May Contain Nuts

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

I posted here that I was stepping down as a moderator on MOUL.  I did so out of a sense of professionalism, since I felt that it was inappropriate to complain about people I was in charge of fairly moderating on the forum, and wanted to avoid any perception of bias or retribution going forward.  However, given that everyone seems to think I’m still a nice guy, and that I’ve been asked not to step down by the other mods, I’ve decided to come at this from a different direction instead: I will be staying on at MOUL as a mod, in the interests of better communication and cooperation.  If anyone, slacker or otherwise, wants to discuss something that is related to moderation, you can contact me privately and we will discuss it.  I may have burned a few bridges here with my comments about people’s behavior, but I am not above building new ones.  I meant what I said when I talked about this community needing more cooperation, trust, and understanding.  To that end, I am willing to work with people.  Shocking, I know, but I mean it.  Being one of the “oldbies” around here (if not by age then almost certainly by seniority ;)), I should probably be leading by example, and so if I’m up on my soapbox advocating cooperation, common decency, direct resolution of personal problems, and all that, then I’d better be willing to walk the walk.  I’m willing to let bygones be bygones; holding grudges is for people with stronger stomachs than mine.

The original UU is well behind us, for good or ill, and MOUL is shutting down in a month and a half.  What this community does to survive after that is up to all of us, and as I’ve said before, I’m in this for the long haul.  I’m also willing to accept that people have different opinions on a vast number of things and still be able to sit next to each other at a table without punching each other.  But there has to be cooperation from both sides for that to happen.  I’m willing to take that first step; offering my hand in mutual not-hating-each-other, if not friendship (I guess we’ll see how it goes) in the interests of building a better community.  Are you?

Since I’m betting that MystBlogs is about to puck up my previous post on its RSS feed, I’ll put this in a new entry to be sure it doesn’t get lost.

Given the tone and position of my last entry, I feel it’s only appropriate that I step down as a moderator on the MOUL forums, effective immediately. I have sent GD a message asking to be removed from the mod list as soon as he gets the opportunity. I don’t want to bring the rest of the mods there any further trouble; they’re just making the best they can of the bad situation they’ve been put in by the very people who will bring the hammer down once they read my last blog post. And to those people I say: this is not a victory that you can claim and pat yourselves on the back for. This is me making sure that any bile you want to throw gets thrown at me for what I said, not at the other mods on MOUL just doing their jobs.

All this infighting and he-said-she-said and bitterness and anger and talking about other people behind their backs and grudges and intentional “innocent” rule-bending etc etc etc etc is really starting to piss me off. It may not be tearing the community apart, but it sure as fuck is starting to fray it around the edges. This shit has got to stop. Why do people think that this is an appropriate way to behave? Why do we let them get away with it?

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been around for so god-damned long that I just don’t care if I’m ostracized or made fun of or put on any particular group’s blacklist, but I am sick and fucking tired of dancing around issues and grudges and problems and arguments just so that nobody gets upset and leaves. It’s stupid. We keep talking about how Uru (and Myst) is something that can be this huge commercial success that appeals to a zillion different people, but at the same time, we get so paranoid over making someone mad and having them leave because it’s one more person gone from this tiny little community we have here. We can’t have it both ways. Personally, I think that while this community may not be huge enough not to miss the contributions of any one individual, it’s big enough to get over it, and small enough that keeping problem-causing people around is eventually going to make it fall apart. It’s not worth it.

I like the Myst games, and I like this community… but sometimes the people in it make me wonder if I’ll even make it to my 10-year anniversary. But if I give in and leave, who else would be willing to put up with it? How many good people are these two-faced back-stabbers going to drive out before there’s nobody left but them and the people who don’t know any better?

And just to be perfectly crystal-clear on this, I’m talking primarily about the Slackers and their self-righteous ivory tower we-know-best attitude. They show up in droves when the situation suits their purposes, and they utterly destroy those who stand against them, argue with them, moderate them, or even just cough while they’re talking. Of course, they don’t do it in public, they do it privately, plotting in their little forum about who’s going to take the brunt of their next round of ass-hattery, and playing all innocent whenever someone calls them on their bullshit. I’m sick of playing in the undercurrent of implication and vague suggestion. Flame on. But know that I’m not leaving, no matter what gets said about or against me. I spoke earlier about all of the ills that came out of UU, well, this is the worst of it. And it needs to stop.

