Review Submitted By: Sol
Author Status: Staff member
Started on Lost Souls: 1994
Submission Date: Jan 19, 2004
TMC Listing: Lost Souls
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Sol]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
Lostsouls is a rare gem among the MUDs still active in the world,
which are rapidly being replaced by 3D MMORPGs. It has retained
it's popularity despite newer, graphically advanced games appearing
on the market, which leads me to conclude that there’s something
else that brings people back again and again to the text-based
world of Lostsouls. It’s so vast, complex, and inspired that
people can’t help returning to it after each flash-in-the-pan
visual MMORPG comes and goes.
First of all, Lostsouls is absolutely huge. If you played it for
an hour or two every single day, it would take you about a year
to see every single room in the MUD, and that’s if you played
the same character all the time. The landscape is littered with
dozens of towns, ranging from hamlets of a few rooms to sprawling
metropolises that contain several individual sections. Caverns
packed with monsters are tucked away into every crevice, while
entire cities of intelligent monsters loom in distant lands; In
fact, there are even other planes of existence to explore than
just the earthly prime material, opening up an incredible amount
of territory.
You never have to worry about getting bored, because a complex and
detailed atman system allows you to create up to ten different
characters from one of forty diverse races. The game system
uses a statistic/skill base, which allows for literally millions
of possible combinations. Once incarnated in the world, each
character may then join one or more of twenty-two different guilds,
with new ones being added all the time. In addition, the world
is filled with over a dozen associations, which are like
pseudo-guilds: non-exclusive memberships that offer a few slight
benefits; join up to six of them at once!
Perhaps the best part about Lostsouls is how detailed the game
mechanics are without making the interface complicated. Players
are free to allocate every single point of their character, from
determining each of nine attributes that commonly range from 10
to 100, selecting starting skills from a list of many of the
game’s 141 existing skills, to determining primary handedness,
gender and even homeland from a list determined by the race
selected!
And it doesn’t stop there. Players may band together and form
companies, each having access to a shared vault of saved wealth.
They may join up into coherent groups to adventure together,
pooling their resources while splitting up experience gains.
The world even has several offices, which are titles passed on
to whoever deserves it most, each granting their own specific
powers and responsibilities.
If you’re into text-based MUDs or just getting sick of visual
MMORPGs that have flashy graphics but no real content, stop by
lostsouls.org, port 3000 sometime and see why this realm has
stood the test of time to endure as one of the world’s finest
gaming environments.
