[Davisb135]

I agree with you. You've also got more / easier competition. IIRC, MUDs peaked in the mid-late 90s. MMOs were really the death knell, then the explosion of other types of games, mobile games, then to your point things like Discord.

One adjacent project we're exploring for the future is if you took all of the current understanding of game design and mechanics with modern AI functionality, knowledge bases, etc, and built a MUD, what would it look like and would it be enough to bring back players from other games?

[munk-a]

There is an ongoing project doing this (that launches this weekend I believe) to revive a MUD called Shadows of Isildur. I think a lot of effort has been put into the new changes to the codebase to bring QoL features that a modern audience would expect while keeping the bones of the game the same. I'm not certain how it will fare as, to be honest, MUDs take an inordinate amount of time to really groove into and immerse yourself in - but I am excited to see efforts like this invested on as we older MUDers find ourselves finally reaching the point of having free time again.

[kingbirdy]

> There is an ongoing project doing this (that launches this weekend I believe) to revive a MUD called Shadows of Isildur

Interesting, could you share more info? I couldn't find anything on Google. I played a fair amount of SOI back in the day and it'd be fun to start over on a fresh server.

[munk-a]

play.shadowsofisildur.com:4500 - if you'd like (it isn't on the old domain anymore) there's also a discord that I'm a bit hesitant to link to where all the discussion is taking place that has a lot of the old folks hanging around and nostalgifying.

[kingbirdy]

So the website doesn't work and the discord is private for no reason? Unfortunately this is reminding me why I stopped playing MUDs :( For a genre that's entirely dependent on keeping up an established and invested user base, the average MUD sure seems to dislike its players, especially new ones.

[munk-a]

The website is down right now and the discord isn't private but I'm hesitant to personally publish it in such a public place.

[tracker1]

Would be kind of a cool experiment for a mud-style interface, where each npc/avatar was backed by a lower-cost LLM... similar rules for the npcs in the game, but a background feed, and history of interactions with other players as background.

Maybe limiting npc's to only a certain number of moves that aren't a response to other users per day...

It could be a lot of fun.

[marknutter]

I'm building this exact thing, actually. Intelligence determines which model powers a mob/npc. Getting neat results so far!

[munk-a]

A MUD exists as a platform for creative writing - introducing LLMs into one would deprive it of its primary function.

[phantom784]

That sounds very different than my memory of MUDs. The ones I remember were much more a text-based version of "World of Warcraft" or other similar MMOs where you navigate through a world, complete quests, etc. You could chat with other players but it was more about teaming up for quests than a creative writing/roleplaying exercise.

Not to say that what you're describing didn't exist, but I don't think it was defining feature of all MUDs.

[egypturnash]

There was a distinct split between people there for the grind and people there for the RP. I was there for the RP and I was mostly on MUCKs, MUSHes, and the occasional MOOs (multi-user chat kingdoms, multi-user shared hallucinations, and mud (object-oriented) ). They all had a combat system lurking somewhere in their code but those routines rarely got used.

[ButlerianJihad]

Firstly, "multi-user chat kingdom" is a backronym that was not envisioned by the original authors of TinyMUCK, but perhaps by the users or developers of some future fork. TinyMUCK is notable for having a "Fuzzball" edition or fork, that powered FurryMUCK itself, as well as related worlds which hosted and catered to people in furry fandom.

Secondly, exactly none of these had a "combat system" of any kind. These were all derived from TinyMUD, written by Jim Aspnes at CMU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Aspnes

TinyMUD was a "social MUD" and its explicit goals were to be a glorified chat room, and a sort of "blank slate" for people interested in building their own extensible worlds, based on a pure textual interface. There was absolutely no "combat system" at all--in stark contrast to the other "MUDs" on the scene in those days, such as AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPmud, which were arguably way more popular, way more violent, and way more into the "combat" or "PvP" or also PvE type play styles.

There was, of course, a "kill" command to allow one player to kill another. But the results of the kill were quite nerfed: the player was sent to their $HOME, and collected an "insurance policy" of pennies, which was partly based on the killer-determined "cost" to kill them in the first place. This wasn't combat by any means--basically, a way to sort of put an exclamation mark on a conversation.

MOO, though it was not derived from any Tiny* codebase, was also one of those "talkie" muds at its heart: it was an object-oriented, fully-programmable, extensible world-building server, where indeed, any combat system could've been implemented, if the players/programmers of a certain world agreed to include combat. But MOO was unique in giving a "barebones" server to program from first principles. So, no, none of these had combat systems, and that's their chief appeal.

[egypturnash]

Thanks for the corrections :)

I sure spent a lot of time on Furry. I think the penultimate time I logged on there was something like a decade ago; the last time was to attend Tugrik's wake.

[pigpop]

In some cases but coming from someone who played MUDs back in the day on a monochrome display and dial-up I know I would have been very interested in playing one with NPCs powered by an LLM had they been available back then. The NPCs as they existed were generally just furniture and the interesting part was playing with and talking to other people.

[Kiro]

Most people played MUDs for the grind. Levels and loot. They care about the story as much as you care about it in Path of Exile.

[munk-a]

The people who played MUDs for the grind will, genuinely, have a lot more fun playing PoE or some other modern adventure game. MUDs were the only option for that sort of adventure experience for a while but there are other options now that simply have more tools at their disposal than text based communication offers.

If a MUD is going to survive today it's going to be driven by those RP focused players where the freedom to describe actions in text allows a flexibility that's unrealistic in graphical games.

[stavros]

Even though I didn't play a MUD for the text, it's entirely false to say that the text didn't add a lot. The writing made or broke the game, since it was all text-based.

[Varelion]

I honestly worry that the relevance of text-based systems is largely tied with literacy and how it interacts with the player's imagination -- something largely in decline, at least in the US.

[CTDOCodebases]

It's not just imagination the relevance is also tied to focus and attention. I have multiple friends who claim that the reason they don't read is because are "visual learners" .

The real truth is they have a 30 second attention span and can't finish a page without daydreaming so in order to stay focussed they need a YouTube video than contains the same information but with constant visual changes.

[Varelion]

Jesus H. Christ, never thought about that.

[Davisb135]

Sadly, you're not wrong... It might not get off the ground, but if we're able to, we'll give it a shot.

[Varelion]

I really, really hope you lot manage to!