly impossible to show in terms of graphics. For example, take this line from The Wise Man's Fear by Pat Rothfuss:

"Clutching his leg, he sat on the ground and let loose with a string of angry cursing the like of which I had never heard in my entire life. He shouted and snarled and spat. He moved through at least eight languages, and even when I couldn’t understand the words he used, the sound of it made my gut clench and the hair on my arms stand up. He said things that made me sweat. He said things that made me sick. He said things I didn’t know it was possible to say."

You can pretty much insert the entire line into a text-based MUD, creating a very precise atmosphere the author wants you to experience. Now, how would you put it into a modern RPG with shiny graphics and expensive professional voice acting? I suppose you could get very close to what the author wants you to feel by recording hundreds of voice lines and working hard on animation, but it will cost a fortune. Whilst in a text-based game it is just a matter of putting a few precisely chosen sentences in.

D&D games, such as Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights, were something in between: there was a lot of text to create the mood, whilst the actual gameplay was visual. However, even there many mapmakers (there is a HUGE mod community for NWN which is active even today) complain that it is very hard to squeeze their abundant ideas into the limits of a visual video game. Every new creature they want to create, they have to work hard on, spending weeks working on animation and textures. Every new house they draw, they can spend days putting together to make it look as they will. In a text-based game, provided you are talented enough, you can create these things in minutes.

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That said, I've never played a text-based MUD I would really like. I've never tried Avalon, but those I tried in late 90-s were not very well written and looked like a product of an amateur high school writer. Perhaps there is something out there I haven't seen yet worth trying?

[unfilteredJW]

I like'em because there's just some themes you can't do in games. One I play I regularly, as a mage, party with a jedi, a fremen, and a cyborg.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's just watching numbers go up. But I like watching numbers go up.