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Mystlander
Great Tree Member
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 521
Location: In Cavern
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 Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 5:01 pm Post subject: URU Live and After |
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Chucker posted an excellent article on MYSTcommunity about URU Live and After
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URU Live KI #: 50911 MOULa KI #11697212
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taniith
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Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 98
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| Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 10:16 pm Post subject: |
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Why is it that every time there is a link to these forums, I can't see the post being linked to? I get something like "you do not have permission to view this page"
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Mystlander
Great Tree Member
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 521
Location: In Cavern
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| Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 8:22 am Post subject: |
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Sorry about that, Taniith, I think you must be registered as a member of the forum. Here's the article...
Chucker Posted: Mar 3 2004, 11:20 AM:
| Quote: | It's February 4. You see people posting about "the rumors" everywhere, and your curiosity makes you want to find out what this is all about. Suspicious posts by DRC members, rumors about major changes to Uru Live, and the plea for someone to clear this up.
A letter from "Rand and the Cyan Worlds Team" appears. They bring what can only be conceived as very bad news, but try and calm down the community and find the positive sides. Uru Live was "being put to bed", or, in other words, starting some time next Monday (February 9), trying to access it will fail.
What does that mean? For almost six and a half years, Cyan had been trying to launch a product going far beyond Myst and Riven. Something ever changing and never ending, something where everyone can participate, something alive. After different kinds of private and semi-public testing, after christening it "Uru" and getting a contract with Ubisoft who already publish the entire Myst franchise now and after jointly deciding to add an offline part, it seemed near the end of 2003 like the vision of "Mudpie" was about to become real. Just imagine thousands of people who read about it before through the novels or have seen hints to it before through the games to finally arrive in what seemed so mind-bogglingly real. It felt like life, and isn't life the perfect game, with all aspects you need, after all?
But wait, didn't RAWA say something about 2007? Doesn't that, even considering he was making a rough guess, all of a sudden make November 2003 seem strangely early? Was Cyan really overworking so hard that they could easily rid the originally projected extra time and release it already, or wasn't it rather business pressure that made them target Uru for last November?
The average user will have to assume the latter. Uru wasn't just filled with a plethora of bugs, some of which never fixed. It was also, depending on the region, a marketing job ranging from "average" to "disaster". Think accidentally let-in Prologue subscribers, think forgotten CD keys in Down Under and also think retailers all over Europe calling it "Myst IV", despite the fact that Uru is not part of the Myst series.
Which is another issue. It may not be apparent to the fans that browse forums like UruObsession or MYSTcommunity, but even semi-decent marketing managers should realize just how complex Uru was. It's a game that starts offline ("Prime", think of it as an introduction to one of Uru's multiple storylines) and then asks you to continue online ("Live"). You can also do part of the offline game and then go online. And once you've made progress in the online game, what used to be offline gets changed bit by bit. That's cool, and realistic too - but the concept is difficult to grasp. Why is the neighborhood balcony available offline? Why is the core part of the city accessible through the Nexus, whereas certain parts aren't? And, if the neighborhoods are parts of the city, then why do they have their own books? All of that has an answer, and the avid fan is eager to find out, but the masses won't be, unless you spend a lot of time abstracting it. Partially by great marketing.
Uru was of much larger scale than Cyan's previous D'ni-related projects not just because it took a lot longer to try and finish off, but also because it surpassed two generations of computer gaming at a time. RIUM+ pointed lyst members to this article which compares 2-dimensional gaming (like Myst and Riven), 3-dimensional games (like realMYST) and finally 3-d massive multiplayer gaming (as Uru Live was).
Now, if I were to say that Uru pushed Cyan from http://www.acmqueue.com/figures/issue010/blow1.jpg to http://www.acmqueue.com/figures/issue010/blow4.jpg - which certainly sounds like an impressive difference, someone is going to argue that there was realMYST. But no, I don't think there was. What more was realMYST good for than giving Zardoz and friends funny easter eggs and configuration file tricks to figure out and present at Mysterium, than giving fans something from the folks at Cyan to peek at and ultimately to have a realtime 3-d game acting as a prototype for Uru? Apparently Ubisoft doesn't believe realMYST was of use for the market. They'll have the reasons, and the almost simultaneous release of Exile was just one of them. I really believe that realMYST mainly gave Cyan a chance to catch-up with more modern rendering technology and to implement new features such as entirely free movement and weather effects.
Both of which worked flawlessly in Uru, by the way. Others like Kadish, but I think Teledahn, Cleft and the Ferry Terminal in the City are great examples of wonderful realistic-looking art. And you could walk around in them. Heck, in Uru Live, it was even an order of a magnitude better: you could walk around in them with your friends, your spouse or a random group you never even knew before!
