The Mana World (TMW) is an open source graphical MMORPG. This article highlights some features of the TMW project and compares it to the text-based MUD Ancient Anguish (AA) to see the differences in the two worlds and potential good things that could be adopted.

Overview

TMW is a reasonably young game, based on the Ragnarok engine when it was released as open source (a server rewrite denoted as Manasource has been in progress for a few years and is in alpha since 2010 - i.e., a development server is up and running). Ancient Anguish is based on the MUD engine LPmud, and has been around for two decades - since 1992.

Player's perspective

TMW is graphical, with killable monsters and NPCs that can be communicated with using pre-set dialogue only. In contrast, AA is purely text-based, where both monsters and (most) NPCs are killable, and any intelligent creatures can be communicated with using keywords, emote commands or by giving them items or money.

Game-technical

TMW is an "easy" game. It is equipment-saving, location-saving (you return to the same place when you log back in), and has no death penalty (you are just teleported to a "save point" with your HPs halved). You can essentially just log in and continue where you left off. In contrast, AA both demands more preparation time per playing session, and punishes death reasonably harshly (by contemporary standards). On higher levels, a death incurs the loss of maybe a week's worth of active play in experience, weapon skills and anything that was carried.

• In TMW, reaching the maximum level is not uncommon for long-term active players. In AA, the highest level is more a theoretical maximum, with maybe one obsessive player realistically pushing the limit.
• TMW is somewhat grind-oriented: killing the same monsters over and over again is rewarded equally independent of the player's level. In AA, weapon skills are not earned as quickly for too easy monsters, which encourages players to seek out targets they can only barely defeat.

Quests

In TMW, all quests are equal - they award experience, money, items and/or skills (levels of magic, and trait-like skills which can be "focused" one at a time and "unfocused" through a quest). On AA, almost all areas contain one (or more) "miniquests", which are similar to TMW's quests, although they can also not involve any talking NPCs (instead e.g. finding the scattered keys to a boss-type monster from an area).

In addition, AA has quests that award quest points - these are necessary for becoming a developer (as developers are "immortals", it is also a form of "winning" the game - if you can call the position of workmule a reward ;)). A list and brief hint description is provided of all quests. A third type of "quest" awards players exploration points, one or more per area, which are also necessary for attaining immortality.

• Many of the quests in TMW involve acquiring X amount of item Y and delivering it to NPC Z. As the dialogue is pre-set, the main puzzle challenge comes from finding the NPC. TMW has no in-game overview of where to find quests, and hints are reasonably sparse. A spoiler wiki is commonly used by players to find and finish the quests.

• On AA, the quest list provides some hints and spreading quest information is strongly frowned upon (or even punished if caught in-game). In addition, an NPC hints towards exploration points once a player has found a few by themselves; these may help find the miniquests of the area, or be completely unrelated - finding a rare flower in a pile of junk, for example.

Developer's perspective

In both TMW and AA, intelligent NPCs are scripted using a dedicated language. In AA, the language is called LPC (I do not actually know if the TMW language has a name).