Okay, I'll admit this introduction will be rather brief, because I've only given the mud a try this morning, indeed I suspect we've probably got players who're more familiar with the game than I am, but since we haven't had a dedicated topic or discussion I thought I'd start one and post my thoughts on playing.
As to why I started playing 4d, for various mundane real life reasons involving listening for things, I needed to play a text game, thus alteraeon and cosmic rage were out, and since I've not decided which of the 3k/3s muds to try or which class and four dimentions is one I've heard about on occasions I thought I'd dive in and give it a go.
The mud's main website is here and the connection info is 4dimensions.org port 6000.
The game has a rather unique theme, and indeed part of the reason I thought of it is that it reminded me somewhat of 3k since it involves time travel across several different rather random time zones.
prehistoric, which seems to range from neanderthals and dinosaurs to bronze age cities of antiquity like ancient egypt and Griece (complete with gods), medieval, which is your standard fantasy dwarves dragons and trolls type of affair with a bit of norman England thrown in, wild west, complete with six guns, outlaws etc, and future which seems like a mix of Startrek and edgar rice burrows Carter of mars series. They have also apparently more recently started a Victorian London type of setting with sherlock holmes etc.
The game in some ways is a fairly standard circle mud type affair, and though some of the races are rather interesting, like martian and centaur, the professions seem to be a lot of the expected ones such as espa, mage, gypsy, hunter and ranger..
Combat seems fairly usual of the style of alteraeon, though it does feature ranged weapons as a matter of course.
What however really distinguishes the game is quests.
I'm halfway through the newbie school, and the place is absolutely littered with stuff to look at, people who give you tasks to do, npcs who react, even vehicles, and this is one mud where doing quests seems to advance you rather further than just random slayage does.
Really the only game I've seen with this much by way of interaction with the environment is Frandom, particularly since 4dimentions has a lot of diferent ways to examine the environment, for example look atat, in, on or under, listen, smell and even apparently feel as alternatives to examine. I also like the fact that you can look in a given direction or listen in a given direction, which makes life rather interesting.
apparently the game does have some alternatives to hack n slash too, including trading and crafting of some sort, though I've not got into those as yet, indeed I'm still working my way through the mud school, which is a mini zone in itself, ---- if nothing else, 4D probably has the most fun mud school I think I've seen in any game.
There are apparently clans, pvp arenas, registration as a player killer for those who want a more immediate pvp experience, as well as less violent clan competitions such as who can collect the most zone flags available.
Unfortunately death apparently does drop your corpse with it's equipment, but there is an auto corpse retrieval service available which I suspect costs gold, though I've not got there yet.
Screen reader wise the game does have some adaptations, I'd strongly advise anyone playing to type nographics to get rid of the aski, nodisplay titles to remove titles from the who list and make it briefer, and also check out help prompt and help prompt codes to customize your prompt to something a little less spammy.
Levels seem fairly quick, which is good given this is a remort game with lots of questing to be done, though it does have a teered skills system which takes a little getting used to.
Thus far it seems this one is almost like frandom meets a hack n slash with random environments, so while the combat at the moment doesn't look particularly interesting, people who like something extra in a game should probably give this one a go.
My char is dark on there (yes inventive I know), though as I said, I'm still investigating myself and there is a lot I still don't know.
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)