TMC Player Reviews: Dark Risings

Review Submitted By: fatty
Author Status: Player and staff member
Started on Dark Risings: Seven years? Eight?
Submission Date: Oct 23, 2005
TMC Listing: Dark Risings

The following review is the opinion of the review's author [fatty] and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.

In my long career as a player on Dark Risings, and shorter career as
an immortal, I’ve had a chance to experience and understand the grand
variety of good and bad things about this MUD. For the first couple of
years, it definitely seemed like the good things outweighed the bad.
But halfway through my time there, it seems like things have gone
downhill. This is reflected in the players, the staff, and the game
itself. As I hope to explain, I honestly don’t feel that this game
deserves the #1 spot.

To begin with the players on Dark Risings, I am of the opinion that
most of them can be divided into two classifications; those who hang
out in safe rooms and engage in boring, clichéd roleplay, and those
who are purely interested in combat, creating the absolute thinnest
role for their characters necessary to be allowed to play. For a while
now, it’s been difficult to find someone of a happy medium. Many of
the awesome, inspiring players have moved on to greener pastures and
those who remain, though I mean no insult, are downright
uninteresting.

The staff members are perhaps the most discussed aspect of Dark
Risings. What I mean by that is that if you play here, you will at
some point be guaranteed to overhear some allegations of cheating or
some form of poor conduct. As a former staff member myself, I can
vouch that yes, some staff members have used their powers for ill
gain, and probably still do. Other reviews here may give you a taste
of the feelings some hold towards the immortals. But regardless, the
overall demeanour of the immortals seems to be pleasant, and although
they will usually prefer their private rooms to interacting in public
with mortals, they’re fair to deal with when you need to. The minds in
charge, however, come up with some bizarre ideas for the game, which
I’ll expand on next.

Over the past year or so, the game has become quite a bit more
commercialized. At one point, donations from players were requested
with ridiculous rewards offered. If I remember correctly, a couple of
hundred bucks earned you your very own vampire or you could pay less
and get an impressive weapon. This is the sort of thing I expect from
someMMORPG, not a roleplay focused MUD. Take a peek at the website if
you need further evidence of commercialization - there are banner ads
aplenty. While I understand that the people who run Dark Risings need
to eat, the banner ads and donation schemes have only come into
existence over the past year or so, and they bottom line is that they
detract from the game.

The game itself, once you remove the personalities associated with
it, has some problems. The code, while constantly being tweaked with
and added on to, is dangerously buggy. If a code port exists, it must
not be put to much use, because I am told that the record time for the
main port to crash after new code is introduced is just five seconds.
Most of the code remains faithful to the mood of ROM, and the
werecreature and vampire transformation features are neat and
entertaining. In addition to the array of stock areas in Dark Risings,
the custom areas range from exciting to completely awful. Some have
compelling descriptions and layouts that kept me exploring for days on
end, while others swamped me with mobprogs in every room and caused
headaches.

Four years ago I would have been very proud that this game had
reached the #1 spot on TMC. I wish I could say that was true now, but
with all the allegations of vote-pushing which I won’t discuss in
detail (look at other reviews to hear opinions or simply load up the
Dark Risings website to see for yourself) I suggest that you scroll a
little further down the ratings and find a better game. I have no
doubt that they do exist.