I’m inclined to believe that you require a playerbase with a textual mindset (in terms of gameplay) because that’s where roleplaying actually occurs to even a slight extent.

For the record, I don’t consider “I’m a big bad paladin so Imma go smash things that paladins don’t like” in WoW to be roleplaying They’ll smash whatever they want if they can. It’s like Rocktamer and the Vertani from Achaea OOOOOOO SMASH!

Anyways… from my experience, people who haven’t immersed themselves in the kind of setting a textual game offers can’t truly comprehend the value of that setting and the enjoyment you get out of it. Having played in both types of settings (although, my graphical MMORPG immersion is rather low…) I can honestly tell you I prefer the current IRE approach. Here’s to hoping you’ll pull this off with a graphical game, Matt. Achaea’s stolen my life already, I’m willing to let you keep it with another game if it’s good enough

Sad, but not surprising, that the same thing happens with text vs. graphical MUDs/MMOs.

The system described would fail miserably in a game like WoW because, more and more, the players want their only interaction with other players to be in the form of combat. Heaven forbid they actually have to talk to real people to improve their standing with a faction. Heck, I’ve been in groups in WoW that didn’t speak 10 words in 2 hours and most of those were along the lines of “GTG” or “sec AFK”.

The advantage text based games have is that their only interaction with the players is text so the players of these games are much more comfortable using text to, I don’t know, talk to each other. The graphical games primary interaction is visual while the only way they can interact with other players, outside of combat, is still text and they may not be as comfortable with text as they are with graphics.

There is a tremendous amount online games could still learn from the traditional, board, card, and dice games of the world.

Dr. Bartle once made a comment on Terra Nova that they were rehashing discussions from the MUD-Dev list from the mid 90’s. This did not amuse the people who like to think they’re breaking new ground, so they poked a bit of fun at him. But, you’ll continue to see people discover what was obvious a decade ago and treat it like something amazing.

I fully expect that in a few years people will act like WoW invented the online game medium. Mark my words.

It seems like a good place to start at least, doesn’t it?

You design a game for a target, not in absolute.

I too enjoy people who completely ignore history, but to be fair there’s a large number of those in the text MUD community that ignore their own history as well.

A friend of mine works for Blizzard, at his birthday party I met with a lot of the Korean programmers on WoW. One of them that I spoke with told me how he started with DIKU MUDs and still plays them. He, like many of us, still prefers the depth a text game offers that those graphical ones can’t/don’t. If they had more people like that, in higher positions, the graphical games might be a lot more interesting and less of the same old grind.