May Contain Nuts

To paraphrase Strong Bad, “oh, you thought there was no more Uru deconstruction butguesswhatthere’sUrudeconstruction!”

This article on Joystiq summarizing the Austin GDC panel on the psychology of MMO gamers got me thinking a bit on griefing in MOUL, and ways to try to counteract it.  By and large, MOUL was pretty devoid of griefers, probably in equal parts because of how little the game itself did to make griefing a viable activity and the general makeup of the MOUL community at large (stunningly, the number of people I had to deal with for griefing in my 3 months as a ResEng could probably be counted on one hand).  I think it’s somewhat surprising, given the somewhat poor attitude most “hard-core” gamers seem to have towards Myst, that MOUL wasn’t more of a target for people just looking to have a laugh at our expense… perhaps the 3-gig download put many of them off.

To the best of my knowledge, the only griefing tactic that was in any way inconveniencing for an individual player was Relto-spamming, wherein a person would repeatedly and rapidly attempt to share their Relto Book with another player, preventing them from being able to move away or even call for help as a result of the way Uru’s GUI was designed (Books act as modal dialogs that block access to any other UI functionality, including the KI and the game’s menu system).  There are of course other ways that players can grief each other… one such common method was sabotaging the Delin and Tsogahl door runs, but even that was typically no more than a 5-minute problem, as contacting a ResEng would usually have the person bounced to Biegalski’s Tetsonot shortly thereafter.  Other tactics were typically limited to lack of respect for personal space (intentionally walking through/standing in other avatars) and verbal diarrhea in the chat channels, again something that was usually remedied by calling a ResEng (abuse of the chat channel was also easily remedied by ignoring the offender using the in-game chat command).

Ultimately, the worst that a player could do as a drive-by griefing was the Relto-spamming (of course stalking and other such serial offenses weren’t unheard of, but were at least extremely rare during the run of the game that I was present for), and I think there’s an easy way to make sure that such actions aren’t possible in the future (I say “easy” because it’s something that would be trivial to implement if one were building the game from scratch… doing it in the current platform would probably be akin to pulling out your wisdom teeth with a pair of tweezers).

Whenever a player attempts to share a Book with another player (typically their Relto Book, but this is basically a pre-emptive removal of other Book-based griefing attempts), they will be presented with a game dialog asking the player if they want to accept the other person’s invitation to use their shared Book (in the format of “<User> wants to share their <Age Name> Book with you.”).  The sharee may then choose “Accept” or “Deny”, with a check-box to always perform the selected action for that sharer.  So, every time a new person wants to share a Book with you, you’ll see that prompt, and if it’s a one-time deal, you can be prompted again the next time you see them.  If they’re a good friend or someone you otherwise trust not to be a jackass, you can forgo the prompt and the game will skip straight to sharing the Book with you.  If you’ve been drive-by’d, you can deny the share offer, and if you’re being intentionally griefed, you can deny all further efforts by that person to share their Book with you.  At that time, the sharer would no longer be able to click on you as a sharee when in “Share Book” mode.

When this dialog appears, it will be semi-modal, in that it will block your ability to move, but not your ability to use the current chat channel or get to the game’s menu system (at the very least, access to the ResEng call screen will not be blocked).  This way, you can continue to use the chat channel to talk with those around you, and still call for help if you need to.

To deal with the possibility that this preference may need to be changed for certain people at some point in the future (either because your good friend has decided to start wearing his ass hat, or because you accidentally ignored someone permanently), there needs to be a panel in the game’s menu that allows players to manage the people on their list of sharers.  This dialog would contain a filterable list of all the people who have offered to share a Book with you, with options to set each person to “Always Accept”, “Always Deny”, and “Prompt”, which covers the other two options.

I realize that griefing is still going to find its way into any incarnation of any MMO, and that Uru is not an exception, but I think that Uru is in a unique position - both because of its community and its inherent design - to be a game where griefing on the whole requires significantly more effort than most griefers are willing to expend to get their jollies.  While Cyan’s tendency towards naievte and idealism regarding people’s interactions online means they probably never even considered Relto-spamming to be a potential issue (and I think justifiably so… it was only ever reported to be a problem to any degree in MOUL, a full 5 years after the game’s original release, so it clearly wasn’t something that had come up as something to deal with before then), I think it’s one of the few instances of griefing that can actually be eliminated because of its ability to put control of the situation in the hands of the target and not the perpetrator, without burdening the game with excessive overhead, or creating a confusing or time-consuming process for the player to maneuver through to block the perpetrator’s actions.

I apologize, by the way, for the lack of visuals to illustrate the way I envision this anti-Book-spamming feature looking… I’m writing from work and don’t really have the time to dedicate to putting together my usual visual aids.

Also, I really hope someone from Joystiq manages to find their way into the Austin GDC panel on Uru, if only so I don’t have to wait for Eleri’s convention report to see how it went.

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in :P.

As I mentioned in my last Uru-related entry, I wanted to save the user-created content commentary for a separate post because this is going to be a thorny subject and I suspect I’m going to be on the wrong side of the debate here.  I’ve thus far been expressly avoiding major additions of user-created content like Ages and such because I honestly don’t think that they’re essential to the long-term survival of Uru.  Please to be not pummeling me until I have a chance to explain myself!

I am absolutely not saying that I think fan-created content is bad, nor am I saying that Cyan is wrong for wanting to give players the means to create their own stuff to share with others.  What I am saying is that I don’t think Uru is the right vehicle for that content.  Uru is (or at least was, I’m not entirely sure anymore) a Cyan project that builds on and continues the extension of official Myst canon.  As much as I like the guys at GoW, integrating fan Ages directly into official canon is a hazy proposition to me.  It just feels… off.  Of course, one could always just turn Uru into this content platform, and leave Cyan with the option of creating a Myst MMO with a brand new title ;).  I just get kinda squirmy when it comes to the “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!”-style scenario that could arise from putting fan content directly into a game built on canon (I’m a purist, you may now commence pummeling).

Where I think fan-created Ages (and indeed, whole fan-created games) would be better suited is a spin-off service that still runs on Plasma, has an officially released toolkit for developers to build their stuff with, and enables users to embrace or ignore as much or as little of the available material as they like, without it getting in the way of Uru’s story or content.  Like Steam, but just for Myst stuff.  With such a service available, content wouldn’t just be limited to what could be produced within the confines of Uru.  In effect, it becomes an official, kosher distribution point for virtual fan fiction, with the obvious disclaimer attached that none of what you’re seeing should be considered canon unless it’s officially adopted by Cyan.  You also get the added benefit of not getting freaked out about someone’s new Age mucking up the Uru Live Vault, and not having to figure out the managerial headache of how people would download and access player content without just piling it all into the initial download (which would be messy and ginormous).  Ultimately, I think trying to cram user-created content into a game that was never designed to support it would cause more problems than it would solve, and that the better way to do it would be to keep the two separate.  This way, Cyan doesn’t have to potentially re-architecture portions of Uru’s download manager, fans can still build and release content that runs on the same engine on whatever schedule they like, and players can access and enjoy both.

