If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some – “beautiful” could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than “beautiful blonde”) instead of spending hours rendering.

In fact, there’s so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game into a conventional MMOG. “Most good text MUDs would be way too expensive to translate to graphics because the range of features would require ungodly huge heaps of graphics… We’d have to strip out the soul of the game (as well as most of the features) to make it work,” he said. While a picture can speak 1,000 words, it seems a few lines of text can conjure thousands of mental pictures. —Joseph Blancato —In Search of Deeper Content (War Cry Network)

Increasing graphics and cooler monsters doesn’t always satisfy. Sometimes, less is more…