Niave question: MUDs and MMOs

July 27, 2006 on 11:24 am | In MMO (Live), General Gaming, Playstyles

As usual with such threads that grow into many pages, the current version of the SWG topic over at F13 has meandered into many sub-topics. The discussion got re-invigorated with folks having read Raph's interview at Escapist. He stopped by to make a comment about dikus and MUDs in general and from there discussion ensued.

And it prompted me to ask a question, the inspiration for which was a comment Haemish made in response to a sentence from Raph's entry.

First, Raph's sentence:

Raph Koster wrote: Diku-derived muds have gone way way way beyond what's in the MMORPGs today. Maybe the industry can take a cue there. But I think that it's far more likely to reinvent the wheel, only much more slowly because of the iteration time.

Then Haemish responded:

Haemish wrote: Yeah, the industry has stopped looking at MUD's as a whole. They are all looking at f**king WoW, and you know it, which is why you say the second part of this statement. MUD's, no matter how many people are playing them or how long they've been around, are going to be completely ignored from now on by all but indy developers.

The industry won't learn a g****mn thing from MUD's because they are convinced there is nothing to learn. And they may indeed be right. The dynamics of MMOG's are not the same as MUD's based on the sheer numbers alone. MUD's are boutiques, and no one with money wants a boutique, they want to be goddamned Sam Walton.

I emphasize "sheer numbers alone" because this is my question:

If you look at what the majority of MMORPG players are doing, as defined by the number of accounts in the diku-inspired games*, they're either soloing or are in smallish groups of 4-6. Raiding is niche, large scale PvP is niche and the games that focus on both are niche. WoW is huge because it doesn't focus overly on any of it, forum rat histrionics aside.

Further, the "millions" in any million+ game, like the thousands in the thousands+ ones, are generally either broken down quite literally into sub groups of about 3,000 people, with maybe 500-2,000 online at any given time. This is further spread across sprawling landscapes or in pockets within the quilts of zones wherein, at any given time, someone might be able to coverse with about 20-60 other people, unless they like the silence of a seldom-solo'd area (or are in another such activity that requires they be there).

As a result of these considerations, I ask, what about the game mechanics of MUDs of old are irrelevant or impossible in what is the mainline MMORPGs?

I asked it there, and here, and will at Grimwell because I'm very interested in hearing from the veterans who were there. I was not. My first MMO was UO, though I have long felt Diablo II closed servers were almost MMOs in their own right. Regardless, I went from Ultima IV to a full-time Mac user to MMOs, and missed all of the 80s and most of the 90s in terms of MUDing and the like.

So here is me asking.

* And please note this is just about diku-inspired games. As a big fan of Eve, I also know it's relevance to large companies with very different scales of operation.