I think that such a service would blow the doors off of a potentially massive Myst extended universe, much the same way that Star Wars has grown exponentially beyond the confines of the original films through licensed books and software.  The Myst universe has the potential to be incredibly huge and rich, and I think a lot of people in this community recognize that fact, otherwise there likely wouldn’t be such a huge push for player-created Ages in Uru.  And while I have to give props to the work the people at Alcugs have done to get their stuff into the offline version of Uru, having a sanctioned release channel that doesn’t skirt legalities, and doesn’t have vague questions about what you can and can’t put in your Ages like the current Uru:CC distribution system does, is going to get a whole lot more people on board.

On a larger scope, I’d love to see more commercially available Myst universe material.  I mean seriously, the Myst universe is simply too large and varied to not be expanded upon by fans and, in my opinion, other creative professionals.  There’s 10,000 years of Atrus-free history to work with here; don’t tell me that not one interesting thing happened in that time that wouldn’t be worthy of a book, movie, TV show, video game, etc.  Think of it: CSI: J’Taeri!  The Mahnxooreeahn Candidate!  Call of Duty 5: The Pento Wars!  Burnout: Ae’Gura!  Sim City: D’ni! (two great tastes that taste great together!)

On a more serious note, I really hope that projects like the Myst Movie thing actually get off the ground and make a dent in the public consciousness.  The Star Wars expanded universe has scads and scads of books, comics, action figures, and reference materials, not all of which are anywhere close to being canonical anymore, and the scope of a potential Myst expanded universe could easily rival such a construct.  I know Cyan’s had some bad dealings with shady, less than agreeable types in the past (*cough*SciFi*cough*DarkHorse Comics*cough*), but I think that with the right people on board to start an extended universe, it could really take off.  And while I imagine that Cyan could probably come up with a lisencing arangement that would prevent the creation of … uncomfortable products (”Section V, article 25: no ‘Atrus and Catherine consumate their relationship’ scenes”?) in order to maintain the franchise’s reputation, as long as there was an understanding that what you were reading or watching was part of that extended universe and not Cyan-sanctioned canon, I don’t have a problem with getting more stories about D’ni out of this franchise.

This is probably the eighth time I’ve re-written this entry, so hopefully it hasn’t gotten too long in the tooth through the numerous re-writes. I’ve been trying to work out an effective format for addressing the three remaining lessons I’ve learned from MOUL’s year-long run, and doing so without turning out a novel-length post is a considerable challenge. These three lessons all center around involving players in the game without forcing them to become addicted to it, and cover story, repeatable content, and content formatting. So let’s dive in (again, and for the first time).

As I mentioned in a recent post on the MOUL forums, Cyan has faced an uphill battle against time, money, and manpower constraints when developing Uru since UbiSoft decided to muck up the game’s formula 8 months before release, and these battles were only further exacerbated by the brief timeframe that GameTap gave a somewhat understaffed Cyan for re-launching the title into public beta at the end of 2006. These constraints have resulted in additional changes to Uru’s original game plan (episodes, live-only story) which, while more subtle than UbiSoft’s single-player campaign mandate, had a similar impact on Uru’s ability to succeed at its own game. I firmly believe that Uru is a concept that can succeed, both artistically and commercially, but all of the pieces to Uru’s development puzzle have to be in place for it to work well at all. You can call me a blind optimist if you like, but I still don’t think Uru as it should be has been given a chance to work… so far we’ve only managed to prove that “Uru Live Lite” isn’t a good business proposal. Twice.

That said, Cyan’s more limited resources require some smart game design decisions that would probably take the game to places other than it was originally intended to go. Still, when given the option of an under-executed original vision and a well-executed alternative, I’d have to go with the alternative option. Here are a few ways that I think Cyan could create a successful “alternative” Uru; one that has all of the pieces in place, but executes them smartly on a tiny budget.

Content is obviously a huge issue for Uru. It is, after all, a content-driven MMO rather than a grind-driven or competition-driven MMO. However, Cyan simply cannot provide Uru with enough content to keep the rabid puzzle-solvers sated, especially with their limited staff. As a result, focusing on single-use Ages with solve-once puzzles is not the most optimal use of resources, because for most players, once they’re done solving those puzzles, there’s little motivation to return to those Ages again, and then they quickly get bored and leave. An alternative Uru needs to focus more on repeatable gameplay and smart re-use of existing content to keep players interested and keep production costs at a minimum.

Repeatable gameplay would most easily come in the form of in-game mini-games. There are already several examples of this sort of content in both Prologue and MOUL, but they seem more like ways to test the water than really well-developed concepts for getting players to kill time in-game.

Small table-top games like Ahyoheek are nice distractions, and with functional leader boards could even fuel more regular play (especially with a game-wide board for players to vie for spots on), but it’s not something that will hold attention for hours on end, and most players will get tired of the D’ni version of Rock, Paper, Scissors before too long anyway. Still, it’s a nice start, and something to fall back on when you’re out of other things to do.

More exploration-based games like the user-created Marker Missions fill another niche, but can only be played solo (which is good for the loner types but not as useful for making actual games). The original Ubi beta for Uru in 2003 had 2 additional game types: Capture and Hold, which were played with teams in a single Age, and had a set time limit. In Capture, you ran around collecting markers for your team, and everybody playing could see all of the game’s uncollected markers. In Hold, the markers you collected didn’t disappear, meaning the other team could steal markers away from you. In both games, whichever team had the most markers at the end of the timer was the winner. They were fun and fast-paced games, and I still don’t quite understand why the time wasn’t devoted to making them work in the final release; they disappeared shortly after Ages Beyond Myst’s announcement at E3 2003, never to be seen again.

Finally, we segue cleanly into strictly competitive mini-games. Typically quick and constrained to a game surface like a wall, a life-sized game board, or a track, these games wouldn’t appeal to everyone in Uru’s crowd, but would hopefully provide something to entice new players into the fold, as well as give those interested something more exciting to do with their time in-game when not out puzzle solving. These games are also typically great for spectating, but Uru has traditionally made getting to these games tedious at the best of times, and downright frustrating at worst, which I think has soured their appeal for most people. Beyond making them easier to get players and observers into, areas like Jalak and Gahreesen’s Wall need to provide places for spectators to gather, a solid way to determine scoring and victory, and ideally a set of leader boards in a public place to showcase your accomplishments and give you something to work toward, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The Wall has more of these requirements than Jalak, but I think that if both were tweaked to include this complete feature set, they would both be fairly popular hang-outs for the more energetic segments of the Uru community. Releasing planned content like the Kahlo creature races would only add to the number of possible things to do in the game during story down-time.

