May Contain Nuts

“Why hasn’t Cyan released the Plasma source code by now?”

Because, as RAWA explained, it’s a long, painful process. As RAWA somewhat implied, there are very few people at Cyan who even know anything about the engine code anymore. Most – if not all – of the Headspin team they bought the engine from have since left the company or been laid off. The number of “Don’t use this, we don’t know what it does” comments in the ResEng documentation I was given when I started there speaks volumes about how much work needs to go into the engine to get it ready for release.

Further, open-sourcing the engine as it stands now faces a number of additional issues. First, I’m under the impression that Cyan wants to separate the engine code from any game content that might be tied up in it, in order to retain legal rights to their D’ni universe intellectual property and released content. Given how often purpose-built engines have game content references hard-coded into them for the sake of convenience, this may be more likely than it seems. Second, I’m fairly certain that Cyan intends to continue using Plasma after they open-source it, so it must be done in a way that doesn’t prevent Cyan from using the engine commercially in the future. Third, there’s a number of proprietary components in the Plasma engine that are the property of third parties (PhysX is a good example), which Cyan can’t release the code for. However, stripping the references to that code out of the engine would make it essentially useless.

A good parallel to draw, I think, is to Relic’s decision about 5 years ago to open-source the engine they used to create the original Homeworld title in 1999. As with Plasma, everyone at the time was mind-boggled at the fact that a AAA game engine for a best-selling title was just going to be given away by its creators. However, to this day there still isn’t an openly available version of the engine that can be used for anything besides running an extremely buggy and feature-deprived build of Homeworld, because so much of the engine got crippled when Relic ripped out stuff like the Bink decoder used for the animatic cutscenes (which weren’t released along with the engine, so until the hard-coded references to them were removed from the engine, the game would just crash because of the missing assets), and there’s a pile of assembly code that just doesn’t work very well on modern hardware, including a lot of homebrewed custom OpenGL assembly code (dubbed “RelicGL”) that was written to get bare-metal access to the anemic or even non-existent graphics hardware available in 1999. Check out the Homesource forums for a taste of what fresh Hells Relic’s engine hath wrought.

So, if Relic’s approach can shed any light on this subject (and I think it can), throwing the code out now now now isn’t going to accomplish Cyan’s goals any faster than releasing the code at a later date, and is in all likelihood actually going to slow things down even further. I know there’s a lot of code monkey geniuses in the Myst community, but Plasma is a 15-year-old monster of an application, and more eyeballs on the problem doesn’t always mean faster results.

Which leads me to…

“Why won’t Cyan let trusted community members help get the code ready for release?”

As RAWA’s noted, and as many others have mentioned, there are a whole swarm of thorny legal issues involved with granting non-employees access to a proprietary code base full of more licensed proprietary third-party software, on top of the very probable situation that Cyan doesn’t have a system in place for allowing outside access to their Plasma code repository, it’s probably in a rather outdated source control system (perhaps even Visual Source Safe *shudder*), and compiling it may also require licenses for software that volunteers would need to be given (just as an example, anyone who’s tried to recompile a C++ VS6 or VS.NET project in VS08 should know it’s not likely to go smooth). Getting all of this set up, settling the hazy legal issues surrounding unpaid labor in the US, and drafting and issuing contracts and access permissions that are locked-down to only the relevant material is probably more trouble than it’s worth, honestly. Again, remember, this is a spare-time effort that Cyan can’t afford to expend valuable resources on when they’re needed elsewhere for other projects.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Cyan is holding onto the code to try and hammer out some additional security issues, which they don’t want out in the open for discovery when they’re also running the only (legal *ahem*) active shard of the game on the planet. Given the (admittedly long-ago) history of outsider abuse of the Myst community (such as hacking the Riven Lyst), I would understand it if Cyan wasn’t willing to expose the Uru community to another outage resulting from someone exploiting the code’s most evident weaknesses. Considering the Vault always struck me as being held together with duct tape and bailing twine, I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot that can go wrong very easily, and again, right or not, Cyan may just want to avoid that situation if at all possible by keeping the code internal for now (and please spare me the “security through obscurity” arguments, because they never seem to convince anyone in either direction).

And now, for my own petty comment: I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Uru hacking community’s tendency to do whatever they want with or without Cyan’s permission is putting Cyan off from being willing to accept their assistance. I applaud Paradox for actually working with Mark on the Pidgin KI plugin, and that sort of approach – independent development of tools and extensions with Cyan’s permission since it’s their property – if repeated elsewhere, could go a long way towards improving the apparent lack of interest on Cyan’s part towards the hacker community, and community involvement in general (assuming the aforementioned hurdles aren’t going to get in the way).

Yeah, I’m at it again. Be afraid. Be very afraid . Also please note that for as much as I go on about this, I really would like to see Cyan do Something Completely Different, rather than staying chained to the boat anchor that is Uru Live.

There are several things that have recently motivated me to further reflect on how to build a better Uru, though two really stand out for me. The first is the fact that I’ve been poking around in Second Life for a while now, and have gotten a feel for how the game’s user-editability works in a broad sense. The second is that the platform I’ve been targeting all of my thinking toward, Unity, is now free for the basic version of the development IDE, which eliminates the barrier-to-entry concerns I had for player-created content on that platform.

To focus briefly on Unity’s strengths, it’s a rock-solid 3rd party engine with its own extensive QA testing department, meaning that support and maintenance of the engine itself are no longer concerns, which makes the cost overhead of development considerably smaller (programmers are not cheap). It has full support for DirectX and OpenGL pixel shaders including bloom, blur, and a whole host of others. It will run natively on Windows, as well as Intel and PowerPC-based Macs, which means no more Crossover or Cider strangeness in the Mac port, and increased accessibility to the product for players with older Mac systems (I’m willing to take any users I can get at this point). It supports live asset streaming from server to client, which means that assets can be retained on the remote server and only downloaded when the client needs them. Considering the bandwidth requirements of most MMOs anyway, these downloads should be fairly speedy, and should even be able to be handled asynchronously, so the remaining content can load while you’re exploring the initial spawn point. It natively opens 3DS MAX files (on Windows), layered Photoshop PSDs, and will import FBX files exported from MAX and Blender, in addition to a whole host of additional mesh, image, video, and audio file support. This pretty much covers all of the most popular tools currently being used to build player-created content for the Plasma engine, with the added benefit of having a documented development API and IDE with full support for every possible feature out-of-the-box.

All of these factors combine to position Unity as a truly capable technology that can easily supplant Plasma in practically every way. I give major props and kudos to Cyan for developing their own graphics engine and server technology in-house to do things in realtime that were unimaginable when they started Uru’s development over 10 years ago, but truth be told, it’s decidedly buggy and lag-ridden in ways that I don’t think open-sourcing the project will ever adequately solve (or at least, ever solve in a reasonable timeframe). Plasma has had a good run, but I think it’s time to move on to something better.

On top of all this, I’ve been reflecting for a while on how to bring some of Second Life’s openness into Uru without destroying the core of what Uru is, or just turning it into a Myst-themed Second Life clone. When players can go pretty much anywhere they please, and do basically whatever they want, as well as build almost anything they can imagine, with a minimal outlay of real-world cash on their part, Uru’s restrictive and largely fixed, scenic environments seem much more sterile and uninviting by comparison. This puts a further degree of importance on the developer-driven storyline, as player-developed concepts are limited to what can be done with only KI notes and unmodified in-game photos as props, and it’s somewhat surprisingly difficult to get people to use their imagination to invent unseen, behind-the-curtain locales for player operations when the rest of the game is so fully visualized. Thus, when the developer’s storyline isn’t going anywhere, or isn’t moving at a pace that can keep up with players’ demands for new material, the game suffers greatly.

After spending a really long time reflecting on what I think makes Uru a great concept, as well as working hard to incorporate some of the most demanded aspects of gameplay throughout Uru’s troubled existence, I think I’ve arrived at a model that can be used to build a better, more potentially successful Uru Live by creating a more player-friendly world built on stronger underlying technologies. Here’s what I’ve got.

User-placeable objects. The game wouldn’t have an object editor like Second Life’s, which is really super complex, but players would have the ability to place arbitrary objects around the game. Certain limitations would be imposed to retain a certain degree of “realism”, so objects like papers could only be placed on designated surfaces like the ground or on cork boards, rather than allowing them to float in mid-air. Players could use this system to drop short notes, full-on notebooks, images, and even arbitrary objects from a global object library into the game. Notes, notebooks, and images would follow a Second Life-style modify/copy/transfer permissions structure, so players would be able to configure whether others can edit, send, send copies, pick up, or pick up copies of the object in question. Arbitrary objects from the library or from a player’s personal collection would have only copy/transfer permissions since there would be no way to edit them in-game.

To further protect certain areas of the game, regions may be configured by the developer to disallow the dropping of objects onto them (the ability for a surface to receive dropped objects would be an explicit opt-in flag in the back-end). Player-owned areas of the game, such as rooms in the D’ni City, may have their structures configured by the owner to determine where things can be dropped by non-owners.

Asynchronous, lazy loading of content. Perhaps one of Plasma’s largest bottlenecks next to physics objects is the way in which it loads content. Everything seems to be loaded synchronously, so in large areas with lots of players, it takes a considerable amount of time before the game gets to a state even barely approaching useable. By decoupling content loading from the main rendering thread and making it asynchronous, players can begin to explore an area before all of the content has finished loading. This is especially prudent for objects like avatars and player-dropped content, but could theoretically be extended to cover the environment itself as well.

More user control of the game’s visual quality. This is a simple thing, but it would make a world of difference to many players. Give them the ability to reduce the visual complexity of the game by reducing the number of avatars their system renders at a time (X nearest, polled intermittently), and by reducing the draw distance for objects such as avatars and player-dropped content. Besides the general improvements to frame rate that would come from migrating to the Unity engine and cleaning up older, more inefficiently-assembled areas of the game, giving players control over the draw distance would likely have a marked impact on performance on lower-end machines, where even a one hundred polygon low-LOD avatar object would add strain to the rendering system. This is a point where we would have to concede “absolute realism” for overall quality and playability, but I think it’s an important and valid trade-off.

