Usurper Reborn, a persistent text RPG with a 24/7 living world, free and playable in a browser

Game Title: Usurper Reborn

Playable Link: https://usurper-reborn.net

Platform: Web (browser, no install), Windows, Linux, macOS, Steam. Also runs as a BBS door and over raw TCP for MUD clients (Mudlet, MUSHclient, TinTin++).

Description:

Usurper Reborn is a modern rebuild of the 1993 BBS door game Usurper, now running as a persistent multiplayer text RPG. About a year of solo work, in open beta. It's a deep text-based RPG with a 24/7 living world: around 130 autonomous NPCs run goal-based AI with memory, relationships, jobs, romance, gangs, and politics. They marry, age, have children, and die of old age. Log in three days later and find out the blacksmith got married, the king was assassinated, and a generation of children just came of age. The world doesn't pause when you log off.

On the player side: 12 base classes plus 5 prestige classes (unlocked by completing different endings), 10 races, a 100-floor procedurally-seeded dungeon with 7 Old God bosses at major milestones, turn-based combat with companions and NPC teammates, marriage, kids, factions, guilds, PvP arena, world bosses, group dungeons, an Anchor Road Gauntlet with named gladiator champions, and a wilderness with new (v0.61.0) Druid's Shrines and beast-taming systems. Online characters get 3 free resurrections before permadeath; single-player saves are unaffected.

It's multiplayer-first but solo-friendly. You can ignore everyone and treat it as a 100-hour single-player RPG, or jump into the politics and arena. Sessions are typically 30 minutes a day. Screen-reader accessible (NVDA / JAWS / Narrator auto-detect on Windows). Five languages with full key parity (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian).

Free to Play Status:

[x] Free to play

[ ] Demo/Key available

[ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)

Involvement: Solo developer. I've written the entire codebase over the last year (C# on .NET 8, around 130k lines across 200+ files, 70+ game systems), maintain the live server (game backend, web proxy, SSH gateway, Nginx, Discord bridge), run the Steam release, and handle the community feedback / bug reports. A handful of community PRs have come in (combat loot, sell filters, companion auto-equip, GMCP additions, shield loot generation, murder-mechanics rework) which I review and merge. Source is GPL v2 on GitHub at binary-knight/usurper-reborn.

What I'd love feedback on if you give it a try:

• First 15 minutes. Character creation flow, the opening tutorial, finding your footing in town. This is where most new players bounce off text games, so the smoother I can make it the better.
• Combat readability. I've put a lot of work into making the per-round combat log understandable (damage calculations, status effects, ability descriptions, party HP), but a fresh pair of eyes will catch things I've gone blind to.
• Anything that's obviously confusing. Especially if you've never played a BBS door game or a MUD before. The room-and-menu structure is different from most RPGs and I want to know where new players stub their toes.

I'm in the comments. Brutally honest feedback welcome.