Beyond mini-games, though, content has to be recyclable for story and general gameplay purposes too. For instance, consider Er’cana - quite possibly the only real forray into repeatable gameplay that Cyan has made. Er’cana’s puzzles are almost all complete throw-aways that have nothing to do with actually operating the machinery in the Age. It’s a big set of “get around this broken pathway” puzzles with power switches at convenient intervals. The only really sustainable puzzle is figuring out a good pellet recipe, and that was generally short-cutted around through the communal efforts in the forums. After that, the Age became largely useless, and the machinery didn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual pellet-making process, which was a curious shift from Cyan’s typical attention to such details. I think that the concept of Er’cana can be seriously expounded upon by at the very least factoring in machine operation and supply management in basic forms. My ideal super-complicated implementation would call for a ‘hood-instanced mega-Age with weather patterns to learn and track over months or even years, and dynamic vegetation growth and harvesting that responded to changes in the weather (i.e. a long drought would cause plants to wither and the ground to become cracked mud). Creating and testing such a system would obviously require considerably more resources up-front than the far simpler infinite supply system and basic puzzle mechanics of Er’cana, but I think the Age would last a LOT longer as a result, and complex puzzles like tracking weather patterns seems like something right up the alley of some of the more obsessive Uru fans. As a launch Age, it would give players something to spend at least a few months pouring over obsessively, without putting a multi-month delay on other content drops while the beast went through development and testing.

As a final point on content, adding new material to existing Ages was another promise of the original Uru which never came to pass in MOUL, a fact I find most unfortunate. I think that part of this was related to the 4-year-old setpieces that Cyan had built versus the new direction in which they were moving the story. To that end, I think there is a need for a set of content that can be repurposed for pretty much anything, and I think that the Path to the surface could provide the perfect opportunity for such a set piece. It’s largely modular, and could be broken into discreet sections by strategic cave-ins; it runs through any conceivable section of the D’ni Empire you need it to; when tied into the GZ coordinate system, you can drop all kinds of subtle clues to players leading them to new content in already-explored areas; KI access restrictions could be integrated into the doors to keep players out until they’d completed any pre-requisite story arcs… the list of potential uses goes on and on. Especially for smaller story-related material, these sorts of simple expansions to existing areas could have a huge impact on the depth of the game world and provide a cheaper alternative to building new Ages from scratch every time you needed a new story element unveiled.

This leads us inevitably to the story. I think Uru suffered from the same fate that befell the new Star Wars trilogy: a good story poorly executed. However, while we only have Lucas’s inability to write his way out of a paper bag to blame for Episodes 1-3, Uru’s story failings have a myriad of causes that stem from a lack of time, money, and manpower.

Since I’m already adopting the viewpoint that a new Uru needs to be a complete reboot in terms of development anyway, with a lot of time being devoted to building large sustainable content chunks before release, I figure I might as well go whole-hog here. Uru’s storytelling technique is unique in the MMO genre because it abandons the notion of player-controlled, player-instanced story for that of a global tale being told in real time, concurrent with the progression of time outside the game. In Prologue, this was handled through regular, live, in-game events that moved the DRC plot along, with a parallel solo story arc involving Yeesha and the Bahro that could be explored at your leisure. MOUL abandoned this solo story arc concept for new development, focusing instead on the much cheaper-to-produce live events as the exclusive manner in which story was unveiled in the game. Unfortunately, this method didn’t work very well, and players more often than not became frustrated with their inability to watch the game’s story unfold first-hand, and instead resigned themselves to learning about the story through out-of-game means like the forums.

Hopefully, I don’t have to tell you that having players leave the game to learn about the story because it’s easier than trying to wring it out of the game itself is a bad thingâ„¢. Eventually, even the simpler methods of maintaining a permanent storytelling record in MOUL, like Sharper’s journal, stopped being updated entirely. Regardless of the fact that Sharper, as a fellow denizen of the Uru universe, probably stopped updating his journal once he found out it wasn’t exactly private anymore, some way to keep that information flowing was necessary, and it wasn’t maintained. Removing it cut off the only remaining source for catching up on events in-game without trying to find someone else who knew what was going on, and that was bad for the story’s delivery.

Beyond that, realtime events ended up cheapening some of the story, in my opinion, by turning them into second-hand recountings of really exciting stuff which, like vacation photos, are really only cool to the people who went with you. Story arc points like the unveiling of the Bahro civil war could have been handled much better, I think, through a player-controlled reveal much like the original Yeesha journey’s reveal of the Bahro’s very existence, rather than Sharper recounting That Time He Almost Died in Negilahn and That Time He Shot a Bahro in Noloben.

Not everything is suited to a real-time event in Uru, but not everything can be placed in the hands of player progress either. Wheely’s death and Watson’s return, for example, had to happen once and only once, as there was only one Wheely and only one Watson for these things to happen to. If someone joined in November and was able to witness Wheely’s death first-hand as if it was happening for the first time, it would certainly be more informative for that player, but it would also violate Uru’s premise that all of this is actually happening in the real world. Some things can even be a combination of real-time and player-time events (I like that term, I think I’ll keep it). For example, many many players were angry that they didn’t get to see Yeesha’s speech in the season finale, and so missed their only opportunity to see her again in person. As an alternative, let me propose the following: upon completing the Path of the Shell Ages, you arrive in a private instance of K’veer so as not to be disturbed. Yeesha appears before you in a triggered sequence that plays once for all players upon reaching this point. Yeesha reveals the salient points of her speech, but leaves out the “kthxbye” part. This gets used in her real-time appearance and speech in Exodus, which obviously only happens once. After her departure, the Yeesha in K’veer becomes a hologram for anyone else completing the Path of the Shell Ages, and an additional line or two detailing her departure could even be added for consistency and explanation. This way, everybody gets to see Yeesha regardless of when they complete PotS, and the real-time event where she departs to draw the Bahro away is preserved as an event for the history books. Provided MOUL’s sole animator hadn’t spent the entire development period animating all of those Bahro around Kerath’s Arch, Yeesha’s 2-minute speech could probably have been cranked out in a couple of days, plus maybe a little overtime (or minus a couple of dogfighting Bahro).

On one final note, I have thus far been very intentionally not mentioning user-created content beyond Marker and Jalak games because that’s a whole ‘nother bail of barbed wire that I’d rather be saving for another post that isn’t already several pages long :P.

With Tweek’s latest post, he’s beaten me to the punch, so to speak, in outlining what I personally think any future incarnation of Uru should be like.  I’ve spent a lot of time going over what I think went wrong and why, but less time has been dedicated here to what I would actually do, were I in charge.  That certainly doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it… I’ve got mockups in Photoshop, about 10 pages of sketches and handwritten outlines, and a full 6 more pages of typewritten “proposal” sitting at my desk.  I’ve actually invested serious amounts of time and effort in figuring out how to build an Uru-like experience in an entirely new, cross-platform (Mac/PC), native (none of this Cider juice) engine called Unity.  Not being much of a storyteller, my work has concentrated mostly on the technical and artistic side of this notion of a reborn Uru, and less on the actual story to be told.  There are, however, a few things I think any new story needs to address before anything new can happen.

