Multi-User Doldrums
Slight disclaimer: I went to college with the guy who made this game.
Hackmud caught my eye for the "hack" part much more than for the "mud" part. I'm not really interested in playing with people online, but terminal emulators and hacking stories are very much within my interests. Unfortunately, Hackmud has its own oil-and-water relationship with hacking and mudding.
The first two hours or so of the game are a tutorial mode - in a (pretend) isolated VLAN, as opposed to the wider internet - made up of scripted missions given by NPCs, with their own brief, AI-based backstories. You'll follow their directions and use some critical thinking (and probably some Google thinking) to solve password riddles, read log files, uncover secret keys, transfer virtual credits, et cetera.
At the tutorial's completion, you're opened up into the multi-user aspect of the game, and it's a pretty jarring transition. The scripted directions are gone, replaced with a general chat channel and an amalgam of human users and AI bots. It's a bit like finding your way out of a maze and then discovering you're on an alien planet.
What I realized, after reading more about it in Hackmud's Steam forum and subreddit, is that this - the "real" game - is, unsurprisingly, a MUD. The tutorial's goal was not to acclimate me to its overall gameplay loop, but to show me the raw mechanics involved in its multiplayer, largely community-driven world. There are still some NPC interactions here, in the form of AI bots with crypto locks and virtual bank accounts, but the process of discovering goals and decoding riddles is more oriented around collaboration with other live players.
It seems like there is a small, but devoted playerbase that's still committed to this world. As well as, unfortunately, barriers to entry that put new players at a disadvantage. But it would hardly matter to me either way; I was only in it for the NPC interactions. And so while I enjoyed the tutorial, short as it was, I have no meaningful opinion on the multiplayer game that Hackmud truly intended me to play.
I do, though, have a fine-pointed complaint about Hackmud's implementation. As a game that revolves around reliable, correct interactions with other players' scripts and saved information, it is naturally server-authoritative. And while you might think that the server load for a text-based game would be pretty light, server responsiveness in Hackmud is actually quite terrible. Waiting five seconds or longer for the output of my command is really ... suboptimal. (At least I haven't encountered the "service unavailable" errors that early players seem to have had.)
Hackmud is, at its core, not for me. And I can't and won't fault my former classmate for that. I do, though, hope that he works on those server performance issues.
Progress: Escaped the vlan.