This week saw the 30 year anniversary of the original MUD so I thought it would be a good time to offer my thoughts on the state of MUDs.
MUDs don’t get a lot of press these days and if you weren’t aware of them you’d be forgiven for thinking that players and developers had all moved on to graphical MMORPGs and virtual worlds a long time ago. I remember Richard Woolcock posting quotes from almost every year since 1990 by different people saying that MUDs are dieing, yet somehow they are still around. It seems a popular view that MUDs are in decline and that they will eventually be taken over completely by graphical games and forever vanish into history.
It is true that MUDs are no longer the cutting edge of online entertainment that they were 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago they still offered an alternative to graphical MMORPGs for those without the latest hardware or who didn’t want to fork out for expensive subscriptions.
These days however there are more and more free graphical MMORPGs and those that required high end systems a few years ago can be played on hardware that is modest by modern standards.
Players today have many different virtual worlds to choose from, so what can MUDs offer them?
In my next post I will elaborate on some of the areas where I believe MUDs still lead the way in virtual world design.
bcdev.design.blog 