May Contain Nuts

I came to the conclusion last night that Uru doesn’t work as an MMO (shocking, I know). First of all, it’s not profitable (at least, not quickly enough to justify its continued commercial development). Secondly, its style of play isn’t very well suited to an MMO… I don’t think this is Uru’s failing, I just think adventure games in general make for pretty crummy MMOs. Not every genre works equally well when you tack “MMO” in front of it.

So I started thinking about how to make a game like Uru actually work. What I came up with is sort of a hybrid between a traditional single-player adventure game and the MMO world of Uru, with a splash of TV thrown in for extra flavor (I swear, it’ll make sense once I explain it!). Beware, those of you well-versed in Uru’s ancient history may find portions of the following explanation tiresome. Because this is a really long post, I’ve put the rest below the fold for the sake of those reading MystBlogs… (I’d also like to apologize if it doesn’t make much sense. This kept me up until almost 4:30 AM, so I’m a bit tired…)

I think Cyan originally had the right idea when it came to D’ni. The original concept for Uru was DIRT, or D’ni In Real Time. It was a real-time, single-player game that let players explore the world of D’ni, and would be expanded as more content was completed. This ultimately became MUDPIE, which took the concept of an ever-expanding game world and put it entirely online, creating the world’s first massively multiplayer online adventure game and eventually becoming Uru.

I don’t think Cyan can, at this point, return D’ni to their original single-player intentions. There are too many folks who are too used to exploring D’ni with others, and there’s a certain level of precedent for more multiplayer components to the game’s mechanics. Whatever comes out of D’ni now needs to have some form of multiplayer built into it, but I think going full MMO is not a viable option anymore.

Instead, I’d like to see something more p2p-like, where you can join other players and go off on an expedition together, just like in Uru, but without the central authentication and game servers. It would be like playing Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, or Homeworld, but with one important exception: your world would persist. Instead of resetting everything when you quit, the game would retain the knowledge of what you and your friends did, and their avatars would retain anything that they acquired in their travels. The next time you launched the game, either in single-player or multiplayer, all of those changes would still be there for you and anyone else who joined. Couple that with the original concept of an ever-expanding game world, and you’ve got what could essentially be considered Uru Lite, or perhaps DIRT Plus. At least as far as content is concerned.

When it comes to the story, there’s a couple of possible options. The easiest would be to present the story as it’s been presented in every other Myst game: something you play through entirely at your own pace. If other players join you, they’ll join your game in the state you left it in, even if they’re either well beyond where you are, or nowhere near as far along as you are (provided they’ve downloaded the content… no sneaking non-subscribers into new areas!). As new content is released with new story components inside, you can play through it as fast or as slow as you want. There’s a certain simplicity and elegance to this that’s strongly appealing, and it might be the best option because it’s easiest to deal with. But it’s not the only option.

A second option would have events play out according to game time. This would sort of artificially lengthen the narrative by triggering events after a certain amount of time had elapsed in-game, enabling the game to adhere to its own internal timeline, without tying it to that of the real world. I’m not a huge fan of this approach, though it does have some scheduling benefits over what I’m about to discuss, because it could lead to folks having to stand around in-game waiting for the clock to roll over and trigger the next event.

Alternatively, the story could be presented in a hybrid form, much like what I’ve advocated Uru’s story be like in the past: a series of at-your-own-pace story arcs, punctuated with fixed-in-time live events that permanently affect the game world. Now, in an MMO, this is to some degree an easier thing to accomplish, but when have I ever taken the easy road?

This is where the TV component comes in. Rather than have truly live events, where players all join in on a single shard to watch and/or interact with actors (or try to, anyway) as they perform their scripts, this DIRT 2.0 would have pre-scripted events that would take place on specific days, and only happen once. To further distinguish this concept from MOUL’s method of storytelling, these events would be scheduled to occur on a regular basis (somewhere between weekly and monthly, depending on what development time ends up being), and be announced in advance. It does break the 4th wall a little bit, but it’s for the betterment of the story’s presentation if this is the form it’s going to take. After all, nobody complains about knowing when the next episode of LOST is on…

I say that these events would be scheduled to take place on specific days because a day is easier to use as a trigger than a specific time slot, especially when trying to figure out what to do if someone starts the game 15 minutes into when the event is supposed to be running. It also provides some built-in time-shifting, so folks can experience the event at their convenience without completely decoupling the story from a set timeline. Basically, if you play the game on an event day, the game will activate a whole array of character scenes and triggers that will only exist for that day. After that, the game will switch on a set of flags that set the game world to reflect the end of the event day. If you missed the event, you can “catch the re-run” by playing back portions of it through an in-game interface whenever you like (they’re all scripted events, so playback is no big deal).

To try and keep folks from moving their system clock forward to watch stuff that hasn’t been released yet, the game will need to get the game time from a central time server, and synchronize content availability flags with a central state vault, but this is a one-time-at-launch thing rather than a constant call-back process, so the storage requirements become almost non-existent, and the bandwidth requirements drop dramatically. This same process can be used to authenticate subscribed players for new content downloads. If any of the authentication processes fail, the game will still be playable, but new content downloads will be disabled, any upcoming events will be disabled, and content accessibility will persist from the last play session. In other words, you can still play what you’ve already got, but nothing new can be added until you’ve connected to the auth server.

All of this is, I hasten to point out, in addition to the at-your-own-pace arcs that would deepen the story and the player’s personal involvement in it. Things like Yeesha’s Journey or my proposed revisions to the revelation of the Bahro civil war would be central to this new version of DIRT, but be given a certain level of urgency through the use of the “live event” days.

At this point, I’d like to reiterate that I’m not suggesting that Uru become this, or that this replace the OpenURU project. Uru is what it is, and it’s defined as much by its status as an MMO as it is by its content and story. What I’m suggesting is a new game altogether. Something that can take on the challenge of telling a story in and about the D’ni empire without being bogged down by the baggage of its previous incarnations, and the largely-unnecessary overhead (and expense!) of an MMO.

With that out of the way, I want to discuss multiplayer in this p2p-based game. I’d like to provide similar multiplayer opportunities to Uru, with game Ages and occasional multiplayer puzzles, provided there’s an understanding at the outset that this game is not a strictly single-player title, despite being able to play it by yourself for the most part. I realize that either way this idea goes – all single-player or some multiplayer – there’s going to be folks arguing the opposite, but I don’t see the harm in requiring players to get a helping hand from time to time, and I certainly see no harm in giving players stuff they can do together for fun.

In addition to the p2p gameplay components, I’d also like to make sure that stuff like marker missions and Jalak boards can be shared between players, again either p2p, or through a central mission repository (again, this would generate some expense overhead, but nowhere near what an MMO would require… this is more like a forum or a website in terms of cost). This, combined with the common story timeline and a revamped KI actually capable of supporting chat on a global level and possibly an in-game match-up service (so you don’t need to go to a lobby to start a p2p game with someone else), would hopefully preserve the sense of community and common experience that Uru fostered. It’s also possible that certain MMO-style activities like the lake lighting process could be replicated using the same minimal data-polling to distribute information to the clients at start-up, and perhaps for up-to-the-minute results, whenever accessing the Cavern “Age”. This would hopefully further foster the notion of the game being a shared experience rather than a solo journey, even if the actual sharing is done more through small groups than huge crowds (which rarely worked in Uru anyway).

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Game Development, Games, Myst, Uru Deconstruction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.