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.

Belford has written a long but very-much-worth-reading essay on the future of Uru.  I have very, very mixed feelings on this whole thing, so I feel I need to speak my peace and lay everything out in the open.  A lot of this is going to re-tread history that has already been covered and re-tread in many places, and I’m almost certainly going to say things that offend some people, but I need to say this, and I’m tired of holding it in.  At this point, I really don’t care if I end up pissing off some of the people in this community, or becoming unpopular because of something I’ve said.  And really, some people deserve to be offended :P.
Back when Uru was MUDPIE, and we got our first tiny glimpses of it through Spyder, Cyan’s open house at Mysterium 2000, and realMYST’s easter eggs, it was the culmination of a dream for me and, I imagine, many other people who had not only spent time in this universe, but grown up in it.  If you think I’m joking about this at all, you are sorely mistaken.  I first played Myst at the age of 11, and I’ve been a member of the Myst community since September of 1998.  I may not have literally grown up in D’ni (wishing to avoid improper use of that word), but I did effectively or perhaps figuratively grow up there, spending copious amounts of time better applied in school learning about the D’ni and linking theory, endlessly debating Rivenese water, reading and re-reading the Myst novels, cementing images of these magnificent places in my mind’s eye.  To me, at least, MUDPIE was a way to finally be able to see those places “for real” and share them with others.  Story, at that time, was unknown and unimportant.  My desire for what would eventually become Uru Live was driven by 10-year-old fantasies of seeing the place where it all began.  And throughout my time in the private beta for Uru that was run by UbiSoft, I saw things, went places, and performed feats I never thought I would be able to do.

To be certain, there were issues with the game itself on a technical level, and I reported those issues as I was expected to, but the game’s world is something that has and will always be a special place to me, because all the while, I was living a dream.  I was exploring D’ni.  And despite the hobbling of the online release by UbiSoft at the final hour, Cyan’s plan seemed to be working… the Cavern evolved on an almost daily basis, and real characters with real depth set the stage for an adventure that would sadly never come.

Until Uru was released shortly after the final expansion of Uru’s offline content, and was hailed by the community as a glorious resource and a way to keep the dream of Uru alive, and continue to share the Cavern with our friends.  At the time, I was overjoyed to be able to keep exploring with others; I had actually been surprisingly overwhelmed by the emptiness of the Cavern in To D’ni, and to this day have very rarely had occasion to venture into Ae’Gura via Complete Chronicles, because it’s simply depressing knowing that I will never see another person there.

For a while, Until Uru provided the respite and safe harbor that I had been wanting since Live’s closure; a place to explore and laugh and be with friends, even if that was all there would ever be to the journey.  But over time, something changed.  UU became something other than what it was supposed to be: a way to keep the idea of Uru alive.  It evolved, and not, I think, in a way that has been entirely healthy for either the community or the game itself.  To this day, certain people still will not speak with each other, and whole groups hold absurd grudges against other individuals, groups, or the community as a whole for things that happened in UU.  I can’t even begin to summarize what went on, because by that time, I had lost interest in going there due to the bickering, the in-fighting, and the general nastiness that existed on most of the shards.  There were plenty of good people in UU, and many valuable projects were started there that have lived on to this day, but unfortunately (and I’m not sure for whom), I let those motivated by anger, frustration, and bitterness drive me away from my second home in the Cavern.