The ability to upload content into the game. This one’s going to stir a few pots, I suspect, but frankly speaking, there is no way to make Uru what players want it to be without making this possible. Having Cyan be the gatekeeper on every item that goes into the game is impractical, and there’s already precedent for user-created material being directly added into the game in the form of KI notes, which can be freely shared, edited, and posted publicly. Provided there is a method for reporting and removing offensive content, I think an honor code-driven system would work fine in Uru for the vast majority of cases. Players should be able to upload their own images into the game for use as images to share, and for use on clothing as extra texture options, without needing to go through Cyan for approval first.

I’m unsure of how (or even whether) a Second Life-like system where uploading content costs a marginal amount of real-world cash would work given Cyan’s traditional eschewing of micro-transactions for extra material, but when it comes to the storage space needed for uploaded text and images, there should probably be some way to defray those costs. The rest of the gaming industry, and Second Life in particular, has illustrated that micro-transactions are a viable method for minor gate-keeping and expanding a player’s available content for a minimal up-front cost, and I think if properly structured, such a system would work for Uru, but it would have to be very carefully managed, and should be considered separately from the notion of a player-driven economy within the game where players can sell items to one another, rather than just paying to upload their own content for themselves.

Uploading actual models and textures into the game would be a somewhat different ball of wax, I think, because of the way in which Unity compiles its game assets and given the fact that we wouldn’t be providing an in-game editor for creating one’s own objects. Objects would need to be built in a modeling environment, imported into Unity, and then submitted to the developer (in this case, Cyan) for addition to the global library/libraries in batches, or to an individual player’s account for their personal use. These additions could be done independent of major content drops because of support for on-demand content streaming built into Unity.

Create an API on top of which players can build. Player-created content is obviously going to be a big draw for Uru, if only because it’s been teased at for so long and is already happening under the table in Plasma. Creating a recognized development framework for players to build their own content and integrate it into the game is an absolute must from day 1. The framework should support adding objects, whole regions (Ages etc.), and extensions to the user interface (like new KI functionality) into the game. Depending on the type of material being developed, the developer may need to act as a gate-keeper of sorts, if only to serve as the conduit through which player content is included into the game’s published assets.

Because not every player will have the ability to build their own content for any number of reasons, it’s reasonable to assume that other players may band together to create development shops which would build objects for other players. Existing Guilds such as the Writers and Maintainers may be very well-suited to this task, and there may be some way to create a development shard that is more frequently updated (or possibly can be built on-demand) so that player-developers can test their content before giving it the green light for inclusion into the release builds. Addition of content would not be explicitly subject to Guild involvement, however; if a player wanted to build something and submit it on their own, they would be free to do so.

Certain areas of the game that were originally created by the developer could even have their own additional APIs for creating player-made rule structures, enabling things like more enforceable gameplay rules for player-invented games in Jalak. Provided the technology supported it, players should be able to upload these area-specific override scripts directly to the game for immediate integration, with the obvious ability to report broken, offensive, or griefing scripts.

Give players somewhere to showcase their work. Hand in hand with allowing players to create things like their own Ages is developing a way to let others access them. There should be developer-created spaces in the game for featuring player-created content such as Ages or artwork, and players should also be able to place their own content in player-controlled areas as well. For instance, if a player owned a room or building in the City, they could place a Linking Book to an Age they had created in that room or building, which would then be access-controlled based on who was allowed to enter that space in the City.

This framework for privatized content placement could even be expanded to a more fragmented shard system, where players could lease or operate their own server, and for a stated cost per month could operate player-created content on that machine with their own rules and code of conduct. Such privatized content would require certain disclosures to be put in place for players who may stumble onto it (my first and admittedly clunky thought is to present the player with a dialog box when they click such a linking panel, containing the destination’s rules as they differ from the main area of play, requiring the player to explicitly authorize the link before continuing to the new server).

In addition, there should be central upload repositories where players can upload content from their KI such as notes, images, and marker missions, for other players to download at their leisure. Again, content uploaded to these stations should have modify/copy/transfer controls built into it so players can control the distribution of their own content.

Don’t forget the story. If Uru did all of this, and nothing more, it would essentially be the Myst-themed Second Life clone I want to avoid turning it into. However, the strength of Cyan’s games has always been the one-two punch of high-quality content and storytelling. Without these, Uru is nothing special, but without the rest of this list, storytelling and content become such a tremendously exclusive focus of the player base that maintaining a sufficient development throughput quickly becomes unsustainable. Do all this, and provide a compelling central story with imaginative and gripping environments, and I think Uru’s chances of success improve greatly.

Of course, it sounds a lot easier than it actually is, or it’d be done by now .

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

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

Read more…?

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.

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 thing™. 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 .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 .
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.