Lostsouls is a rare gem among the MUDs still active in the world, which are rapidly being replaced by 3D MMORPGs. It has retained it's popularity despite newer, graphically advanced games appearing on the market, which leads me to conclude that there’s something else that brings people back again and again to the text-based world of Lostsouls. It’s so vast, complex, and inspired that people can’t help returning to it after each flash-in-the-pan visual MMORPG comes and goes.

First of all, Lostsouls is absolutely huge. If you played it for an hour or two every single day, it would take you about a year to see every single room in the MUD, and that’s if you played the same character all the time. The landscape is littered with dozens of towns, ranging from hamlets of a few rooms to sprawling metropolises that contain several individual sections. Caverns packed with monsters are tucked away into every crevice, while entire cities of intelligent monsters loom in distant lands; In fact, there are even other planes of existence to explore than just the earthly prime material, opening up an incredible amount of territory.

You never have to worry about getting bored, because a complex and detailed atman system allows you to create up to ten different characters from one of forty diverse races. The game system uses a statistic/skill base, which allows for literally millions of possible combinations. Once incarnated in the world, each character may then join one or more of twenty-two different guilds, with new ones being added all the time. In addition, the world is filled with over a dozen associations, which are like pseudo-guilds: non-exclusive memberships that offer a few slight benefits; join up to six of them at once!

Perhaps the best part about Lostsouls is how detailed the game mechanics are without making the interface complicated. Players are free to allocate every single point of their character, from determining each of nine attributes that commonly range from 10 to 100, selecting starting skills from a list of many of the game’s 141 existing skills, to determining primary handedness, gender and even homeland from a list determined by the race selected!

And it doesn’t stop there. Players may band together and form companies, each having access to a shared vault of saved wealth. They may join up into coherent groups to adventure together, pooling their resources while splitting up experience gains. The world even has several offices, which are titles passed on to whoever deserves it most, each granting their own specific powers and responsibilities.

If you’re into text-based MUDs or just getting sick of visual MMORPGs that have flashy graphics but no real content, stop by lostsouls.org, port 3000 sometime and see why this realm has stood the test of time to endure as one of the world’s finest gaming environments.