Re: [MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.)

[coder#ibm,net]

On 20/11/97 at 08:12 PM, Ola Fosheim Gr°stad <olag#ifi,uio.no> said:

>The whole concept of Quake and Tombraider is found in mid-eighties games. 
>Your comment made me go upstairs and look through my 64-stuff to look up
>the name of one of them.  "Talisman", written by a teenager (at least I
>think so, I believe he greeted his schoolfriends in a scroller :) has it
>"all".

>I think it might be interesting look back to "the roots" where everything
>had to be simple due to hardwarelimitaions.  Maybe the important aspects
>of the concepts are more visible there than in the flashy games of today.
>(To balance this: I do remember that I complained about flashy licenced
>games without real gameplay back in the 80's as well.  I might even say
>that licenced games have improved over the years.)

>What I am thinking of is to go back look at simple, ugly and FUN games
>from the past and try to see if some of these concepts could be done in a
>way that won't suffer too badly from lag. Then one build a new enjoyable
>platform for muds, with reduced bandwith and everything (What would fit
>in a C64 won't burn too much bandwidth :^).  I'm not so convinced that
>commercial MUDs have to be so flashy, at least not with the current
>competition.  After all, a MUD should be enjoyable for more than a week
>or two.  Communication and contents is more important in the long run,
>right?  Maybe funny graphics, puns and soforth is more important than
>smooth animations?

A long quote, but I think needed.  

I've long been recommending the members of this list to go play Shades for
a while.  It is one the very early MUDs, very little changed from the mid
1980's, and it is intensely playable.  This is despite being incredibly
primitive technically and as a game design.  It just works, and continues
to work.  It also serves as a fine example case to show how many of the
assumed truths of PK, H&S, GoP etc aren't quite as true as they're claimed
to be.

-- 
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw#null,net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder#ibm,net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...