First, Yeesha needs to go away for good.  I know there are people who will stone me for this, and others who will sing my praises without hearing me out, but here’s why: Yeesha’s character has been dragged through the mud to the extent that there’s not enough left to keep her going without some serious retcons.  Given that I dislike retcons (as do most Myst fans, I believe), I’d rather just give her a final reason to not come back and leave it at that.  Her story in MOUL wasn’t particularly engaging, many people saw her as incredibly manipulative, and there was no real way to integrate her into the everyday experience of playing Uru without some serious refactoring of how the game’s story was designed to play out.  Her “special powers” have been used to justify some particularly egregious violations of Linking Theory as we knew it (I don’t think there really are any rules anymore thanks to the mess of PotS’s time travel and the wonky linking mechanics of Uru Live/MOUL), and overall I don’t think her presence has lent any stability or structure to the game beyond providing a semi-reasonable context for the Age instancing nightmare.

Second, the DRC (at least as we know it) needs to go away as well.  Their apparent original purpose as a sort of “Mary Sue” for Cyan’s world building efforts has been largely (if not entirely) abandoned since 2003, despite Cyan’s frustrating habit of intentionally (and unintentionally) blurring that line by having DRC concerns reflect the pressures of Cyan’s work schedule.  Their further purpose of providing an alternative viewpoint to that of Yeesha’s was also never well-realized in the first place (as Tweek explores in his blog post), and completely abandoned once Prologue was shut down and the DRC all went off on Yeesha’s Journey for themselves.  As a result, the DRC as an instrument of historical preservation and archaeological responsibility gave way to the DRC that just opened up Ages willy-nilly, seemingly without oversight (coughTetsonotcough), and played directly into Yeesha’s plans for a restored Cavern.

I definitely think that some organization should be in charge of opening new areas of the game IC, but the DRC as we know it has become too entangled in Yeesha’s restoration plans to be of much further use.  I’d much prefer the old DRC, with the explorer-snubbing Kodama and the safety-nazi Dr. Watson.  I think Laxman can be salvaged, but only because he’s an engineer and something of a nerd, and D’ni just doesn’t work well without him it seems (doesn’t work too well with him either, but that’s another point entirely).
The real tragedy behind my decisions is that both Yeesha and the DRC could have been very interesting story elements in the original Uru Live, but the original offline release mandate, the Uru expansion packs, and End of Ages severely hamstrung Cyan’s ability to roll with the story they originally set out to tell.  Characters went through extreme off-stage changes in the expansion packs, and whole new constructs of Linking Theory were built for the sake of making multiplayer puzzles work offline.  The 3-year hiatus broke down any semblance of consistency between Prologue and MOUL, and whenever Cyan tried to pick up old threads (like Phil), players either didn’t know who they were, didn’t care who they were, or were frustrated with the caricatured way that the characters were portrayed.  With Phil especially, it’s like the difference between Yoda in Empire Strikes Back and Yoda in Revenge of the Sith… he talks funny in both movies, but he does it on purpose in the newer film because people expect him to, and it comes off very forced and insincere.  Had Uru not gone through the horrible roller coaster of doom that it did, I think the story would have come across much more cohesively, and interested a lot more people.  As it is, the elements left on-stage are tattered remnants of their former selves, and no amount of new paint is going to cover up the underlying decay.

Despite Tweek’s already having done so in a manner with which I almost completely agree, I’d like to outline my thoughts on a revived Uru:

First, I want to note that my plan calls for the recycling of as little existing content as possible.  My initial reasoning for this was to avoid as many possible legal ramifications when it came to publication licenses for existing material, but on top of that, the places we’ve got are really old, and don’t really stand up to other modern and upcoming MMOs built on engines like Unreal 3.  If Uru is going to succeed, it at least has to look its absolute best.  It’s by no means ugly in its current form, but it can definitely get cranked up a notch on modern hardware.

With that in mind, my plan calls for players to start in a public area, much like Tweek’s does.  However, I would like to start players in the volcano’s caldera rather than in the Cleft (with a realtime in-game intro depicting their arrival as well as some basic history/backstory to D’ni), since there’s no point putting up with Yeesha’s babblings and throwing Relto into the mix only complicates what’s next: getting the KI and learning how to use it immediately.  I still don’t understand how such a vital piece of equipment in the game can be left largely to a chance discovery by the players.  It needs to be given to them right away, and at the very least, the basics need to be explained.

To that end, players will be able to explore the puzzle-less “noob area” that is the Caldera and the tunnels leading up to the Great Shaft.  The KI dispenser in the Eder Tomahn at the top of the Shaft (the one in EoA down the hall from the first Node) will give players their KI, and a looping welcome message from Laxman will cover the basics of how to use it.  A printed, illustrated manual will also be placed in this room for those who prefer to read (ideally it will be an in-game copy of a PDF document available on the official site).  To get out of the noob area, players will need to register their KI in the Nexus pedestal in the Eder Tomahn, thereby granting them access to the Linking Book (it’s locked behind a metal cover to prevent players from linking there without their KI).  Both entrances to the Great Shaft (the intended one through the back door of the Eder Tomahn and the big hole in the wall from EoA) will be inaccessible.  The tunnels leading to this point from the Caldera may be extended somewhat to give players a bit more room to spread out.  Further ideally, Greeters would be on-hand to deal with new players who aren’t used to the concepts of Uru.  This initial area can be returned to via the Nexus at any time, but is largely intended for new players to get their feet wet with the controls, the KI, and the concept.

Once in the Nexus, another Laxman hologram and/or printed sign will instruct players on how to use the Book Machine.  Initially, players will have three open destinations: the noob area they just left, the top of the Great Shaft, and the boat dock on the wall of the Cavern at the end of the tunnels to D’ni.  This last option is available for players who just want to get into the thick of things, who don’t feel like trekking for hours down winding passageways and caves, and who are setting up a second character and don’t need to re-walk the Path.  I know it’s a game design no-no to make such a large block of content optional, but I’ll come back to it later ;).

With regards to the tunnels, I don’t expect the trip to D’ni to take days.  I think that would require an obscene amount of content and ultimately frustrate players who decided to make the trip without knowing what they were in for.  I think a couple of hours would be the maximum duration I’d be willing to subject people to before they got annoyed and left.  Along the way would be additional Eder Tomahntee with Nexus pedestals for bookmarking your progress, and if you quit the game along the way, you would launch back into the last Eder Tomahn you bookmarked (Tweek had the same idea).  I don’t anticipate there being many explicit puzzles along the way here, as this too will be a public area, with plenty of fancy incremental loading and rendering tricks to make it a seamless trip rather than a load-screen-fest (the fact that the tunnels can be made of tile-able segments would cut down on RAM requirements since an element need only be loaded once to be used a dozen or more times).  I do, however, see lots of opportunities for KI-locked doors for future use (hint: the Path won’t be entirely optional if you want to experience everything in the story and content ;)).

