[MUD-Dev] The Future of MMOGs... what's next? (fwd)

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Talanithus HTML wrote:
> From: "Ron Gabbard" <rgabbard at swbell.net>
 
>> Personal opinion, the main short-coming with MMOGs is that they
>> are one mile wide, 100 miles long and 6 inches deep.

> I would love to reply to this, Ron, but I really am not following
> what you mean by MMOGs being "6 inches deep."  Of all the gaming
> genres in existence, I think MMOGs have the deepest influence of
> all.  They allow social interactions, communities, individualized
> representations of one's self...  basically the ability live and
> breath in a new world!  In effect, I believe that MMOGs are
> actually the deepest gaming experience that has yet been created.
 
> Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you mean?  Could you elucidate
> on your thoughts, please?

I think that he means is that the big graphical MUDs like Everquest
and whatnot are essentially Diablo with lots of people playing at
once. Lots of content, but it's shallow content. Compared to
single-player games, I'd agree that even the most basic text or
graphical MUD is generally deeper, but compared to good text MUDs,
the graphical ones are just eyecandy so far in terms of depth.

That's not meant to disparage the graphical format. After all, the
first text MUDs were pretty shallow too (fetch item, drop item in
place X to get some XP. Go fetch another item and drop it in place
X, etc.) and graphical MUDs are such huge projects it's
understandable that the first couple generations of them have taken
the most watered-down, most widely-accessible part, hack n' slash,
(at least among the niche crowd that plays graphical or text MUDs)
and focused their games almost entirely on that.

--matt

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