I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately.
Back in the 90s, I ran a VBBS board called Realms in Montgomery, Alabama. LORD, Usurper, TradeWars, and MajorMUD were some of the games I spent the most time with.
Looking back, it's interesting how many things we remember fondly were actually limitations of the technology.
Daily turns, waiting for resets, limited interactions, simple combat, text descriptions, and having to come back tomorrow to see what happened next.
But were those things limitations we tolerated, or were some of them essential to what made the games enjoyable?
I think the answer is probably a little of both.
Take LORD, for example. Having a limited number of forest fights meant every encounter mattered a little more. You couldn't just grind indefinitely until you were powerful enough to beat everything. Eventually, your day was over.
On the other hand, I don't know that requiring someone to wait until tomorrow would have quite the same appeal today, especially in a single-player game.
Then there's Usurper. It had so many little things to discover, and the world felt larger than what was actually represented on the screen. A lot of that came from the writing, the choices, and the player's imagination rather than sophisticated graphics or complicated systems.
I've been working on a game inspired by that era, and one of the questions I keep coming back to is where the line falls between preserving the experience and simply copying the mechanics.
I'm interested in hearing from people who played these games back then, but also those still playing them on active boards today.
What would you absolutely refuse to change about the classics?
And what would you happily leave behind in the 90s? submitted by /u/Impossible_Phone_201 [link] [comments]