[MUD-Dev] I Want to Forge Swords. [Another letter to game designers]

[asnellin at san.rr.com]

On Wed, 9 May 2001, Vincent Archer wrote:

> I had the odd experience yesterday in Asherons Call. I was "sweeping
> a road" with a friend (i.e. going from one town to another, killing
> everything inbetween) when we met a character, going the opposite
> way.  We said hi, explained what we were doing, and got rewarded by
> "but the experience is bad here. You should be in dungeon X or Y,
> it's a lot better". He got flabbergasted when we told him we just
> came from dungeon X, we were the only ones there, but moved on and
> were on the road "because we never went up that road, and my friend
> wants to visit Cragstone".
 
> That's what you find when someone in an explorer mood meets someone
> in an achiever mood.
 
> For us, the world is interesting at all levels, and we want to see
> all.  In EQ, we (the same friend and I) have visited about every
> zone we could get in (with the exception of the keyed dungeons of
> Kunark and the tail end of Velious). And lots of people want at one
> time to do that.


This is one of the reasons I like AC so much better than UO... there
are so many more things to explore. You can honestly get lost in the
wilderness, and there are so many unique little dungeons to poke
through. When I first heard of Multima, long before the whole MMOG
thing blew up, that was the sort of thing I envisioned: being able to
play a ranger or druid type, who lived out in the great forest at the
north end of the continent and interacted occasionally with players
who got lost up there.

And for the first few months in AC that was largely what I did: walked
everywhere, exploring the vast spaces in between the towns that lots
of people rarely see. Granted, the novelty wore off after a while, and
I moved on to more focussed adventuring, so to speak. But I still have
a distinct advantage over lots of higher level players that I group
with, in that I know the layout and relationships between all the
towns and can generally use the portal system much more
efficiently. Of course, my characters are still gimps, but you can't
win them all. :>

-- Andrew

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