The Relto bookshelf The bookshelf in Relto stores all of the linking books you've found and allows you to travel to all the ages from one handy spot. It is the concept behind Myst and the dream of any healthy nerd to have access to countless worlds right at the tips of his fingers. Each book is a new world to discover. While most Myst games only had at most four ages, Uru had the potential to give access to so much more. That potential went largely unfulfilled. So I find it strangely thrilling to look at these books and think of all the possible ages that could have been added. Here's what the complete bookshelf looks like in the offline and online versions. Uru: Complete Chronicles - Notice how even the first row is not full of books. The lone book on the left is the Cleft. The three separations represent each of the expansions (notice the symbols on top of the books). Myst Online: Uru Live - A bit more content, but not by much. Some of the books have changed places or just have a new binding. The four similar books of different colors are the pods. The bookshelf still looks pretty empty. Phil's bookshelf - A bookshelf found in the Relto of a NPC. None of the books can be interacted with (they're locked in place) except for the one in the middle with its tab up. Even if a lot of the extra covers are just rehashes, it made players hope for the day when the shelves would be full and some new other means of storage would be needed. Ah, the beauty of hope. Uru Live - The Aftermath Why didn't Uru succeed? Really, there's nothing else to say first other that the idea of an interactive puzzle game is interesting, but nonetheless terrible. The problem with a Massively-Multiplayer Online Adventure game is that it doesn't work on a fundamental level. Killing stuff with other players (FPS, RPG, it doesn't matter) is a classic recipe and it works. Being with another player who has top level gear or is extremely skilled can turn the game into a cakewalk, but the second he leaves you're back on your own with your four copper coins, your wooden club and your terrible hand-eye coordination. Playing skills can only be gained through experience and good equipment is rarely given without compensation (hence people selling their "virtual property" on eBay). Adventure games, however, deal in another currency: information, a magic little thing that can be reproduced infinitely and once you know an answer, the challenge is permanently killed. Adventure games rely on knowledge, so it's pretty difficult for players to interact together. This makes managing social interactions really hard. You can't really play with people who have done it all; they're just going to spoil the puzzles for you. They might be courteous enough to keep silent, but what are they going to do, sit there doing nothing while you mess around with stuff like an idiot for hours, their lips burning with the answer? For the record, players were in fact very mindful of spoilers. On the other hand, the rookie player with no integrity can ask for all the answers and burn through the game in a few days, while pretending to be a great mastermind. Doing this is perfectly legal (for now...), but it sure makes the whole concept feel pointless. The only good way to play with someone else is to both start from scratch and hope the other guy is not too smart or too stupid. The only problem is that a week after a new area was released it was already old news, so good luck finding another person who hasn't solved it yet. The result is that solutions spread like wildfire, sometimes long before all the pieces of the puzzle were actually given to the players. You just can't leave a knot lying around a bunch of Myst nerds without it being untangled fast. It also seems like the most basic of courtesies to tell new players what to do first: get your KI, subscribe to a neighbourhood, complete the Cleft, get your sparklies and so on. That's what most would do and although it comes from good intentions, it totally kills the mystique of a game where you're not even supposed to be fed any context. Myst is about not knowing what's going on and taking in the atmosphere. Otherwise, it feels a lot more like running errands than being a stranger in a surreal land. In the Myst Online: Uru Live version, players didn't start alone in the desert cleft... so you didn't even have to walk the first few miles without anybody holding your hand. Wouldn't it have been better if you could at least feel like you took the first steps of your pilgrimage alone, only to stumble upon a vast inhabited universe? Wasn't that the whole point? Maybe if veteran players intentionally behaved like poetic assholes the "mystique" would have been preserved: - Yo! wats a KI, were izzit? - The solution you are looking for resides within yourself. That is the path of all answers. Only there can you find true enlightenment. - fuck8r! - Shorah to you, good sir. [SPONGEBOBASSPOO@@@] has left the cavern But no, players were nice folk and Uru was a wholesome game. I mean... A MMO where you can't hurt or kill anyone? A MMO where there was presumably as many women as there were men? Where women (or men pretending to be women) can't give themselves enormous breasts or slut it out in a very revealing outfit? Not much sexual harassment either, as far as I could tell. A MMO where every room is filled with university graduates? A place where people don't know or care to know what leet speak is, since the English