Review Submitted By: Davairus
Author Status: Staff member
Started on Abandoned Realms: 1998
Submission Date: Dec 14, 2006
TMC Listing: Abandoned Realms
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Davairus]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
As a staff member, you should expect a heavy bias in my review,
although I will say first and foremost I want to give you facts about
the game, I dont want to pull punches or make any false promises. So
here goes.
First the shortcomings:
1) Code changes. These occur very slowly, so slow it frustrates even
me in fact. We have changes announced 6 months ago that still haven't
been completed. So that's a real negative I think. Some of the
players are quite disgruntled with this, which I think actually hurts
the process back in turn, a vicious cycle. As you can imagine, if you
are an Imm on a mud, you want to have fun to, and if you're being
pressured to get changes done, you're probably likely to stop finding
that fun to do and find something else. This is bad because all the
change go through the single owner. It has the enormous benefit of the
game's classes all being done in the same vision, wonderful for game
balance. So its not all bad. In the past, Imms have had disagreements
about the direction the mud should go in, and this would lead to a
'too many cooks spoil the broth' syndrome, some classes being really
diesel and others notably over-complicated. Now its all sorted out,
already, lucky for new people.
If you were new to the game, this wouldn't be bothering you for a year
or two, because the mud has too much unique material for that. Down
the road.. yes. Some classes are bland after the second play or so,
as they haven't received their polishing yet. Others, like warriors,
you can play with every race (and there's 16) and receive a different
experience from it. That's pretty amazing. Hopefully all the classes
will eventually get there.
2) Playerbase.
For me this is the biggest negative with AR. It quite literally used
to be triple digit back in 1998, the mud's heyday. Then its dropped
off quite quickly, max 80 in 2000, 60 in 2001, etc.. I'm looking at 7
logged in at the moment, max on of 25. This was a mud that had so
many people on it when I started, and most vets remember that time,
so there's some tension over it. Now some places have a lot worse,
that's for sure, but you wish for what you got 'used' to, if you
understand what I'm saying.
Main reason that's a problem is that the mud was primarly pk, so, say
back in 2000 when you were level 30, you would have 16 people in pk
range. Scary. Now you're lucky if you're not the only one in that.
Although there are cabals to join, and since they have to wait at 30
for applications, you are guaranteed someone in pk if you wait around.
And I do believe it is worth the wait. I'm always looking for the
next big thing to make those ranks more fun, but there's no real
substitute for another human being, as you'll no doubt know.
3) The pk/rp merging of genres.
Here you see a rift between the mush-like people who seem to just
want to rp / kill mobs and hate pk, and the pk-happy people who hate
them back and won't do any. Result: neither group is satisfied,
although the guys that actually enjoy this quirky blend of rp/pk do
seem to love it. The playerbase sure could use more people like that.
I think this counts against the mud in this phase of its existence,
as I am seeing a dominant group of mush-types, with a few skilled
pkers. The mud is straddling the divide nicely I think, but a lot of
players dont seem to be doing that quite so well. I might be
misjudging this one being a pker type myself.
4) Promotion.
It is with a tinge of sadness that I say this. There are muds that,
no joke, have better playerbase than AR because they market themselves
a lot better. We don't do banners or anything, we rarely bother with
mud reviews. I see other muds pretty darn similar to ours thriving
because they're getting the word out. Kind of a reason why I posted
a review too. I would especially encourage you to drop by and try
this mud if you've never heard of it. You might be surprised. Very
surprised. This mud is the proverbial diamond in the rough in my
opinion. Hopefully we'll get an ad-banner one day.
Now the good points about the mud.. they're numerous gameplay-wise, as
any good mud should be, and the website does a nice job of introducing
those to the browser. I'll give a few:
Racial legacies -- this was the best thing added to the mud in the
last five years period. Suppose you pick, say, a duergar thief. Then
you get two unique skills due to your duergar heritage, that aid your
thievery. Why is this great? Because duergar thief having a vuln to
water makes it an otherwise unpopular choice. This puts them in the
mainstream again.
The 'raid' areas -- Winter, the vast underdark, volcanoes, vampire
haunted mansions, all sorts of fun and dangerous places to go in. If
you dont explore these, and you played this mud, honestly you are
missing out on a great experience. My only complaint about those
areas would be they are designed for big groups, and since the game is
a competitive one, it sort of goes against the grain. Areas built for
two people to handle might have been wiser. Though I haven't seen
much complaint about this to be honest...the camaraderie is really
high amongst the guys that run those areas. I just personally prefer
it to see people kicking each other's guts out.
Newbie friendliness -- i won't say its unmatched on muds, what I will
say is its competitive... I think AR is leading the genre in newbie
friendly amongst the *truly* free muds like this.
Game 'pk' balance -- whenever I play the game myself (now remember, I
am on the staff, since I'm a major contributor) I sometimes get quite
euphoric about the game's balance. I can't help that feel that the
game is done ...just right. You have to equip your character and
that's an important task, but you have to equip it the right way.
That includes procuring rare items from other player's corpse. Then
in battle, you have to worry about things like, is my weapon quite
appropriate against his? Since flails will beat daggers easily, given
equal eq. Skill can overcome eq disadvantages, but only by so much,
and with experience, you can tell how much. Now of course, if you
fight outnumbered (e.g. 2 on 1) your character cannot possibly get
strong enough to stand a great chance against that, its seldom that
anyone can dominate the playerbase, and the best players will
definitely go down 3 on 1. I think that's the way it should be.
I'll skip the rest of these, and just move on to Imms. The owner is
a creative genius, which is probably due to his liberal arts backgrnd.
If nobody is playing a class due to lack of interest, you can be sure
he's got plans there. I'm a coder, and obviously I'm around a lot
so that whenever Imms are needed (e.g. to fix a bug, or deal with rule
abuse) there's often me online. The rest of the Imms are more like
gofers for us two, helping the playerbase out with questions and doing
some roleplaying stuff. In the past, Imms have gotten impatient with
the other Imms, and you could definitely see the effect that was
having on the players as well. Imms are picked quite selectively, but
somehow this still happened. As of now, AR has a good solid Imm
team where everybody gets along 100%.
Well I dont want to hit the 10k word limit so I'll end there. I hope
that this has been informative.