Taking online communication to an entirely new level by such realistic and flexible avatars certainly worked well for me, personally, and I've heard positive reports from many others, too. All of them will miss this. There are various alternative games out there, but will they ever truly meet the perfection Uru felt to have?
The thing is, you need more in an online game than just the ability for people to walk around and to explore. Puzzles. What kinds of puzzles they had in mind might never be clear. Live had mini-games like Ahyoheek, an adaption of Stone-Paper-Scissors on a table - it was so much more fun than it sounds like, and the marker quests, where you're supposed to walk around the ages seeking tiny futuristic-looking "markers" that will give you points and / or enable you access to more regions. What Live didn't had yet was Myst-style puzzles with multiple players. Think one person hitting a switch that will go off once it's no longer touched - so you need one more person to actually pass that walkway, for example. I think that was the kind of puzzle many were waiting for and never saw.
The DRC, too, added to the storyline. Problem is, it made another aspect that was difficult to understand for the average player - for someone who doesn't even know how to spell "D'ni" or who Yeesha and the Bahro are, figuring out the idea of a group of seemingly crazy, secretive and seldom-in-harmony self-proclaimed "archaeologists" is simply impossible. "Is D'ni real?" - for a fan, that's a question to laugh about. For everyone else, it is another frustrating part of what made Uru Live.
If they even got there yet. Did it never occur to those who cancelled Uru for "lack of subscribers" that the average person simply doesn't want to have to deal with a supposedly full of bugs beta test dubbed the "Prologue"? Or that they don't feel like subscribing to something when they have not even finished the offline game yet? Or, almost absurdly, that they were recommended to wait with subscribing until Live gets more "stable"? It didn't, because otherwise, no manager in their right mind would cancel a product with certainly higher interest than claimed before it was even declared finished.
I hope you don't get me wrong: I believe it's fair for me to say that I deeply loved Uru, its concept, its diversity and its inner and outer beauty. I would have been willing to pay quite a high subscription fee. But I've had to suffer from this decision (and expansion packs are really little else than a last resort, scaling Uru back down to the pre-online gaming market) - not only because I've known, and worked with, quite a few of those in charge of trying to make it work out, but also because just like every other fan (I hope), I was looking forward for years for whatever it was that "Rand and the Cyan Worlds Team" were trying to accomplish.
Neither the Mac port - which should and would have happened eventually anyway - nor the upcoming expansion packs are going to make me forget that D'ni In Real Time, Mudpie, Parable, Myst Online, Uru Live weren't "not good enough", but rather "too good to be true".
Sören 'Chucker' Kuklau
MYSTcommunity Technical Lead ( http://www.mystcommunity.com/ )
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Zen-17
Veteran Explorer
Joined: 13 Jan 2004
Posts: 69
Location: anywhere
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| Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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That is a good essay....
D'ni certainly was something different, different than I had first imagined. The city held life, celebrations, explorers, politics, division, and restrictions, instead of the quiet, dark atmosphere of cloaked sillouettes and pale-eyed dreamers I had imagined. Time passed, and things became clearer, and I think that many held hope that the 'tree' could be strengthened, renewed through realizations that Yeesha taught and Sharper seemed to champion.
It took more than a glance at the surface to see that there may have been a brighter path for the cavern. Not everyone saw that, and so I suppose that could be part of why so many chose not to make the journey, as I believe chucker states.... Games like Myst and Riven appealed to many people, but not the average online gamer, I suppose. Broadband was another limitation, although from what I hear it might've averaged around 10K/sec, so if there'd been low transfer intervals, dial-up'ers could've even played, admittedly with a hungry lag monster on their back 24/7....
I can imagine, though, that if you couldn't get into the plot/storyline at all, and you weren't an overly social person, that to those people, Uru could have appeared less than appealing. Lack of real competition--at least, not well-advertised competition, considering that 'heek and the wall were relatively small and out-of-the-way--might have discouraged many of the competitive gamers. Uru targeted a very specific type of person, and required knowledge of complex ideas and an ever-changing storyline, and I guess they couldn't handle such a small demographic.
Maybe if they'd employed a sociologist or two, they could've worked around these things....?  
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Tokai
Explorer
Joined: 10 Feb 2004
Posts: 11
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 9:16 pm Post subject: |
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It just has to happem again - you know it has. Make no bones about it - for them that experienced Prolgue (Uru online) it was something to log into and experience - a different world to be yourself - talk - meet - ignore even - it was just a different world that we all loved.
I rather suspect that the biggest thing Uru online gave was the fact that people could communicate with each other in real time. And that the puzzle soving played a minor part albeit part of the plot. I wonder how many secretly fell in love - and longed for the next night to link up with their exploring partner.
Meet me in Teledahn... we have something to discuss (brilliant KI device).
And did you notice... Everybody was nice. I never met a bad person once.
It has to come back in some form.
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