Again returning to Tweek’s comments, players will get to a boat dock (with an infinite supply of boats fed from a side-room) tucked under the wall of the Cavern, so that the “big room” is hidden from view.  Once on a boat, scripted animation takes over and players are treated to a sweeping introduction to the Cavern in realtime 3D, with a scale more in line with what’s in the concept paintings (see Tweek’s blog) than what’s in Uru right now (it’s way too massive to even begin to grasp the scale of it right now).  Cut to black for time-saving purposes, and load in the City Proper (yep, no Ae’Gura trippin’ in this plan), where another scripted sequence has players docking their one-man dinghy “off-screen” in a boat-house (hooray for clever object deletion) before emerging into view of the camera again from a door away from the water.  These quick-access dinghy-docks will be located in most public areas of the Cavern on the waterfront, in addition to the scheduled ferry runs which can carry multiple players at once.  I’d like to see water travel come back to the Cavern, since it’s built around a giant lake…

It’s important to note here that everywhere players have been so far (including the largely-uncharted-for-the-sake-of-this-entry City Proper) has been public.  Given that this is supposed to be an MMO, I think that’s a marked improvement.  However, I do want to keep to Cyan’s tiered access system in a way.
Astute readers will note that there has been no mention of Relto since I said we wouldn’t be visiting the Cleft.  That’s because we won’t be visiting Relto either.  Instead, players will be able to take up residence in their neighborhoods, with their personal Book and trinket collections being located there as well.  This is a bit different from Tweek’s proposal that players get their own segregated house-and-courtyard area in the game, since these rooms (and I use “room” loosely, it’d be more like a townhouse apartment) are built directly into the neighborhoods themselves, rather than being separate areas (ala Relto).  I haven’t quite worked out how to design the ‘hoods such that they will support a theoretically infinite number of players rather than arbitrarily limit ‘hood size, but I’m confident that it can be done, and that giving the players some direct ownership of their ‘hoods will make those places become more useful and remain populated throughout the day as players come and go.  Like Tweek, I can easily see replacing Relto pages with collectible trinkets, and tying the room into the Nexus system would not only provide players quick return access to their room, but would also make it possible to invite other players to your room with a minimum of fuss.  Finding a way to inform players that they can join and live in a neighborhood without further bogging down the intro hologram in the Eder Tomahn may be tricky… perhaps another hologram at a later common juncture point, like the boat dock on the Cavern wall, could be used to further inform players of what to expect.  Traditional MMO players are no doubt accustomed to ye olde tutorial NPCs that fill you in on what you’re doing and how to do it, so moving that into a looping hologram would probably be the Uru equivalent, providing a consistent, expected experience for other MMO junkies while also serving a real purpose for newcomers to the Uru franchise.

As far as panic linking goes, Oscy and I had a similar thought to that of Tweek’s: Bahro aid, with transport back to your room in D’ni.  How well this would work given my aim to try and cut down on the mumbo-jumbo I’m not sure, but it’s either that or invisible walls (or player death, which nobody wants).  We had the further thought of placing special symbols in the Ages to act as a replacement Journey Bookmark, essentially telling the Bahro to link you back to that spot when you return to the Age via the matching symbol on your Linking Book, but again, mumbo-jumbo makes science foxie sad.

I have further concepts and plans either in place or in the works when it comes to other segments of the game such as the technical aspects of storytelling, managing cooperative projects like the Lake Lighting Effort, and engaging players with both story- and non-story-related content on a regular basis.  Some of these I’ve already covered in my “lessons learned” commentary, and others I was saving for another entry in the same series, but since the cat’s out of the proverbial bag, I’ll just be rolling all of these things into another entry on how I’d do it.

Welcome to part three of an ongoing series wherein I try to learn something from Uru’s second lack of commercial success. Hopefully by now the standard “not trying to tear anybody down, just pointing out problems” disclaimers aren’t necessary, so I’ll spare you that whole paragraph. This time, I want to take a look at the way that new players come into the game, and discuss the potential issues that may arise from the approaches that Cyan took the past two times.

When Uru first came out in 2003, players started in the Cleft. They were alone, and had to complete an initial task before they could continue. As everyone reading this no doubt already knows, that task was to collect the seven Journey Cloths that had been scattered throughout the Cleft’s environment. If players got stuck, they could always go back to Zandi for a hint (followed by a fairly obvious pointer). After completing this initial “level” of the game, players advanced to Relto, where they were still on their own. From here, players had a one-in-five shot of finally making it to a public area (the neighborhood), though given the distribution of new players across ‘hoods, it wasn’t very likely that they would have run into anybody there either. Some basic signage in the ‘hood instructed players to get their KI without going into any further detail about why they needed to do so, and getting it required them to once again venture into a private area with little to no assistance from signs or other players. So far, you’re looking at probably an hour of play in an MMO without running into or even being able to speak to another person. That’s something of a problem.

The second time around, Cyan got a bit more overt, which was nice, because vague and cryptic introductions worked for Myst, but for Uru, not so much. The “explore together” and “explore alone” bits were nicely done, I thought, and served to better introduce players to the different aspects of the game and how to get involved in them. At the same time, though, players start for the first time in Relto, alone, with no further instructions. The vast majority of players will figure out what to do, no doubt, but my hand to God, as a ResEng I took a support chat from a guy who asked me if there was anything else to the game besides that island (I wanted so badly to tell him that no, he was paying $9.95/month for that island, and he’d better make the most of it), so it could certainly stand to be made ever so slightly more obvious what’s going on for the criminally dense.

One of the really nice things that Cyan did for visitors later in the game was automatically link them to the Guild of Greeters Bevin when they used their ‘hood Book. I thought that was a really nice touch, and provided a way for players to immediately get involved in the multiplayer aspect of the game and get help from the people best suited to give it. However, if you were already a paying GameTap member, or you signed up for MOUL but weren’t sure what the premise was, you missed out on that opportunity, as all paying explorers were still taken to their default (and very often completely empty) ‘hood instead.

The biggest issue I have with Uru’s first steps is that there is very little hand-holding, which is important in an online game built on such a deep history. Newcomers to D’ni are completely lost, and even veterans of the D’ni civilization have a lot of learning to do. Apart from a few vague signs, there’s simply no indication of what you need to do or why you need to do it. I get that the game’s supposed to be very open-ended, but you do still need to walk players through the setup portion where they get their bearings and pick up the single most important piece of tech in the game so that they can enjoy the rest of this open-ended game world. Further, there’s no really intuitive manual provided for the KI, either in-game or on the website, which has been a failing since the original launch (beta testers got a really nice PDF KI manual every time it got updated… why were players deprived of this post-launch?). Given the device’s complexity, not providing a graphical manual is a serious oversight. Not to discredit the work that the GoG put into their in-game text-based manual or the PDF they have on their website, but these two resources are either overly verbose (a failing of the device, not the manual, since it’s virtually impossible to briefly tell someone through text how to do something with the KI) or off the beaten path for most players - especially the ones who would have the most need for it.

