Re: So I've been Playing Lost Souls for a While...
Interesting that someone else has found this.
Lost Souls is on my things that every prospective game designer, especially online game designers, should play. It can range from absurdly simple to bloody complicated, depending on race/guild/associations, and it's done things that are literally impossible to do on top of anything that's not a custom mudlib. It will grab hours of your time if you can get past the Newbie stages and can figure out the world map (which I take credit for making accessible).
But it is also a game wherein one can see the pitfalls of being world-oriented instead of player-oriented. People either love Lost Souls or hate it, without much middle ground. It does not do things "for the convenience of the player", has no newbie tutorial, etc. Lost souls lets you do insanely over the top stuff (people used to be able to wield a clock tower, if their character was big enough, there's 4-dimensional spac
e, guilds that let you summon eldrich abominations). The saving grace is that the people are helpful to newbies; the lesson is that this is not how to make a game if you're looking for large numbers of players, because it's decidedly not casual and decidedly not to everyone's taste.
But I think everyone should try it at least once. You will never, ever find another game like it, for as long as muds exist and have existed.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
