it's a bridge from a pure text mud running inside a classic mud client to something
that's more familiar to young gamers.

You still have the text, but it's running on top of a custom client
that's OpenGL based and allows you to do graphical overlays, fadeins/fadeouts,
background "ambient" graphical effects (maybe according to terrain),
ambient sounds for weather (rain, wind, lightning), has keyboard/numpad
walking enabled from the get-go and also allows you to script it and add your own keybindings and macros and so on and so forth.

The ambient sound thing is huge for immersion. You can programmatically generate ambient sounds dynamically that never quite sound identical,
so it's even more immersive.

Finally, if you're doing text rendering on top of OpenGL you can present
the text itself in a more glitzy way. Combat verbs for instance could be
animated and have their own effects. All sorts of ideas that make the game
look *unique* and hide the stale 80s text adventure stench that can be
immediately off-putting to young gamers today.

The "cypher" (http://www.cabrerabrothers.com/cypher.html) text adventure is a good example of the things that are possible
to do with a custom client.