To resolve some of these problems, here is what I would propose doing instead:

1. Start players in a public location right off the bat. It can be on the Surface, or it can be in D’ni… doesn’t really matter as long as it’s public. Get them interacting with other players right away in a newbie-friendly environment. There should be minimal puzzle-solving required to advance out of this area, and before they leave, players should have everything they need in their possession to get around in the game world.
2. Give players the KI immediately, and stress what it’s used for. Provide a hologram of a DRC member or some other individual telling players, in clear English, how to acquire the KI and why they need it. How to use the whole thing may be a bit much for that initial message, but at least get them going with the basics (text chat). Make getting the KI a requirement for advancement, and be sure that the hologram describes how to proceed from that point. In all, this message should be no longer than a minute or two, or players will lose interest in it and get frustrated if they can’t advance. Additional signage should be placed for those with no interest in listening to a recording.
3. With the KI being a requirement for advancement, teaching players how to use the Nexus is the next obvious step. Again, make this as newbie-friendly as possible; if need be, provide a “newbie-Nexus” for first-time users with additional instruction on how to use the Book Machine (not like the Nexus is hard to use, but you’d be surprised…), or perhaps a limited selection of locations so that players aren’t overwhelmed.
4. Finally, players should still have a private space such as Relto to “escape” to, should they want to get away from the crowds or launch off on a private expedition through an Age. I think this is an important element of Uru’s design, but I think that beginning in a place of isolation is a poor design decision for an MMO. Make it a respite that you get after spending some time with other players (but perhaps not too much time, for those who prefer solitary explorations), rather than a starting point. That makes finally getting there all the sweeter, and nudges players outside of their comfort zone just a bit (and many players have noted their initial reluctance to visit the public areas, and ending up being very social after knuckling down and taking the plunge, so perhaps nudging people is a good way to get them to come out of their shell a bit).

Ultimately, a lot of this entry comes out of my experiences with new players as a ResEng. There is quite possibly no better way to see what people are having trouble with than by working at the customer service desk, and while there’s simply no helping some folks, a lot of the people I helped were sincerely having trouble with the same areas of the game. I can’t even imagine the number of people who didn’t manage to find a ResEng to help them if they were stuck…

An MMO can only be successful if people are actually able to play it. While Uru is/was certainly playable, I think more could be done to help pull newcomers into the fold.

I think I may end up with a whole ‘nother tag for my Uru Live post-mortem thoughts at this rate…

Before I get going, I want to stress that I’m not doing this to be critical of Cyan’s work just because it was ultimately unsuccessful. There are a myriad of ways to make fun of MOUL, and I hope to never fall victim to doing so. Rather, I want to learn from this failure. Rand said that the biggest regret he had about Live’s closure in 2004 was that they didn’t get the chance to learn from it. Six years of work went into something that ran for 3 months in a somewhat limited beta testing environment. The title never launched, and the content and story they were planning to roll out in the coming months never got released online. It just didn’t run long enough to learn anything terribly insightful beyond “lag is a serious problem” (and incidentally, they did make great strides in that regard during the past year). With over a year’s worth of updates, content, and story roll-out under its belt this time around, I feel that there are definitely some lessons that can be learned from Uru Live’s closure this time around that go beyond the technical limitations so often addressed by players. With what I hope is an emphasis on my respect for Cyan and a desire to learn from their mistakes firmly established, let’s press on.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the concept behind Uru is the notion of an MMO driven by a compelling developer-run story on a daily basis. Sort of a perpetual D&D session, if you will. Emphasis on player actions is obviously still important, and makes up a fair amount of the content of any good role-playing session, but players are “living” in a story that is being told around them as well as through them. I think that Prologue did a much better job of this than MOUL in numerous respects, and I’d like to briefly go over a few of them.

1. In Prologue, events happened “on stage”. Sharper and a group of like-minded explorers tore down a barricade blocking off the entrance to the Kahlo Pub. He later broke into one of the neighborhoods’ Private Rooms, made that neighborhood private, and later had it deleted from the Nexus system by the DRC. Phil was kidnapped by the DRC on the rope bridge in Ae’Gura. Tink was later allowed to speak with him in Kirel (which at the time was just another private Bevin-style ‘hood, hooray for ret-conning ;)) when the protests from explorers started getting out of hand. Phil later “died” in the Guild Hall, and while that specific action wasn’t on-stage, everyone in the City was watching and heard the collpase, followed by the plume of smoke rising from the Guild Hall. In MOUL, virtually everything seemed to happen off-stage: Sharper’s trips to Negilahn and later to Noloben were completely inaccessible to players, and only existed through later re-tellings by Sharper, which were not done in any sort of continually-accessible way like journal writing, but rather through one-off live events. Sharper’s killing of a Bahro was perhaps one of the most “on stage” pieces of the entire story arc, when the Bahro linked into the Watcher’s Pub with their fallen comrade. Wheely’s death was also relatively on stage, but there were no outward signs of activity during the rescue; no sounds of drilling, no smoke rising from the Tokotah building from the DRC’s efforts… nothing to really make it that much more real. (I could also find fault with re-introducing Wheely to the Cavern just a day or two before she was killed off, but that may be going a little far.)
2. The DRC and other supporting cast members were in the Cavern more regularly, and for longer periods of time on average, than they were in MOUL. If news needed to be spread, it was usually done in multiple neighborhoods as well as in Ae’Gura, rather than through a single visit to a neighborhood before disappearing again. In Prologue, the DRC seemed like more realistic and believable characters; in MOUL, they seemed to be more like caricatures of themselves.
3. Prologue had the full contents of Ages Beyond Myst to provide depth and relevance to the ongoing live events in the Cavern. Yeesha’s single-player Journey gave players something to do and learn without having to attend live events on a regular basis. MOUL had plenty of additional Ages, but they did little to nothing to further deepen the relevance of the live story events going on in the Cavern. This turned the entire story into a collection of live events, rather than building the live events on top of a more stable, longer-lasting, at-your-own-pace single-player experience (incidentally, I think this is the only benefit that Uru Live got from the creation of ABM).
4. You can’t rely on players to fill in the game’s gaps, especially without tools capable of enabling them to do so. Players like J. D. Barnes, Echo McKenzie, the team at Subterranean Restorations, and others ran with this notion as far as they conceivably could, and groups like the Relayers stepped up admirably to fill a hole left by Cyan in the delivery of the story to the masses, but it seemed as though there was too much reliance on players to do it themselves, and not enough work done to make that truly possible. Further, entreating the players to make their own fun in a game they’re paying between $10 and $15 a month for (depending on your nationality) isn’t something that sits well with a lot of people, and I can’t really blame them for not wanting to invest more time into a game they’re already investing in financially just to enjoy the time they spend in it. Some players are more than willing to do so, and I say more power to ‘em, but not everyone should be expected (or required) to do that.

I think it’s important that an MMOS effort be able to effectively combine live events (like Wheely’s death) and fixed-in-time storytelling segments (like Yeesha’s Journey). The live events should be used primarily for providing day-to-day activity within the game on a small scale - stuff to keep players interested and generate “flavor” in the story; nothing directly related to advancing the plot - and for major, it-can-only-happen-once sort of events, like Phil’s kidnapping, his “death” in the Guild Hall, the rescue efforts to save Wheely and her subsequent death, etc. Fixed-in-time stories should be things that players can continue to complete at their own pace even after the plot events leading to the unveiling of that story have advanced beyond it (case in point: you can still release a Bahro into the Cavern by completing Yeesha’s Journey four years later in MOUL, even after the Bahro were freed from their enslavement to the Tablet).

