Review Submitted By: Acacia
Author Status: Player
Started on RetroMUD: February, 2008
Submission Date: Jul 1, 2010
TMC Listing: RetroMUD
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Acacia]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
RetroMUD is an old MUD spanning six worlds with many dungeons and
thousands of rooms to explore. It is highly detailed and original and
features many races as well as many classes and subclasses, and the
attention to detail is perhaps its greatest asset.
Characters in RetroMUD join a guild which teaches them the skills and
spells they will need to survive as adventurers. As they master their
guild, they can go on to more specialized guilds to learn new tricks
to make them more useful in and out of battle. The combat and
advancement systems seem to be unique to this MUD, though some spells
are clearly homages to games like Dungeons and Dragons or shows like
'Dragonball Z' and 'Inuyasha.'
Players advance their skills and spells 5% at a time, and the
percentage most often determines how likely the skill or spell will
fire successfully. Each advancement costs gold and experience, though
at newbie levels the gold cost is waived up to a certain percentage.
Unfortunately by the time a player has to start paying gold to train a
skill or study a spell, the skill or spell is still at a level that is
somewhat unreliable. Players save their experience points to advance
not only their skills and spells, but also their character levels and
guild levels which mercifully only require experience.
Recently RetroMUD allowed new characters to start with every spell
and skill up to level ten at 100%, which saves a huge amount of time
and expense, but the next ten levels are still very difficult and time
consuming to advance through if you want to have skills and spells
that are at least somewhat reliable, and this seems to be a big turn
off for new players. Gold is very scarce at low levels, and often an
hour and a half of farming will provide enough gold to advance only
one or two skills or spells by 5%, assuming that you know the best
places to farm and can farm them alone without dying. Unlike gold,
experience is in abundance, and it is easy to accumulate a lot since
you earn it from exploring rooms as well as killing monsters. The
disparity between the rate of earning gold to experience is so great
that you will eventually carry around a lot of unusable experience
points and risk losing it by dying.
Though RetroMUD has always prided itself on being a party-oriented
MUD, parties are rare and generally the people who put in long hours
of farming to get into the upper echelon are the ones who make and
attract parties. Newbie and lowbie parties are not uncommon, of
course, but they do impede the already slow advancement since
everything has to be split at the end and so the emphasis tends to be
on solo farming. Once you do get to the point where gold is not an
issue, you've probably spent at least a couple years in the game, but
you can easily reincarnate into other guilds to try out other things
since gold will not be an issue for you.
RetroMUD's best features are its unique guild and skill system and
its sheer size spread out over six diverse planets, and it's worth
checking out if only for that. The very slow advancement can turn off
players who like to advance their characters quickly or steadily, and
on an Internet with gaming alternatives that provide faster
advancement and more opportunities for partying, RetroMUD really
cannot afford to turn players away. If you don't mind the tedium of
really slow advancement and just want to log on for a little while
just to tinker around with a character, then RetroMUD may be for you.
