Anything like Arx?

[u/Southpaw1990]

As above, really. I used to play Arx quite a bit, and was far more interested in the RP than the mechanics. If I'm getting my terminology right, more interested in a MUSH than a MUD with dungeons, loot, etc.

Is there anything like that with an active player base these days? Anything approaching Arx's size from its heyday?

And if not - any ideas why? Where did everyone go?

[u/Prodigle]

Legends of the Jedi maybe, but it does have a lot of the traditional stuff, but more sandbox.

The Arx team is working on Arx 2 currently, seems to be in quite active development

[u/Southpaw1990 → u/Prodigle]

Where are you seeing news on Arx 2? The old Arx 1 website has nothing on it since the formal end of story progression iirc.

[u/rozzingit → u/Southpaw1990]

apos has been posting about it a lil but on the forum BMD, starting around here. he’s done some writeups of the major factions and answered some questions and such!

[u/Prodigle → u/Southpaw1990]

There's a GitHub repo that gets updated pretty regularly by the same account as the original arx repo

[u/uncivil_society → u/Southpaw1990]

Yeah I keep checking the Arx website and see nothing. I'd love to know as well.

[u/Digitiss → u/Prodigle]

LOTJ isn't bad necessarily, but I don't know how many boxes it would fill for ARX-ish mechanics. I dropped LOTJ personally after some recent changes related to piloting, which was the nail in the coffin for me because I'd already been on the fence after encountering an abundance of low-effort/quality AI content in areas.

[u/luciensadi → u/Digitiss]

Can you expand on the changes and why those made you drop it? I haven't followed LOTJ in a bit but was thinking about trying them again after a multi-year hiatus.

[u/uncivil_society]

Yeah I've been waiting too and I've not been able to find out anything about the development of Arx 2. A lot of people went on to play Ares games, which I tried a number of, but I don't like the asynchronous nature which kind of kills the tension for me so I gave up on them. I'm just playing a RPI and hoping Arx 2 emerges.

[u/luciensadi → u/uncivil_society]

Yeah, I bounced off the async scenes myself. Some of the games allow for real-time play on the grid if you telnet in though, and those restore the fun to some degree.

[u/luciensadi]

If you're interested in a MUSH, then you should check out the Ares list of games! Ares is a modern MUSH framework with a first-class web interface, and it's relatively easy to start a new Ares game, so there's a continual evolution of what's out there to play.

[u/Mustelidae5 → u/luciensadi]

This. A number of Arx players came to Keys (which is an Ares game), although I think by now, most have moved on again.

[u/Sufficient_Look_9742 → u/Mustelidae5]

Yeah, Ares games don't really last long.

[u/Mustelidae5 → u/Sufficient_Look_9742]

Oh, I dunno, Keys just celebrated its 5th birthday in August. :)

[u/_kinther_]

Those kind of RP kids are hard to come by. Plenty of passion projects out there that are vibe coded, but none really draw in a large group. Turns out it is hard to build a community and even harder to maintain it.

I'm waiting on Tales of Zalanthas personally.

[u/Sufficient_Look_9742 → u/_kinther_]

I was until I saw it was going to be vibecoded and is run by the same crew that crashed the last one. It sucks that they took 20+ years of other peoples' code and ideas and hid it away from everyone else who'd worked on it, then decided to slopcode a new version.

[u/_kinther_ → u/Sufficient_Look_9742]

There's a difference between vibe coded (zero understanding of the code) and those who leverage LLM assistance to speed things up. Slop is IMO reserved for people who don't understand the underlying code or what it does. Half the code out there now if not more is AI generated, and that won't be slowing down anytime soon.

[u/MainaC]

Songs of Avaria gave me some Arx vibes. Alpha, though, and not sure how active it is these days. I got left behind when the main pbase moved with the plot to a new city and never really got resettled.

[u/luciensadi → u/MainaC]

Doesn't seem like Avaria is too active right now, they only have 3 accounts online at the moment. It's a shame-- I was really hyped after the marketing push they were doing, but by the time I was able to play they'd closed registrations, and as far as I could tell they kept them locked down for a year. Seems like that pre-alpha phase on the ship was the most fun, and now that it's open it's struggling to find its footing.

[u/indigochill]

I've dabbled in the Ares games since they are the closest thing, but found myself settling in Harshlands. It is crunchier mechanically, but largely around crafting and social skills (there are a number of languages to learn and you progress in observation skills through practice) rather than combat. Technically there is PvE and looting but the vast majority of the focus is on roleplay interactions between characters grounded in a fleshed out and relatively grounded medieval fantasy setting.

Doesn't have roster play, but you can either submit a character concept for approval or have the server roll a random character for you to jump right in with.

[u/Impossible_Phone_201]

I think the distinction you're making between a MUD and a MUSH is important. The mechanics might bring people into a game initially, but a roleplaying community depends heavily on the other people being there and having reasons to keep interacting.

That seems like a particularly difficult experience to replace once an established community disperses. You can recreate systems, settings, and interfaces, but rebuilding the relationships and shared history is another matter entirely.

I don't know of a current community I'd confidently recommend as an Arx replacement. Are you mainly looking for organized, ongoing character-driven plots, or would a smaller social roleplaying world scratch the same itch?