It’s equally important, though, that these two practices not get switched around if you want to create a world with a truly impactful, cohesive story and a way to keep players interested between major in-game live events. For instance, requiring players to complete a time-sensitive challenge within a certain date range to be able to participate in the releasing of a Bahro (essentially replacing Yeesha’s when-you-have-time Journey with a sequence of live events) is a bad way of doing things, as would be enabling everyone to witness Wheely’s death first-hand regardless of when they happened to get around to completing that leg of the story (essentially tacking her death onto the end of a Journey-like series of player-triggered events as a climax). The first example distances players from the story by ensuring that only a small handful of players are actually able to complete a task that should be open for everyone to participate in, while the second example lessens the power of a watershed moment in the Cavern, solidifying the fact that the Bahro weren’t all sunshine, unicorns and lollipops into the collective consciousness of the Cavern. You just can’t kill Wheely every day of the week from now until the story ends and expect it to have any meaning. Were it an event in a single-player game, that would be an obviously acceptable action to take, but in a shared universe like Uru, once a character is dead, they can only die once, or it undermines the suspension of disbelief required by the game to make it appear to be a real place.

Interestingly, I think this means that an episodic content release schedule for online games like Uru could be a viable means of releasing material, but not by following the model used for MOUL. Episodic releases that cram considerable amounts of activity into a small span of time are fine for bringing in players and even driving up interest and participation in what are likely to be major plot points. However, outside of those periods, the game can’t simply stop, which is what Uru did. There can be a flurry of activity in those week-long episodes, but outside of them, the characters still need to make appearances, and small things still need to happen often enough to keep players there for the entire time. Further, by moving some of the story into play-at-your-own-pace arcs of single-player or small-group content, you deemphasize the need to be present at every live event during the episodes to know what the heck is going on in the game. Combining these two factors, the crush to see a character during an appearance should be lessened, resulting in better game performance, better interaction between players and characters, and create better interactive characters since they don’t just turn into walking scripts who say their piece and then leave before the crowd gets too unmanageable.
Finally, I don’t really have any specific answers or suggestions for how the events of MOUL could have been played out differently that haven’t already been mentioned by dozens of other people, so I will avoid doing so in the interests of not being repetitive (and because I don’t like back-seat game-developing… learning lessons is one thing, saying “you should have done X instead of Y here” is entirely another). However, I think that any future efforts to make a story-driven MMO need to learn from the pitfalls and promises of Uru’s development and execution, because I feel that there are real lessons there to learn from that can make future products better, more engaging, and ideally more likely to be profitable.

This may be the wrong thing to be saying right now, and I’m betting at least a couple of lynch mobs are forming even as I write this, but here’s what I think should be done about Uru Live’s cancellation:

Let it go.

This is a game that has struggled to manifest itself since day 1, and has been in development for almost 10 years now. It’s been beset by setback after setback, and has now been canceled twice. Whether it was given a fair shake or not is irrelevant; the horse has long since ceased breathing under its own power, and it’s time to stop hitting it with that aluminum bat.

That is not to say, however, that we should give up on the idea of Uru. Uru’s premise and promise are filled with potential untapped by Cyan throughout their numerous efforts to bring Uru to the masses. I believe in the concept of Uru – even if its execution thus far has been flawed to varying degrees – and I believe that it can succeed. Yet in order for it to do that, it must rise from the ashes of its failures as a phoenix, not a zombie.

Uru is too entangled in its own problems, I think, to successfully engage a sufficient number of players and provide a dynamic world capable of satisfying the demands of modern gamers. Its cancelations and single-player releases have been re-incorporated into the game as story elements. The story arc revealing the Bahro for what they were was crammed into a separate game and then further grafted back into Uru as history that most players knew nothing about. Its story and its mechanics have become convoluted over the years, beaten down by the demands placed upon it to keep it alive at all. Worlds have sat unmodified for years now: doors still locked; machines still broken; homes still empty. Systems like the Great Zero calibration project and the lake lighting effort have been hampered by a lack of sufficient automation and feedback from the game. Uru cannot continue like this. It needs to stop.

In its place, new worlds can appear, with new stories, new histories, and new players to experience them. Whatever Uru becomes, it must be more accessible to people who have never picked up a Myst game in their lives, while drinking deep from the reservoirs or material that long-time fans will rightly expect from a game set in the Cavern. It needs to break free of the restrictions placed upon it by the content it is currently saddled with. Take us to the City Proper; let us explore the Lake; give us new, expansive worlds with reactive and dynamic environments. Make D’ni a home, not a place.

All of this can happen, but only if we let Uru as we know it go in peace. If we continue to beat on our horse with an aluminum bat, we will only get more of the same, and while that may be good enough for some folks, its not what Uru is to me. It’s much more than that. Before Uru was Uru, it was MUDPIE, and DIRT before that. I saw it as a way to explore all of those places that I had been to before in the Myst novels; a chance to “live” in the fictional worlds in which I had grown up. And not just explore them by myself, but with the friends I had made in the community; all the while being entertained by Cyan and their masterful storytelling. While in some ways it has outgrown those early expectations in ways I can’t even begin to comprehend thanks to the dedicated community of explorers, it still falls far short on the most important counts for me: exploration and storytelling. Without these things, I don’t think that Uru can ever be successful enough to support itself.

I am deeply sad to see Uru Live shut down for a second time, and I truly hope that the talented folks at Cyan can come up with another project to keep them going, but I think it’s necessary that we let Uru go, so that something even better can take its place. Call me crazy, call me an optimist, call me a traitor to the cause, I really don’t care… I’ve been through this enough times already, and I’m ready for something new.

I wonder: what sort of technological, marketplace, or other financial innovations would make it possible for “cult” franchises like Firefly and Uru to be more financially viable in the future? Both have large fan bases, and both have seen, as far as I can tell, remarkably marginal returns in the market despite the rabidness with which their constituents adhere to them. These products contain content that is by no means inexpensive to produce. In the case of Firefly/Serenity, there’s actors (not quite big-time ones like Harrison Ford, but certainly able to command sizable salaries), writers, camera crews, set builders, support staff, marketing, effects shops full of their own staffs… that’s a metric ton of money to be throwing at something like this. In Uru’s case, you’ve got artists, animators, programmers, designers, concept artists, story writers, marketing, customer service staff… again, loads and loads of money that needs to be spent for this sort of content. The sort of money that, when not made back quickly, makes investors or other financial buoys (like publishers) nervous.