language is good enough for them, with spelling, grammar, prepositions and everything. Other languages were welcome, by the way. A place where some people come in and talk about their grandchildren? Yeah I know, a boring utopia, isn't it? Uru had a knack for turning away most people faster than they could say: - dudez, this suckzorz a$$! lol, where's the bl00d, ROTFL? (o_0) TOGTFO! [NaRuTOhALO78238] has left the cavern - Who was this charming fellow? - Why, I don't know. Him and his ilk do seem to find their way here every once in a while. - Interesting. Well, wasn't that a delightful manner of speech? - Quite. (Maybe not that much, but you get the picture) It could be the fact that everybody was eerily friendly. I mean, players didn't even have the courtesy of being snobby intellectual elitists. Everyone was usually more than eager to help, probably because they were bored out of their skulls since they had already done everything and were trying to pass the time until the next tiny update. When they were bored in the game, Myst aficionados would go to the forums and leave each other complex ciphers to unravel; that's the kind of people they are. Nevertheless, my ears were buzzing from the silence of not hearing the word "noob" even once. Well, it was my eyes, really, since it was mostly text. There was a microphone function integrated, but it wasn't used very often and I thought it was more annoying than useful. But my experience is biased, since Uru is the only MMO I've ever participated in, and by "participate", I mean skulk in my Relto fortress of solitude, solving puzzles on my own and interacting with those strange things known as human beings when I needed a hand or when I was bored out of my wits as well. Yes, this is yet another problem with Uru: it was appealing to the smart, nice and outgoing crowd, but also to loners who didn't really see what the chatter was all about and wanted to solve things on their own. Myst has always been a series about solitude, after all. I did try to reach out to my fellow player, however. After the announcement by Gametap that the game was entering its finals days again in 2008, I thought it would at least be funny to set up my own "end of the world" cult to mark the coming apocalypse. Something about the White Serpent clenching its jaws on our poor universe, with fire and brimstone stuff added in for good measure. Not very mature, I know, but I was just trying to stave off boredom for a while, just like anybody else. Hey, it was still better than my traffic cone sculptures. My efforts at creating a cult weren't too fruitful, however, since I was mostly deemed a "poor sport" for believing that Uru would actually fail again and not starting a petition to save it instead (there were some). People were just too damn optimistic that everything would turn out alright at the last minute and that their love of Uru would eventually prevail over the evil forces of commerce, one way or the other. The usual mantra on the boards was "cautious optimism", but someone must have mistaken the words blind and cautious when coming up with their motto. Ok, I have to admit the other players were a high point of Uru; it's obviously much better to deal with sensible people than with drooling jerks, and the former are rare on the Internet. But, since it's just between you and me, dear reader, I must confess that the archetypal Myst fans are such outstanding people that it makes me feel a little bit sick. But how about the online game itself, how was it managed? Well, creator-player communication was pretty bad, new content was scarce and no release date was ever successfully met. The communication part is forgivable, considering how Cyan is a company known for creating mysteries. Content, on the other hand, was much too sparse, which would lead to mass boredom. In an attempt to correct the situation, Cyan turned the sporadic updates into TV-like "episodes" that would squeeze one month's worth of content on the first week of every month (that didn't stop them from delaying the episodes, though). I really don't know how this made sense in their minds: it's trading four weeks of mild boredom for three weeks of intense boredom, with extra lag as a bonus, since everyone is logging in the same week. Now I'm in no position to judge how much content a small team of programmers should be able to create in a year, but I do have ideas on how much content it takes to keep a normal human being entertained. Maybe it would have been easier if Uru was a typical MMO: give a few enemies a palette swap, double their stats, copy/paste some trees and put a regular sword that shines blue at the other end. Put the next benchmark in progress behind hours of tedious clicking so people will shut up for a few months or so. Grinding may not be exhilarating, but it sure is convenient for keeping people occupied at busywork. Cyan did try to implement their own version of the thing: people could use a machine to "cook" pellets in Er'cana which would be used to feed the luminescent algae in the main city and restore the D'ni's natural lighting source to its former glory. This sounds all nice and good on paper, the only problem was that accumulating "pellet points" had no coded effect whatsoever within the game and that the machine put on the docks to track the players' progress was pretty much stuck on the same number. Some employee was presumably waiting for the arbitrary moment to switch a zero