May Contain Nuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DO WANT!

But if there’s no space-themed areas (like, actual space-themed stuff, like the space shuttle and whatnot, not Star Wars :P) or Mars Mission-type stuff, I don’t think I’d be able to find much to do there ;).

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…