Beyond the ugliness that grew out of UU, there also came a certain sense of ownership and entitlement, which I think more than anything else has seriously altered the way that some segments of the community see Uru.  The shards were ours, after all, and there was no authority standing between us and the game’s content.  And so, UU once again changed, and certainly not for the better, in my opinion.  The UserKI and AdminKI, as well as the myriad other ways in which the game was modified, are some of the worst things to have happened to D’ni that I can possibly fathom.  In 2003, there was a realism to the world of Uru, a sense that this was a real place, with rules, structure, and a certain adherence to the laws of nature.  What it became was Myst: Second Life, with people leaping hundreds of feet in the air and walking around with neon blue skin, the lake tinted to whatever color struck the fancy of the shard administrator(s), etc.  Whatever realism was in Uru was destroyed for me by what was done to it in UU.  I know a lot of people in the community adored the UserKI, the skydiving “feature”, the ability to literally be a little green man, the fact that the shard admins could upturn Kerath’s Arch and turn the sky in the Cavern pink, and spawn a massive copy of the DRC’s laptop in Tokotah Courtyard for everyone to play on, and so I’m sure, moreso than I was when I suspected (incorrectly) the last time I said it, that I will be lynched for uttering these words, but I hate what UU did to Uru (or, to be even more direct, I hate what this community did to Uru in the name of making their own fun).  More than that, though, I hate that UU’s atmosphere of happy-go-lucky do-as-you-please-ness has become so accepted and ingrained in the minds of some people that they outright protested Cyan’s efforts to do the very thing that UU was intended to facilitate: re-launch Uru Live, citing that over-developed sense of entitlement as the sole reason why UU should be left running (oddly, pretty much everyone I saw protesting UU’s closure on the grounds of MOUL’s limited international availability were people who lived in supported countries).
I could go on at length about the ways in which either Cyan or GameTap screwed the pooch this time around, but I’m not going to.  I’m pretty sure that Cyan knows what went wrong, I’m pretty sure that GameTap doesn’t read my blog, and I know for a fact that the community has been all over this facet of Live’s second closure, and so I see little point in continuing the exercise.  Suffice it to say that mistakes were made which probably contributed far more to Uru’s second death than any failure of imagination or effort on the part of the community.  And now that Uru is gone again, everyone wants desperately to have something else to hold on to, and the only thing that comes to anyone’s mind is another UU.

While I can’t blame people for wanting to return to the only known way of keeping this game alive on an unofficial basis, to put it bluntly, this notion scares the living shit out of me.  I’ve seen this community turn D’ni into an amusement part for its own entertainment, when years ago, the very notion of such a thing would have turned the stomachs of everyone I knew.  I don’t want to take over D’ni, and turn it into the community’s plaything.  I don’t want to usurp Cyan as the arbiter of D’ni canon.  I don’t even want to usurp the notion of there being an arbiter of D’ni canon.  At the same time, I have no qualms with people who build Ages, or tell stories, or create artwork that increases the depth and breadth of the D’ni universe; people who - like those of us who signed on to this game eight years ago - see D’ni as a real place and want to share their interest and enthusiasm for it; people who genuinely want to give something back to the community.  If left in the hands of people like that, I wouldn’t be concerned at all, because I would know that D’ni was in good hands, and I would work with them as long as I could to make sure that the Cavern was never silent again.  Even before Uru, there were attempts at something similar through the Writers of D’ni MOO, and though I sadly have never participated in it, I know some of the most creative members of the community in ages past did so, and created a place second only to Uru in its representation of D’ni.  More than anything, though, I fear turning D’ni over to people who would once again turn it into an amusement park to make it more “interesting” or “fun”, not seeing or even understanding that D’ni is interesting and fun enough for a great many people on its own merits.  Based on the dedication I have seen from the Guilds in their present form, I don’t think Guild-managed new content with ultimate approval from Cyan would be a bad idea.  But anything that removes Cyan from the equation entirely for a second time is begging for a repeat of the bickering, anarchy, and entitlement that ultimately stemmed from Until Uru, and I don’t think I can stand to see my childhood desecrated like that again (yeah, I’m one of those people; the kind who finds stuff like Pyst to be beyond simple poor taste).  Sadly, I don’t think there are many people left in this community who share my experiences of D’ni, and I weep for what may be done to it again in the name of “entertainment”.  Perhaps it would have been better never to have dreamed at all…

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.

It occurs to me that I’ve been rather a bit more talkative than usual of late.

Anyway, an update, a personal bit, and some rumination to follow.

