The Glade 4.0

You know, I knew about these things. I knew UO and EQ were based on them but with a graphical overlay. Yet somehow it never occurred to me to try one. The MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) has been around longer than the "World Wide Web", but it was still just esoteric computer history to me...until now.

Apparently I lucked out. If the reviews are any indications, I stumbled upon the best one on the Web. It may not have my favorite theme ever (but it is, at least, relatively original). The Inquisition - Legacy is set in the world of Urth, in a setting that mixes elements of several of our real historical periods (from the dark ages through the renaissance, and the ever pervasive Inquisition.) The difference is, magic is real. Witches exist. The Church has decreed they are evil, and burns them to save their own souls...the history is much deeper and I could go on for pages, but there's no reason to. If you play the game, you'll read much of it yourself.

What sets it apart is the roleplaying. Real, constantly, people are in character. There's no prevention of player killing, but people don't go around killing each other either. There are plenty of reasons why, and I could go into the mechanics of it, but if you're at all interested, I recommend just playing. Despite the lack of graphics, it's rather what I expected EQ to be 13 years ago. EQ ultimately failed at this, but this game? completely scratches my roleplaying itch.

(Demographic is odd, too. Seems half the players are Aussie women.)

If you do play, please type 'refer talya' once in game, just to let them know i brought you there.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Uh, I think you broke it. I just tried to go to http://www.ti-legacy.com and it sez "not found."

It's back!

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Sounds like every MUD I ever played on. The whole up n down thing, not Urth.

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Would love to, but my ISP (one of the major UK ISPs...) is banned. Go figure ;-p

Nice, it's a ROM derivative.

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I don't understand how anyone has fun with this stuff.

Yeah, what Lenas said. Maybe I'm just too much of a visual person, but the "video" in "video games" is really key to me.

Do you enjoy reading books? Seems kinda the same thing to me.

Books are not the same thing as visual media, but that doesn't diminish what they are.

Books don't require input.

I do, but I also don't go into reading a book with the same expectation of interactivity as I do a game. Books are a 'tell, not show' medium to me, games are the reverse. And much as I love reading books, for instance, I'm not crazy about reading in games. In a game, I want to see and hear what you're talking about, not just imagine it.

Edit: Lenas for the succinct win.

Do/did either of you play any tabletop RPGs?

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No, but I would if I had friends that were interested. Tried to get into pbp but doing that **** online takes centuries and isn't fun.

I believe Hopwin's point is it's the same thing as a tabletop RPG, with the app serving as the table, and a whole lot more people capable of playing at once.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Tabletops can still have physical representations of the game that you can see and interact with.

Also, direct meatspace social interaction, which is kinda their big draw (to me, at least, and no, I'm not a big TTRPG gamer).

I tried MUDding once. For me, it struck an unhappy medium in which one benefits from neither the asyncronicity and time to compose one's responses that Play by Post/Email provides, nor the speed, pacing, and immediacy that face to face gaming yields.

It's like holding extended SMS conversations; you get more done, at some point, by just dialing the other guy up, and you're still stuck typing with your thumbs in 160 characters instead of email.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I miss some of the MUDs I used to play. To this day I have yet to have that same sense of immersion in a graphical online RPG than I did when playing a MUD. Sure, graphics make things easier. And they are pretty. But once you see them, you've seen them. I would be willing to bet cold, hard, real cash that the average person (or even majority of persons) who play graphical online RPGs get "Wowed" once or twice, but the bulk and majority of their time is spent ignoring the visuals and tunnel-visioning their way through the game after that.

That wasn't the case with a MUD. Since it was all in your head, your mind's eye always placed you in as detailed a world as you could want. On top of that, it was even more detailed than the graphical games (to this day) can achieve. I specifically held off on playing EQ for a while because I knew it would only disappoint me when it came to immersion (and I was right).

Some of my absolute favorite memories of the game would be the equivalent of "hours of crafting" in today's gaming. But, instead of impatiently clicking on a button and watching a status bar move and a tiny number increase by a digit, here is what I was doing: Sitting alone on a mossy log next to a babbling brook, catching glints of the sunlight as it danced through the leaves swaying in the wind overhead. Foraging for a few rosewood sticks, shaving the bark off, straightening them out with my shaper tool, nocking it, placing three strips of glue along one end, attaching three fletchings, and finally affixing an arrowhead.

Mundane to some (especially so in today's games), peaceful and relaxing to me. I would do that for hours. And again, this is the sort of thing I miss the most.

The caliber of player was always, on average, much higher than today's RPGs as well. Like Linux, MUDs tend to weed out the average "instant gratification kiddie" and you're generally left with the type of people like yourself; the ones that want to experience the game the same way as you.

Not every MUD was made equal, however. Because they were easy to set up and many had general templates that others could copy you could easily run into some pretty bad ones. Some players putting themselves in the role of "God of the Universe" (since it was their server) and making sure other players worshipped them (yeah, I ran into this on some of the bad ones). But there were a few very good ones too. DragonRealms and Gemstone III, made by the same company, were both very excellent (I was partial to the former).

To those that will never understand it, or want to try, I truly and honestly feel bad for you. It is a unique experience that not even the best games of today can even come close to matching when it comes to combat, role playing, exploration, crafting, and general camaraderie (even amongst enemies). It wasn't perfect and had it's own set of flaws (as every game does), but I do not regret a single minute of it. I can't say the same for some of today's online RPGs.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

There were two MUDs that I played the **** out of during high school: Arctic(a MUD based off the Dragonlance series) and Rapture(which I think was influenced by many different DnD settings, but was mostly its own world). Jesus...the time I sank into these two MUDs is insane. Arctic was the more hardcore of the two, but damn it was fun. So easy to get lost in these games. I eventually became a builder for Rapture, but I left after creating my first area. I think that's when I got my first job at McDonalds and a few weeks after that I dived deep in to Everquest and haven't gone back to MUDs ever since.

I've always wanted to back and try some other MUDs, and I would probably try this one except for the fact that the setting does not appeal to me at all. Sure, magic is real but it's still Earth. I hate Earth as a fantasy setting. MUDs are so hard to get started in, though. You basically have to keep track of your movements so you don't get lost(it's not like you can just press M to bring up a map), combat is generally much deadlier(kind of like Everquest) and some MUDs would penalize you pretty harshly for dying(I know that in Arctic, you permanently lose stats when you die. At the start of the game, you have fixed stats and need a magic scroll to see what those stats are...but you need a good chunk of money and need to be level 5 before you can even use the scroll. Most of the time I ended up rerolling after finding out how bad my stats were).

I don't think I have that amount of patience anymore.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick