May Contain Nuts

I’ve been mulling this over for more than a month now, since I brought it up to Blade as part of our conversations about the GoA after attending the GoMe meeting in August, and have finally reached a conclusion: I can no longer be the sole point of development and administration for DPWR.  The site has gotten large enough, and I’ve gotten busy enough, that I simply can’t handle the work load anymore.  Unfortunately, because of DPWR’s history, transitioning to shared ownership will not be an easy thing.  The code has never been under source control, and development hasn’t exactly been what one might call “professional” at any point in time.  DPWR is how (and why) I learned PHP, and a lot of what I do with the site generally consists of hacking and modifying existing files in Invision Power Board, with poorly-documented and poorly-commented results.

What I want to do is essentially start from scratch in some ways.  I want to start with a virgin installation of IPB and the various components that I use for DPWR (Links, Gallery, and Wiki), and then build the current feature set back into the site.  It’s a fair amount of replicated effort, I know, but I think it’s the only way to start off on the right foot.  To make things potentially easier, I’ve already subversioned the current files so that there’s a base point of comparison that can be built from and re-implemented whole-cloth where appropriate (and possible).  In addition to re-programming the PHP, I would also like to tackle modifying the site’s skin as well, since it’s got some rather obvious legibility issues and needs some love to pull it more in-line with the Guild of Archivists concept (Tweek being the awesome person that he is has provided me with his “Guild Pub” emblem for the GoA, which I’d like to run with).

Ultimately, my goal is to get everything updated and moved to the live site by the end of the year (just in time for IPB 3 to come out and start the process all over again :P).  Since most of the stuff on the site doesn’t need much (if any) modification to work, and all of the really hard work of getting the Archive to support tags has already been done (it just needs to be re-implemented into the vanilla install), I think the thing that would take the longest would be the skin.

I’ve decided to do this now (rather than wait for IPB 3 to come out) for several reasons: 1) I want to make sure that the site is actually maintainable by a small group before IPB 3 comes out and the really hard work of porting the Archive component to the new version begins, 2) I want the site to be able to support all of the requirements that being the host for the GoA puts on it ASAP, and 3) I don’t have the time to do any of this by myself anymore.  I’ve got one pro bono web design project I’m working on right now, and will hopefully have a contract for another site by next month.  Coupled with the 3 months worth of other small-to-massive-sized projects I’ve accumulated over the summer without a Mac to call my own and the fact that I’m at work 9 hours a day, I just don’t have the ability to throw myself at DPWR the way I did when I was 15 without a care in the world ;).  (On a side note, it’s actually kind of scary that I’ve been managing this site since I was 15… it originally launched on Homestead on June 30, 2000)

So, if you’re a PHP developer interested in helping to get DPWR on its feet, please leave a comment with some way of getting in touch with you, or email me and let me know you’re interested.  I realize I’m asking a great deal with no real compensation (all I’ve got are my gratitude and appreciation [as well as my most profound apologies for the current sorry state of the code base]), so I don’t exactly expect a stampede of volunteers, but anyone willing to lend a hand would be very, very greatly appreciated.  I’ll discuss the details of how to get to the SVN source, as well as some other guidelines and requirements, privately with anyone who volunteers.  It’s not nasty, mean, paranoia-inducing “OMG SEEKRETS!” stuff, just stuff that I would rather discuss in confidence because it has to do with a non-open-source project ;).

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.

To whom it may concern,

Clearly you feel that there is something seriously wrong with the way the MOUL forum is being run, otherwise you would not persist in your sarcasm-laden, poorly-veiled commentary on the moderators who run it and the posters who frequent it.  I could swear I remember stating as a matter of public record some time ago that I would be willing to discuss perceived mistreatment of members and mismanagement of the forum by the MOUL moderators privately.  Unfortunately, nobody involved in the explosion that triggered that statement has since taken me up on the offer, nor has anyone involved in the forum thread I linked to above.  Is this simply poor memory on your part, or do you feel that it is better to try and publicly stir up bad vibes and goad people into taking actions you can later use as justification for your divissive behavior?

