How does a text-based game fare in the world of 3D graphics?
Addiction is king
by Oligo San
08/21/98

Intro
This guide is going to serve as a comparison guide, pitting one form of online entertainment against the other. More comparisons will be added as time goes on. I plan to include Arctic vs. your Boss, and Arctic vs. Grades with in-depth comprehensive coverage after painstaking research.

Arctic vs. Quake
As a few of you guyz know, I'm a hard core Quake fanatic. In fact, one of the many reasons as to why I left the world of Krynn has been because of my dedication to Quake. However there are many similarities between the two.

Client
Firstly, both are popular because they can be played over the Internet. While currently Quake can host a maximum of  32 clients simultaneously under Quake World, Arctic supports up to 500 players concurrently or something along those lines, hardware resources permitting. However with the upcoming Quake II, there may be support for 200 players concurrently, and it has been mentioned in John Carmack's .plan file.

Names
This is an interesting difference between Quake and Arctic. I played Arctic first and I remember among good friends on Arctic you called them by their real-life names. For example all my fellow clanmates and my enemies called me Norman usually. However in Quake, if you call a player by anything other than his alias, he can become fairly irrate. This has occurred between a real life friend of mine who only plays Quake. His name irl is Eric but when playing Quake and on IRC he's known as Latinum. One day while playing Quake against him, I called him Eric on his server, he nearly exploded. He bothered to run from his dorm to mine, and basically chew me out about calling him Eric online in front of others in the Quake community. I kindly recommended to him the local mental institution which has done wonders for me. The Pittsburgh Underdeveloped Sinister Sicko Youth, otherwise commonly referred to as PUSSY.

Player Killing
Player killing in Quake is much more a result of human eye-hand coordination and reflexes. A lot of strategy is involved in 1-1's such as knowing respawn locations, and timing item respawns. The more you kill a player in Quake, the greater you're respected. However in Arctic it's slightly different, the more you kill a player, sometimes the less respect you receive, depending on the level of the player and his ability to defend himself. Also, in Quake, death blows are referred to as being gibbed (pronounced "jibbed"), whereas in Arctic they're far more descriptive, yet less visual.

Clan
Arctic Clans and Quake clans differ and are alike in many respects. Arctic clans are huge, comprising of usually 30+ members. Communication while not playing between clan members occurs in the form of mailing lists. Clans do everything together, usually zoning, hunting, and pkilling together. Oftentimes they're very exclusive and refuse to group with others. Membership is only granted upon the Clan Leader's discression. Clan battles may comprise of a total of 30+ members with 15+ members representing each side.
Quake Clans are in general a lot smaller than Arctic clans. While not playing on Quake servers they usually hang out on certain channels of IRC. Clan matches are usually staged and planned before hand, and they're done in a 20 minute 4 on 4 format. Arctic battles are usually random and the battle is usually based on online strenght at the current moment of time. Quake Clan recruiting is usually done by try-outs or skill tests such as a deathmatch 1-1.

Administration
Arctic has a god system intact, once mortals achieve level 30 with 1 exp to go, they may apply to become a level 31 by a consensus of the level 34 God and the level 35 Overlord. In Quake there are operators on the IRC channels, and there are also admins on the Quake Server itself. Some servers are clanring servers and with knowledge of a simple 4-digit code, any player can become an admin with authority to change match time limits or changelevels.

Coding
Arctic is an ever evolutionary world. There's a builder port where folks can code their own zones and areas. Quake is also very modifiable with it's own programming language known as QuakeC. Custom weapons and levels can be created using this language.

Arctic vs. Ultima Online
I'm not very familiar myself with Ultima Online and perhaps some folks reading this can help me out, but from what I've read, Ultima Online will be somewhat of a graphical version of MUD. It'll be  real-time interactive multi-player RPG world. Currently it's in the beta stages of testing and from what I've heard it's quite buggy still. If you've ever played Ultima 7, then you probably have a pretty good idea of what it's about.

Client
Ultima Online will have a online capacity equal if not exceeding Arctic's. What's impressive from what I've read is that it takes 10 hours to walk from one side of the map to the other. Then again, that could've been conducted on a 2400 bps modem.

Cost
This is the major factor if there's to be any weight to sway the hard-core MUD'ers to Ultima Online. First off, MUD is FREE and can be played nearly anywhere regardless of terminal type. Ultima Online as I understand it will not be free and instead some type of time charge deal.

Clans
Clans on Ultima Online are called Guilds. I would imagine that their exclusiveness and membership is very similiar to Arctic's, but then again I'm only making conjectures.

Arctic vs. Diablo
I've seen Diablo played extensively over the LAN at college but I've never played it myself so this review is somewhat prejudiced. From what I've seen it appears to be a dungeon graphical environment soley taking place underground with randomly generated maps.

Clients
Diablo only supports 4 players simultaneously online on a single given map. That bites, it reminds me of Doom2.

Player Killing
From what I've seen, this is clearly unbalanced. The mages have the ability to teleport and quickly launch fireballs around their victim. Warrior class folks don't stand much chance against these mages. They're unable to prevent this attack in any manner.

In short I don't have much to say about Diablo because it sucks ass. It's fairly unoriginal in concept, the graphics may make you say "ah" but a few seconds later you'll find yourself saying "bah."

Arctic MUD is currently the most portable game by far. It requires basically no form of advanced hardware, even a player with an 8088 with a working modem could derive endless hours of fun from it. Playing Quake at a competetive level becomes from dependent on your link, and the speed of your system. Therefore not all players are created equal under Quake. In Arctic while packet loss can result in lost links, in Quake there is a combination factor of ping and packet loss which can result in miserable game play.

If you're looking for instant action and you have a 56k or higher connect while happily gibbing away your online buddies, play Quake. If you want to be able to play in the Unix cluster, the Mac cluster, and the NT cluster at college, play Arctic. And if you want graphics, with gore, yet in an RPG environment, play Ultima Online once it matures.