21st Century MUDs

There was a recent thread at TMS asking if MUDs need to be brought into the 21st century.

A few years ago my answer would have been a resounding “Yes!” and I’d have gone on about accessibility and web clients and user interfaces and blah blah blah.

Nowadays I tend to think that there’s not much point talking about modernising MUDs because they have become a retro experience almost by definition.

That said, if you did want to make MUDs more appealing to modern gamers I believe there are three main areas you’d have to work on; presentation, interaction and gameplay.

Presentation

This is probably the simplest to change and yet very few MUDs manage to look like anything other than a terminal window from the 1980s. Unfortunately when you talk about presentation most people immediately leap into a “text vs graphics” debate but presentation is about much more than just graphics. By presentation I mean fonts, colours, layout and all the same things that designers consider when making a website (even one that’s mainly text).

You’ll often hear complaints from MUD owners that modern players don’t like reading or they only want to play graphical games but of course people read all the time on their computers or tablets, whether that’s websites, articles, forums, ebooks, facebook threads etc. What they don’t do is read fixed width fonts in white text on a black background in an 80 character wide terminal window.

Fonts and colours (and to a lesser extent layout) can be handled by the client of course, but MUD servers are usually designed with output to a standard terminal window in mind. Switching to a non fixed width font for example can cause problems if your game uses ASCII graphics or table type formatting.

Interaction

Traditional MUDs use a command line interface which is powerful and flexible but can be difficult to learn. This is especially true in the world of Windows where the vast majority of people just aren’t used to typing commands at their computer. If you want to attract mobile gamers then it’s even more of a barrier if they have to type everything.

You’ll always need to type when chatting of course, but there’s no reason why a modern interface couldn’t offer mouse or gesture control for the majority of commands and standard interactions. This traditional text adventure for example is entirely mouse driven and the principles could certainly be applied to a MUD.

Most modern browser games are turn based, and while I would guess that in many cases this was a technical rather than a design decision, it does give them a very different feel to MUDs where the action takes place in real time. The relentlessly scrolling wall of text from a MUD can be a lot more intimidating than static blocks of text the player can read and react to at their own pace in a turn based RPG.

Gameplay

This one is trickier to pin down and the most subjective. Many MUDs have their design rooted firmly in the 1990s or earlier (even if they aren’t actually that old) and often have systems which are more suited to “hardcore” players who are willing to spend a lot of time and effort to achieve relatively modest goals within the game.

These systems can include rent, offline equipment decay, death traps, corpse runs or large experience penalties for character death. These are all features that have gradually been dropped from mainstream MMOs as players have become less tolerant of them. Many MUDs also lack some of the conveniences that modern RPGs take for granted like real time maps and quest tracking.

There are also games which require complex client side scripting in order to play effectively, and while community created scripts exist for some of the more popular games in many cases the player is expected to do it all themselves.

Conclusion

This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of MUDs, and certainly there will be plenty of people who enjoy the very features that I’ve said make MUDs unappealing to many modern gamers. That’s absolutely fine and I can understand why many existing players and administrators wouldn’t want to change the MUDs they enjoy.

You could make improvements to presentation and interaction without alienating existing players by offering an optional alternative client, but I still don’t think it’s going to make your average MUD anywhere near as popular as a 21st century text game like Fallen London.