Aetolia is about vampires vs werewolves and undead vs living, probably the most RP heavy among them. Achaea is the oldest and by far the most populated (more then 300 people in prime time), but its mostly traditional fantasy. But they are different in settings and some features. In core gameplay they all are very similar, made with same game engine, played with same game client and even share same community. It offers 5 games: Achaea, Aetolia, Lusternia, Imperian and Midkemia Online. IRE stands for Iron Realms Entertainment - one of the only two companies, that made business of creating MUDs (the other one being Simutronics). Many MUDs that were very populated in the past dont have a single person logged in! I once found MUD where only its creator was online. It saddened me to see huge worlds, that someone put alot of hard work to make, look like ghost towns. Along with most popular MUDs that I found at I checked few lesser known. Veteran players value every new soul since they are so rare. In MUD when you start, everyone welcomes you with open arms and ready to give you all kind of help and advices.

In WoW when you start playing, nobody cares about you. But where such games luck in numbers, they fill in attitude. And only very few top MUDs have more then 300 at peak times. 100 players online is considered very good pop, 50 is decent. The raise of MMOs striked hard at MUDs population. Dunno why she did it, but it was fun talking to her and she actually helped me with my quests. Once I was playing Lusternia and saw a Goddess interacting with NPC in low level area.

In MUDs you can do this on regular basis. Speaking about Gods (creators, world builders), I doubt any of you had a cute ingame chat with Ghostcrawler or Bob Kotick in WoW. Many of them dont even have such thing as high end content. Still MUDs are not about chasing to high end content. Some of those characters went through several reincarnations and are close to Godlike status. But it's also hard to catch up with veterans, who played for more then decade. So there are quite alot of things to see and do. Many top MUDs started 15-20 years ago and were in constant development. I just wish they had varied sound effects for this. Or tavern keeper shouts 'All drinks are on the house!'. For example you can stand in a tavern, reading a sign, and then scene about brawl of drunken visitors starts. Top quality MUDs have interesting and very immersive room descriptions, with different scripts that make world feel more alive. There are many players who know all ins and outs of game's lore, and wont speak out of character even in private. There are organisations that are made and governed by players who write rules and play political games. In many MUDs roleplay is mandatory and games are built all around players interaction. Even on LoTRO's RP servers its just community effort.

There is no MMORPG on market except maybe Face of Mankind, which is built around RP. These are my thoughts and short reviews.įirst thing that striked me when explorting MUDs - the quality of roleplay. Not long ago Ive decided to take a break from MMOs and check what top MUDs have to offer for MMO gamer like me. As for MUDs (text MMORPGs), Ive played russian one called Aladon in late 90s, but it was very short experience and Ive never tried them ever since. Played every single one of them that is worth playing (tried more then one hundred MMO titles). Ive started playing MMORPGs in 2004, since WoW beta.

Aardwolf dragon keeper