[MUD-Dev2] [Off Topic] Have impatient players ruined 'The Ship'?

[Louis d'Ambra]

On 10/1/06, William Leader <leader at k2wrpg.org> wrote:
> There are a couple of servers that have a longer round time
> but they are sparsely populated and this causes a problem as well. If
> there are only three players on a server you can simply kill the first
> player you see without taking the time to identify them. since there is
> a %50 chance that they are your target. Since there is no penalty for
> killing the wrong player (so long as you don't get caught) then even a
> game with longer round times can't be played as designed.

The Ship started as a successful Half-Life 1 (free) mod, and some of
it's greatest features were simply removed on the Source portage (the
one your friend purchased). From what I've heard, the commercial
version was a major disappointment for it's fanbase, wich stuck to the
original.

For example, one of the key feature in the original mod is the
presence of NPCs moving along the boat that you cannot distinguish
from real players, so you can hide and fool others players by
imitating a NPC behavior. When they released The Ship on Steam, there
were no bots at all, wich was a huge mistake because the gameplay was
just plain flat and uninteresting : the game could only fail. I
suppose that they finally added the bots now, but too late. What I've
read from others insightful players showed that plenty others things
went just "wrong" and the original game was just a lot more fun. You
should try it, it should match your expectations.