The Great Tree

[Jon]

I found an interesting article just now, in the NY times.

Linky is here

URU LIVE, the online component of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, from Cyan Worlds, was stillborn. Before most players had ever seen it, before it was fully functional, before there was any real reason to subscribe, the publisher, Ubisoft, declared it D.O.A. and pulled the plug, stranding people who had bought the single-player version of the game.

What went wrong? I knew I was the one to solve that mystery. I've been solving mysteries in adventure games for years; how hard could it be to solve one in the real world?

As a warm-up for my Uru investigation, I arrested and convicted a murderer in Law & Order II: Double or Nothing.

Law emulates the structure of the television series on which it is based. Arriving on a crime scene to that echoey "bing bing" musical sound from the series, you search for clues that you can send to the lab and question suspects who can be put under surveillance. Once you have compiled enough evidence to convince your superior that an arrest is warranted, your character is transformed from detective to prosecutor. If you present the right evidence, pose the right questions to the right witnesses and head off improper testimony by shouting "Objection, your honor!" at the right moments, then you'll win your case.

An effective presentation, with good dialogue and an involving story, Law has jettisoned the worst design flaws of the first game, removing a time constraint and the possibility of hitting a dead end if you fail to ask the right questions. The game is less ambiguous than the series, which sometimes leaves you in doubt about whether the right person was convicted. I would love to experience the moral complexity of a law game in which you could convict more than one suspect, but Law's producer once told me that coming up with the branching story lines that such a game would require would push it over budget.

The Black Mirror from Future Games seemingly attempted to keep its budget down by hiring actors from a suburban theater group to deliver the game's tedious, stilted dialogue. I did not solve the game's mystery, but only because I got bored having to ask every game character about every mysterious item that I found and then listen to their dreary replies.

My faith in my ability to solve mysteries was not shaken even by giving up on Pendulo Studios' Runaway: A Road Adventure. The game's crisp graphics, intriguing story and wacky characters showed promise. Alas, the characters fell flat - even a trio of drag queens failed to say anything funny, and instead of ingenuity the main requirement for solving puzzles was a gritty determination to search every centimeter of the screen for the easily missed items needed.

Despite this mixed track record, I felt ready to investigate the case of Uru Live.

The fourth game in the Myst series, Uru was originally conceived purely as an online game in which players could meet and puzzles would be added monthly. But at Ubisoft's request, a single-player stand-alone game was added. The game was released before the online component was ready, but small batches of players were invited to come online, where they reported that there was not much to do. The press was told it would soon be invited to visit.

While waiting for an invitation that never came, I played the single-player Uru, in which you must search for and open a special door in each of several worlds. Previously, the Myst universe was disconnected from the real world. But in Uru, businessmen and construction workers have arrived on the scene, and you will discover the journals of men studying the place with the apparent goal of creating a theme park.

Uru's game engine is remarkable, creating worlds rendered in real-time 3-D that are just as beautiful as the pre-rendered landscapes of the earlier games. It is perhaps the most beautiful 3-D game ever made, allowing the player to walk across a bridge past giant mushrooms over which man-size dragonflies hover, or to watch odd plants spew out bursts of pollen.

Despite gorgeous settings, first-rate sound and ingenious puzzles that matched those of the previous games, Uru did not enthrall me in the same way. Much of this had to do with the awkward control scheme. You can switch between first- and third-person modes, but both views are poorly designed, with a sluggish camera and unresponsive controls. Third-person navigation is problematic in most games, but first-person navigation is largely standardized and hard to screw up. I felt at constant war with the controls.

Another unfortunate quirk is that while Uru saves your puzzle progress automatically, there is no way to save your location. And if you fall off a cliff or just quit the game, you will restart in your home world. This is annoying in any game, but inexcusable in this one, which can take a shocking two or three minutes to load a world. That's plenty of time for you to become infuriated, especially when it happens several times in a half-hour.

Some of those who played Uru while it was being tested report that they complained about the game's flaws to no avail. A common complaint is the introduction of sudden death; you may die leaping across a chasm. It was an odd addition to a series that in the past had never required much eye-hand coordination, and it alienated Myst's fans but failed to make the game any more interesting for action gamers.

Uru has the feel of a good game that has been subverted by awful design decisions, and while it was sometimes fun, it was so often intensely aggravating that I just could not stand playing the whole thing. My only hope had been that Uru Live would redeem the game. That hope gone, I decided to talk with ubi.com's general manager, Jason Rubinstein, about what had happened.

Mr. Rubinstein said that Uru did not observe the conventions of first-person game navigation because its designers were visionaries who do not follow the herd. When I asked if the game's poor navigation and lack of online functionality were the result of rushing its introduction, he said that any designer would want another six months to refine a game. That answer seemed to ignore the difference between a game that could use some tweaking and a game that was clearly unready.

There was even an optimistic twist to the cancellation: the Uru Live puzzle stockpile will be used for game add-ons, the first of which is to be distributed at no cost to Uru Live's unfortunate subscribers.

Mr. Rubinstein also said there would be a patch to address some of Uru's deficiencies, although he declined to provide details. If they add a save-game feature, make it impossible to die and use standard first-person navigation, then Uru would be a lot more fun, although it is hard to believe that they would suddenly do everything right.

Mysteries are harder to solve in real life than in Law and Order II: Double or Nothing, in which you simply choose appropriate questions from a list and key points are neatly summarized for you after an interview. Anyway, the Uru debacle seems less a mystery than a tragedy, a grand vision gone awry through a series of misjudgments. And with no video-game tragedies to give me my bearings, I will not be able to unravel this tragedy until someone comes up with Othello, the Game.


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It's nice to see that we're getting some major coverage, at least. Isn't that New York place pretty popular?
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The laws contrived by the Proud are their security, and their undoing. Such laws make disobedience a virtue and obedience a sin.

[Kyven]

[Professor Askew]

As a New Yorker I can tell you that, yes, the New York Times is considered one of the bigger newspapers in the country. This is why you can generally pick it up in any major metropolis and then some. But, this writer didn't really seem to have a reason to write this article. I didn't look at the link...is this a review? If so, it's one of the most poorly written I've ever seen. It can't be social commentary because the author never even made it into Live. If she or he had, I'm sure we would have been given a completely different story. Not necessarily better but...

The writing was blase from someone who played the game half-heartedly.

Am I biased? ABSOLUTELY! Do NOT knock my Uru.
Yes, yes, I know there were some compliments in there....just not enough.
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[NSymon]

Interesting and different review. I haven't found the controls to be sluggish at all. Should try the controls in 'Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness' now they were sluggish and awful. And the game was riddled with bugs after it was released on the PC. But the controls in Uru I thought were great, I played in third person and loved the way the camera either swooped down or around you as you moved about.

What's all his talk about people complaining to no avail?? All my comments and reports to CCR were always answered. Or is he referring to issues like lag? Not very clear in his article.

And this misconception about dying in the game. What did he think his relto book attached to him was for when he panicked link? There was no dying, he didn't see his body melt in the lava or smash on rocks. A safety net that took you back to your Relto. Oh well you just can't please people all the time.