Unless you're one of the fewer-than-50 people who still play it regularly, there are solid odds you've never heard of Lusternia, Age of Ascension, a 21-year-old, free MMO that's been quietly, contentedly trundling along for most of this century. That's a shame, I reckon, because as someone who is decidedly 'not an MMO guy,' I've always loved it and the many, many games like it—games like Achaea, or Aardwolf, or Discworld, or Multi-users in Middle-earth. The simple scope of what you can do in a lot of them is staggering. Become a fighter, a performer, an explorer, or get stuck into the messy and labyrinthine player-controlled politics: guilds against guilds against cities against gods against philosophies against religions.
Anyway, the reason you probably haven't heard of them is because they look like this.
These are text games, baby. These are Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): a more elegant MMO for a more civilised age, and what they lack in graphical fidelity they make up for in scope and ambition. That screenshot is my Lusternia character running in Mudlet, a client you can use to access the aforementioned games alongside, well, probably any of the 100 MUDs listed here and more besides. Anyway, I've just spent three(ish) paragraphs telling you what MUDs are because Mudlet just got a big update that makes them easier to get into than ever: a new mod organiser, updater, and downloader.
- Former Ultima Online lead says MMOs have 'been in a rut for a long time', and that cozy games like Animal Crossing have been filling a non-theme park hole
- Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is an aggressively old-school MMO that hates hand-holding so much it won't even give you a map—but a certain type of player might just love it
Because MUDs are, really, just big gobs of text fired over an internet connection, the stuff canny coders and scripters can turn them into with a bit of elbow grease is really impressive. For instance, using a few premade packages, my Lusternia guy automatically selects the best attacks for enemies, can find his way pretty much anywhere in the game world at the click of a mouse, and, oh, there's actually a UI now. Imagine!
I can't make any of that myself due to having no actually useful abilities whatsoever, but there are all sorts of forums and Discords where coders share their packages for others to tweak their MUDs of choice with. The beauty of Mudlet's new easy-to-install package manager is that hunting those spaces down is much less necessary than it used to be. So where my process of installing Demonnic's Lusternia Chat Tabs (a script that separates the game's myriad chat channels into its own separate section of the UI) meant finding it on Github, a new player would be able to download and install it straight from within Mudlet.
In other words, it's basically like turning on Steam Workshop support for almost every MUD at once, so long as the relevant script authors continue to upload their packages to Mudlet's central server. It should make these venerable old games a fair amount easier for new players to get into. You could make Lusternia look just like this!
Which, yes, okay, maybe is not going to turn MUDs into WoW-killers, but I'm a big believer in the genre and an ardent fan of several MUDs ever since I fell down an Achaea hole as a teenager. They're a remarkably niche hobby and, in a lot of ways, an artefact of an era of dial-up internet and graphics cards you could sweat with Doom. But they endure and, thanks to the efforts of dedicated madmen like Mudlet's devs (and the authors of the scripts it's compiling), even continue to evolve and grow. That's worth celebrating, I think.