Firstly, on the promised subject of DPWR, I’m hard at work getting the upgraded version of the site hammered out, finalized, skinned, and integrated into IPB 2.3. The forums are complete, as are the Gallery and the Archive. The links system has been totally overhauled, and will need to have all of its information re-entered from scratch, but there’s a lot of cruft in there that doesn’t work anymore anyway, and a lot of new stuff to add, so I look at it as a way to make the whole thing better overall. The Community page just needs a couple of tweaks, and will ultimately prove to be FAR more useful than the current landing pad with two links on it that I’ve been using for the past 3 years. I’ve taken to syndicating a few of the community’s RSS feeds, such as the feeds for Explorer Exchange and the Jalak Registry, as well as MystBlogs, UruBlogs, and the CCQDB. Community-related news items from the main page are also re-printed here, along with a calendar, an online list, and access to the Member List.

Slightly less far along is the actual home page, but that’s mainly because it’s still missing some minor News integration and the whole gamut of Library integration. Once the Library is wrapped up, I’ll be tying that in, and everything will be complete. There’s already some better integration than there used to be, with better Archive integration befitting of the new Archive component, separate news feeds for Community/Cavern news and general game-, GameTap-, and Cyan-related news, and a new listing of the last 4 images to be posted in the Gallery.

The Golden KI, the Library, and the News segments are the only things that still require considerable amounts of effort. The Golden KI is largely complete, but it’s my intention to overhaul the rather arcane voting system and manual contest switch-overs that are currently in place, and replace them with poll-based voting in the forum itself, as well as an automated task to switch the contest over, handle topic/poll creation for each round, and announce a winner after each round is over.

The Library will be largely unchanged, because it doesn’t seem to be lacking much beyond a search feature, and I’m still looking into how difficult that would be to actually implement. The layout will be updated to reflect the new site design (don’t worry, it’s nothing drastic like previous revisions… this is more of a refinement). It’s still in the early-ish stages of development, but it should move fairly quickly once I dig in. My goal is to have the Library complete by Wednesday night.

The News bit is going to require a little bit more work, because I want to democratize it a bit more than it currently is. The new version of the News section will allow anyone with an account to post a news article or event announcement. Regular member accounts will require staff approval of their entries to prevent spam, while certain groups, like TCT, who have a history of posting solid material, will be able to post without the approval restriction. As with the Library, I’d love to have a search feature for this section of the site, but it depends on how feasible it ends up being; both the News and the Library both draw their data from Invision Power Board’s forum database, so the permissions restrictions and such that go along with that need to be worked around in order to get search working outside of the forum itself. Development of News should be completed by Thursday or Friday at the latest. Ideally, this will all be wrapped up before my new computer gets here, so I can give it my undivided attention when it does. I fully expect to have the new DPWR online before October 1st (of this year, just to be overly-specific).

Moving on to a completely different topic, today I started “Phase 1″ of my eventual data storage and backup solution. My current solution is pretty much “hope the drive doesn’t crash before late October”, though I’m hoping to move well beyond that soon. I was doing some browsing earlier today and noticed that Best Buy was selling the new revisions of Western Digital’s MyBook line at $50 off, so I went ahead and sprung for a 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for all of $140 after tax. This will eventually become my Time Machine back-up drive, but for now it’s serving as an extended storage drive for my Mac, because I’ve been running desperately low on storage space for the past while now. I’ve already moved my iPhoto library over, and am in the process of moving my iTunes library over as well, for a combined storage savings of about 80 gigs.

When Leopard comes out, I will be getting a copy along with an additional internal hard drive (probably also 500 GB), which will become the new extended storage drive. I’ll be backing up all of my data to this drive, and then doing a fresh installation of OS X on my primary disk, just to make sure all of the cruft and haxies and random crap I’ve installed but no longer use is cleaned up for before I start using the new OS. Once I have Leopard installed, I’ll copy what needs copying back over to the primary drive, and then set up the MyBook drive as the Time Machine backup target. So, I’ll have 820 gigs of storage backed up on a 500 gig drive. Perhaps not an optimal solution, but one which can be extended as time goes on as need be.