[...] Leaving aside the numerous posts that claim that I am not interested in content, the underlying points being made in these are interesting precisely because of what they point out about the game development process. It’s directly analogous to what a (justly) famous and multimillion-selling game designer said about my Grammar of Gameplay talk, when he called it “intellectual masturbation.” [...]

Generally, nothing on the muds was locked in that manner because you could rely on etiquette to keep people from “stealing the quest” or some such. But since there are badges and rewards at all stages of the quest, people generally wouldn’t want to skip to halfway through anyway.

There’s no doubt that a lot of violence has been done to classic mud gameplay by developers’ efforts to minimize griefing and interference by other players as the games reached larger scales… stuff that used to just work and still permit lots of interaction faced problems at the large scale, followed by solutions put in place to reduce player interaction.

–GF

Well made quests seems to be one likely component, are the others “seekrit sauce” or just hard to find?

I didn’t know you had quoted it recently though. Where?

Which I also have quoted recently. I must have reminded him of this

Another tidbit about the meteorites is when they fall, they can occassionally land ON a mob or a player. I’m only aware of the actual event of it hitting and killing a player once (as it was ME who it happened to!), but frequently a mob is the victim of a meteorite that’s headed groundwards.

The fight with Grendel’s mother is indeed fairly unique as well… it’s not a matter of killing her, but you must be hardy enough to endure a battle of certain length at which point she falls over dead. While this might seem like a real technical detail, it really helps the story along since, if she were not coded as such, the battle wouldn’t be epic… a few high level characters could drive her to death in a matter of seconds.

This quest is one of a few in the game where people still cheer when it’s finished — many on the near 12 year old mud have become old hat. Even with walkthroughs and the ilk posted, doing this and a few other quests still garners a few ‘wow, congrats!’ from the lot of players.

Raph’s Website » Beowulf Overview of the Beowulf Quest from LegendMUD.