Niche markets are getting harder and harder to tap, it seems, despite the increasing interconnectedness of experiences that one would think would make it easier to reach those niches, and the amount of money required to create high-quality entertainment capable of not only attracting but retaining the people who make up that target market is ever-increasing. You can’t make a Firefly or Uru with $50,000 in the bank (which by itself is a rather substantial chunk of change), and you certainly can’t sustain it that way. These are multi-million-dollar products, and you need to find a market for them quickly, and be able to hold onto that market, or you’re screwed, no matter how many loyal fans you have who will follow you to Hell and back if you promise them a fruit cup.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see quality franchises suffer at the hands of the Almighty Dollar just because not enough people are interested in it to make it financially viable. Not only is it frustrating, it’s also rather scary, speaking as someone who wants to do this sort of thing for a living before I die. Especially in the case of video games that don’t find their market fast enough, it’s ridiculously frustrating, because video games are themselves still a niche market (I think the biggest reason games cost $40-$60 a pop is because of their limited market… though as it expands and the prices fail to drop, the industry has managed to overtake motion pictures in revenue… go figure). A product like Myst or Uru that has the ability to break out of the traditionally-held limitations of the gaming industry’s demographics should be able to (and did, once) make substantially more in sales than products like Call of Duty, or even Halo, which has of course proven to be more popular than God. And yet, such products languish in obscurity, attracting only a niche group of an already niche market dominated by a demographic more inclined towards faster-paced, more aggressive gameplay, and failing to reach those who decry video games as nothing but murder and “virtual orgasmic rape” simulators (not so much NSFW as just incredibly, horribly frustrating).

There’s something about this whole situation that makes me wish that there were some way of more cheaply developing quality entertainment products that only manage to appeal to a narrow cross-section of the market (or that only manage to reach a narrow cross-section of the market that you know would find it appealing). Whether it’s through something ridiculously socialist like subsidies from whatever governmental organization could be seen as supporting this sort of thing (or, ideally, just making Blizzard share some of the billions of dollars in revenue that WoW generates… no, I’m not bitter, shut up), or through some other innovation in the market itself that makes these sorts of products available to anyone at reasonable prices with the majority of the revenue going to the developers and not the distributors, I feel that something needs to happen, especially in the video game industry, whose generally-accepted concept of innovation seems to be “Mario64, but in space”, “Like Halo 3, but with chainsaws”, “WoW 2″, and “System Shock 2: Underwater” (shocking). I may be watching a bit too much Zero Punctuation…

It could be (and certainly has been) said that as far as something like Uru goes, there was more in play than just lack of audience, and I think I’ve got a whole post full of things to say about what I’ve learned from Uru as a developer, but despite its numerous setbacks, cancellations, and stutters, it’s still a unique approach to interactive entertainment, and I wish there were more people willing to throw copious amounts of cash at it to make it what it really could be. And maybe that’s the solution to this whole thing in the end: finding people with plenty of money to spend funding crazy-awesome ideas that may not be the most wildly successful product in history, and hooking them up with people who have crazy-awesome ideas for niche products in need of said cash.

Now how the hell do we do that?

More Portal references, yes. Deal with it ;).

A brief update on the whole physics-based first-person camera controller I was working on last week. I’ve gotten it working to a pretty reasonable extent. It’s slightly tricky, and doesn’t match reality 100%, but it works well enough for 99% of the cases I’d be interested in handling.

To quickly run down what it’s capable of, the system can handle collisions with stationary objects just as the standard controller does. It also properly handles landing on and moving on a moving object, like a rotating or moving platform (i.e., I could build Gahreesen in Unity were I so inclined to do so, only I could actually build it as a single scene, rather than 4 distinct sub-worlds, so everything would rotate as expected, and transitions between sections would be completely seamless). Additionally, it works reasonably well when the rotating object is tilting, rather than spinning on its vertical axis (i.e., a see-saw versus the Gahreesen rooftop). The only issue is that it takes until the thing you’re standing on reaches a near-90-degree angle before you slide off. For the most part, this really isn’t a huge problem, since I don’t see myself building many environments that involve this kind of rotating platform, and games have gotten away with much worse in terms of controls before (especially first person games).

The main drawback is that it doesn’t seem to work with the standard 1st person camera controller construct, so I can’t really restrict movement to certain angles of surfaces as easily as I could if it worked seamlessly. However, since the 1st person camera controller’s slope restrictions can be easily overcome by simply walking at the offending steep surface and jumping repeatedly, a more robust system would have been required anyway. So, now I have to make sure that any areas I don’t want players getting to are well enough insulated that they can’t cheat the physics to get there. In this regard, seeing all of the ways that Cyan has had to re-jigger their collision planes to stop people from getting places they shouldn’t be able to is a useful learning tool (like ever so many things about Uru are…). I believe the general rule of thumb espoused by several players has been “build a 20-foot wall around it” if you don’t want players to get on top of it. This seems like a very valid suggestion.

Now that the control works for a first-person camera, the objective is to make it work for a third-person rig. I doubt this will be a huge issue, since it’s been built completely independent of the camera controls, so the challenge is more in getting a third-person camera to work than it is in getting the movement to map to a visible object. Although, I do need to figure out how to get walk cycles mapped onto an object and ensure that it moves at the proper rate of speed for the designated walk speed. The camera will probably be the more difficult of the two, because I not only have to work out how to get it to look at and follow the target object (the easy part), but I need it to react to the target’s movement either in a dampened fashion (like Uru’s avatar-following camera), or in a fixed-position fashion (like a console game, i.e. Psychonauts or Tomb Raider). If it behaves like Uru’s camera, it needs to behave largely independent of any mouse input. If it behaves like Tomb Raider or Psychonauts’ camera, it needs to react directly to all mouse input to control rotation and elevation angles relative to the player character.

While Uru’s avatar-cam system would probably be easier to develop, and is something I’m certainly interested in pursuing, I’m more immediately interested in seeing if I can develop a third-person camera system that’s more like Tomb Raider or Psychonauts.

It’s at this point that I really wish I was getting paid to work on games, rather than writing online banking software, because there are so many things I want to work on and develop, and I just don’t have the time to devote to all of it along with the other stuff I’m always busy with after work. I’ve got ideas for camera controllers, walk cycle implementations, particle effects, physics tests, environmental animations… basically a whole mountain’s worth of stuff to fiddle with and fine-tune, some of it related to the current game projects I’ve got going, and some of it more indirectly related to game ideas in general. It’s kind of killing me that I have to spend 45 hours a week expressly not working on them. I just don’t have the money or ability to simply do this as a day job, because nobody would be paying me, and my release audience is currently restricted to either web-player games (which would obviously be free of charge) or Mac users. And while there’s as much as 8% of the current population using Macs, that’s still a rather small target audience for games. Now, my plan is to make a free limited web-player version, and charge a nominal fee for the full game in cases where it’s a more casual-style game (like Labyrinth), so hopefully I can get people hooked enough to buy the full version, and by saving up those proceeds, I can do things like buy the professional version of the Unity development environment, so I can build Windows binaries as well as Mac ones, and maybe eventually get a new laptop for more development freedom (since most of the work gets done on a Mac, and we only have one of those, it kind of creates a production bottleneck when the sound & music engineering, game programming, level assembly, and testing all has to take place on one machine).

Oh, and for those who were wondering, I believe RIUM’s post about furniture sentience was the fault of Ash and myself. Not like I’m trying to give something away or anything…