I have been entirely honest in my offer to extend a hand in honest, open communication regarding perceived mishandling of situations on the forums by the moderators, and my offer still stands.  Vacant, public accusations of wrongdoing will get you no farther in resolving anything; I’ve learned that lesson myself.  If you have a problem with the way the forum is being run by the moderators, take it up with me directly - that’s why I made the offer I did.  If you have a problem with the behavior of a forum poster, take it up with them directly; don’t over-generalize and accuse the entire forum population of being Cyan yes-men when it’s plainly clear that that is not the case.

I look forward to working with you to resolve whatever problems you see as existing on the MOUL forums in a direct, professional, and speedy manner.

- Alahmnat
MOUL Forum Moderator

Evidently, for just $100,000 (or more), we could register the .dni domain name.

Or maybe .myst; I’ll take either ;).

Can’t say anything registered as .dni or .myst would be even remotely as clever as Marten’s Rel.to, but what’re ya gonna do?

I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning…

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying to stick around anymore when all anyone ever seems to do is argue.

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.

I have another Backseat Developer post to make that’s been sitting in my draft bin for a couple of weeks now, but I wanted to get some thoughts down about Uru’s second closure now that I’ve had some time to reflect and cogitate.

Surprisingly, I don’t find myself nearly as upset about it as I was last time.  Of course, last time it was basically sprung on us at the last minute without warning, and we only had a week to pack up and head home, so the circumstances were obviously different, and there was more time to get through the rough patch without also having to say goodbye to the game itself.  The entire tone of the situation - from the time they announced the theretofore nonexistent season finale back in September, through the announcement on February 4th - wasn’t exactly promising, and after the announcement, we were given 60 days to clean out our lockers rather than the 5 days that Ubi gave us.  It just gave me a lot longer to really come to terms with it this time.  That’s certainly not to say that I’m not upset at all, and that I don’t feel bad for not being able to devote more time to enjoying the game while it lasted.  I’m guilty on both counts, and I do wish that things had gone differently to make Uru more of a success than it was.

Oscy and I met up with a few of the ResEngs (and Calliope) at the Service Station in Spokane after MOUL shut down, and there was some good catharsis over the game shutting down.  It was really good to see everyone again, and it made me wish I could have been there through the end.  Working at a different job now, I didn’t get the opportunity to be in the ResEng video that GD posted (everyone else still works at Cyan in other capacities, so tracking them down to be on camera was just a matter of heading over to the South Building), so I’ll have to make do with saying here what I would have said in the video:

Thank you to everyone who hung out with us goofballs in Beginner’s Bevin.  Thank you to everyone who was on-hand for my first day on the job… that 10:00 orientation was unforgettable.  Thank you to vid for inviting Dogherra and I to your New Year’s Pod Party.  Thank you to everyone who came to my last orientation, featuring Dreschel, Keeley, and Mr. Cone.  Special thanks to Resolute Guardian and Calliope for all of the fun we had together, whether it was un-sticking you guys from walls and railings or dragging you into verifying bug reports before they got filed, you two made the days that much more entertaining.  I really enjoyed the time I got to spend as a ResEng… there was never dull moment, and between the community and my co-workers, there was enough insanity and dedication in Uru to keep me amused for days.  Thank you all for the laughs, the questions, the attendance at orientations, the getting into situations that made me and the other ResEngs go “WTF?!” on an alarmingly regular basis, the humorous support tickets (both intentional and unintentional)… thank you for everything.  It was totally worth it.  And thank you for letting me don my pseudo-hat on the last night.  The reunion was great.

I hope that this is good night, and not goodbye.

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.

Evidently someone else thought the memory necklace from Revelation was a cool idea.  Now it just needs a faulty clasp and a 10-year-old girl in jeopardy to go with it