Description
An early MMORPG, this romp through
TSR's blasted alt-fantasy
Dark Sun AD&D campaign setting of Athas was built atop the shoulders of the earlier singleplayer game
Wake of the Ravager in terms of the engine and interface, offering a similar experience, only moreso: multiplayer parties adventuring through new scorched desert areas in pursuit of new ceramic treasures, rewards for similar fetch and extermination quests as in the earlier games -- but now
automatically generated, to ease the load on the support staff scriptors who threw new scheduled role-playing events into the realm daily as #NPCs to challenge and stump players.
A great deal of the interactivity rested on elaborate MUD-style conversational conventions (speaking to those within earshot, privately confiding, announcing to the whole server), attempting to shunt aside "out of character" (OOC) chatter as deleterious to whatever suspension of disbelief was a prerequisite for group role-playing in this strange new graphical online forum. Nonetheless, many later staples of MMORPG social conventions could be found emerging here, from the formation of player guilds to forbidding "PVP" (player vs. player) combat in certain "safe" areas, among them the newbie launch pad of Caravan Way in the city-state of Tyr.
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Trivia
DSO was originally conceived of as a fantasy gaming cornerstone to AT&T's Interchange network in the summer of '94, a way for them to keep up with the Joneses with AOL's
Neverwinter Nights. The deal fouled in early November '95 as the project approached completion, and it was left in funding limbo for a couple of months. Finally,
DSO was picked up by the
Total Entertainment Network in January of '96, where the game was beta-tested and, eventually, went live exclusively to TEN subscribers through to 1999.
This entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
Pseudo_Intellectual (33644) on Dec 01, 2007.
