EQ and its related games (pretty much every modern MMO) have long been dismissed as nothing but “DikuMUDs with a graphical interface slapped on top of them”.
I’ve been playing with the DikuMUD code over the last few days to get a feel for world building and to add a feature (what I call “rally troops” but is really a way of multi-boxing several characters in a group)… and I had a thought (yes, just one. I treasure them, though). Why not make EQ… into a DikuMUD?
So here is the EQ1 zone of (of course) West Karana… in DikuMUD form… no mobs or objects yet.
I don’t think I’ll continue with DikuMUD. Though it’s easy to modify and create worlds with it, an object-oriented, database-centric approach would be far more powerful (allowing for hot patches and user-created objects), and move easier into the graphical realm.