Review Submitted By: Oliver aka Svaergof
Author Status: Player
Started on After the Plague: 2001
Submission Date: Aug 6, 2010
TMC Listing: After the Plague
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Oliver aka Svaergof]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
I searched long and hard for the mud of my dreams. I tried hundreds.
This is by far the best one I have ever played, including pay to play
muds. I don't play online games any more, but I'm writing a review
to help steer people to the right mud, don't waste your time
elsewhere.
Why? In a word or two: Realism and complexity. (ok it's a fantasy
mud, but the code/engine/gameplay is what's realistic). To start
with, you don't just get xp and level up. It's skill based, and
titles are earned through questing.
There are lots of guilds/orders, which teach different
skills/abilities/spells/psionics (and there's a lot of skills/spells
in this game). Some can be combined, and you can have up to 5 guilds
total - read multiclassing/customizable character. For example to
learn spells you can join the summoners, enchanters, necromancers,
augurs and elementalists - each with it's own casting skill. Beware,
- some cannot combine and will not take you because you are, or were,
in a hated enemy guild/order. Best to learn about them before making
your actual long term character. Ninjas aren't widely liked.
Plenty of cool races and a bunch more available after gaining title
of noble. A couple of them can fly, a couple have extra arms (read:
extra weapons/attacks) one doesn't bleed. They're way more than
different stat profiles, so choose carefully.
The world is fleshed out too. One down to earth example is you can
mine for ore (in the mines), refine and forge with it, the higher your
skill and better the metal type the higher the quality of the
weapon/armor/object. You can disguise yourself, build a house, ride
mounts, you can even search for herbs.
There are dozens and dozens of herbs; different ones grow in
different spots, some rare. Different recipes for potions or you can
try them by themselves in a pipe. You'll need to analyze them to
avoid being poisoned, paralyzed or drugged.
Combat is complex, you can aim for different limbs. A good tactic is
to break or sever an enemy's hands so they can't attack or if you
want to get fancy, you can encumber their hands/arms with arrows or
darts. Of course head and torso being disabled kills, and injured or
broken/severed legs make it almost impossible (very very slow) to get
away.
There's all the regular combat, you can disarm, bash, trip, blind
(throw certain items at their head) throw vials of acid to destroy
armor, poison crossbow bolts and arrows or any weapon. Then there's
all the magic and psi powers. My battlemage would have up to ten
spells active during a real serious fight.
The pvp is unrivaled in any mud. There is also an arena for deathless
pvp.
The world has lots of unique weapons and items, plenty of original
areas to explore. It's challenging, but balanced.
I logged 60 days (1440 hours!) on one character, and 20 days on
another. Yeah, ok that's including roleplaying and chatting, but you
get the idea.
My biggest piece of advice is: Aliases. Do you really want to type
out 'draw longsword from sheath' when every second counts? No. You
type 'dls' and the alias system does the rest. Some commands have a
time delay, but others can be chained together so you only have to hit
enter once for multiple commands if you separate them with a semicolon
; (a must for fast pvp).
And think outside the box. This mud has a lot of things interacting
with each other, if you are imaginative you can be powerful. My
character was never the strongest or the best caster, but I tricks up
my sleeve and I'd use 'em all.
The only complaints I have are that a few of the quests are really
hard unless you talk to older players, and sometimes there are only a
couple of other players. I think that's because they don't market
enough, but the gameplay is rad enough to make up for it.
In a nutshell, this is to muds what Zelda:Link to the Past was to
console rpgs or what Vice City was to PC adventure games: It's the
game you were looking for, you just didn't know how bad the other
ones were.
