Re:The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games
by anthk on Thursday August 24, 2023 @04:26PM
(#37254109)
Most text adventures have been curated over 30 years. From a 486, Pentium II or a tiny Rpi A/B, most top IF games from the community will surpass by large the pseudo duct-taped environment (if there is any) an LLM would create.
Zork came from Dungeon, and it's nearly 40 years. Now, the 90's. By just 1993 with Curses!, any DOS/Linux guy with a 486 could play (and still do) pretty complex games with far more interactivity than a current free roam game except for Minetest/Minecraft. And, even with MC, there are some text adventures with pure alchemy on it, allowing to craft new objects inside the game. And, I repeat, playable under a 486/Pentium without any effort.
If someone created a text adventure with the requeriments of a Pentium II/III, it could basically host a whole MUD but for a single player and tons of actions and methods to solve puzzles.
If we ramp up the requeriments for a text adventure being a Pentium 4/SSE2, you basically get Cataclysm DDA but with a text parser and 200X of stuff to do ingame, as it would not be restricted to have to render the whole world each turn. You would get procedurally generated puzzles, NPC's with personality traits, emotions, and even a relatively complex grammar on subjects. Like the IF Galatea, but in a free roam world, with NPC's interacting with each other shaping the world dinamically.
Zork came from Dungeon, and it's nearly 40 years. Now, the 90's. By just 1993 with Curses!, any DOS/Linux guy with a 486 could play (and still do) pretty complex games with far more interactivity than a current free roam game except for Minetest/Minecraft. And, even with MC, there are some text adventures with pure alchemy on it, allowing to craft new objects inside the game. And, I repeat, playable under a 486/Pentium without any effort.
If someone created a text adventure with the requeriments of a Pentium II/III, it could basically host a whole MUD but for a single player and tons of actions and methods to solve puzzles.
If we ramp up the requeriments for a text adventure being a Pentium 4/SSE2, you basically get Cataclysm DDA but with a text parser and 200X of stuff to do ingame, as it would not be restricted to have to render the whole world each turn. You would get procedurally generated puzzles, NPC's with personality traits, emotions, and even a relatively complex grammar on subjects. Like the IF Galatea, but in a free roam world, with NPC's interacting with each other shaping the world dinamically.