for a one in the code and, presto, instant accomplishment! What a cop-out. The fact that Cyan has very high artistic standards didn't actually help them meet deadlines either. Copy/pasting was looked down by the team: every important object had to be unique. However, if I've had any success in communicating the Uru experience to you so far, you've probably gotten the idea that these standards were starting to waver very quickly during the online Gametap era. They've added a lot of areas during that year, but none of them reached the level of complexity of the original ages or the level of quality I expect from Cyan. Maybe they were better off putting an end to the project before things got too messy. I mean, look at Tetsonot! The online storyline was actually handled by Cyan employees showing up live and in character playing DRC officials, handing out proclamations and chatting with the populace. This means you had to be there at the right time to witness any event firsthand, but if you did you felt special. A single event is particularly noteworthy: the death of Wheely Engberg. An earthquake in the cavern ended up trapping two young women under the rock wall of an Ae'gura pub. Nervous onlookers gathered near the scene while DRC officials relayed the girls' messages and information on the progress of the rescue attempt. Wheely's father Michael tried to send messages to her and when Wheely finally managed a reply, she said she loved him very much. Wheely said weakly that she felt a presence around her. During the event, the Bahro showed up at the cave-in. Were they helping or hindering the rescue attempt? Did they stop the linking books from working? After a day's work of clearing the debris, messages were sent that only one person escaped from the rubble. Wheely didn't make it. The news went through the community as a great shock and flowers were placed on the scene of the tragedy. A monument was later built to honour her memory and that of other lost explorers. Of course, all this amounted to was somebody typing about a fictional character's death. The player cap in the main city was quickly reached so very few people were actually at the scene of the "accident" (even then, they would only be standing close to a roadblock). Most players would hear about the event from someone who heard that someone is reporting that somebody died. Like Chinese whispers, the news would get distorted a little bit every time a new person talked about it. It felt a lot like the actual kind of information chaos you can expect whenever a real disaster happens. On some level it must have been a success, since some people were complaining on the boards that this was terrible and that they didn't sign up for this kind of stuff. In its defence, Uru is the best looking MMO game yet... except MMOs are not supposed to look state-of-the-art, they're supposed to be lean, mean and lag-free. There wasn't that much lag to begin with, but the main city would be very slow when it was densely populated, as the environments weren't intended to hold more than a few dozen players at a time. Even if things ran fairly smoothly, that didn't stop people from chatting about lag, but in MMO parlance, discussing lag is like talking about the weather. Anyway, no matter how great every place looks, you'll still get bored of looking at them for their own sake eventually. If there is no adventure and no exploration, well that leaves the game at risk of receiving the most shameful of titles for a MMO: the glorified chat-room. If you weren't satisfied with Uru, at least Canadians and Americans had access to the entire Gametap catalogue as well for their seven bucks a month. If Uru didn't catch your interest long enough, maybe you could at least find something to like in Silent Hill, Deus Ex, The Last Express, Heroes of Might and Magic, Zork, Fallout and so on? On the other hand, international pricing for Uru was 13.95$ US, but without any of the other games. Ouch. Some people did blame Gametap for not sinking enough money into the still-not-very-popular Uru. Those capitalists, you know? Always trying not to go bankrupt. Not a drop of vision or artistic integrity in the lot of them. Of course, more reasonable fans would just realize that MOUL was never going to be a commercial success and that it was already a godsend that Gametap fuelled the dream for a little while longer. Conclusion I really, really loved Uru: Complete Chronicles. The puzzles were difficult, the visuals were appealing, the soundscapes engaging and it was all tied together by the invisible hands at Cyan in order to give everything an extra layer of depth. Collecting stuff was just the cherry on top. I may not have expressed this affection clearly enough, but it's obviously quite hard to describe what is supposed to be mysterious. The online experience is another story. It was too little content too late and with too many complications. It dragged down my previous experience of going solo through Uru with its complete mediocrity. That's how bad it was. While it may not have been a success, it still was a great flop, because it failed in a way games rarely ever do: reaching for the stars. It deserves a place next to other great commercial flops like the Last Express or Shenmue. What is the deeper source of the problem? I'd take a guess and say it's because Cyan describe themselves as an artist dominated-company instead of being a programmer-dominated company. It might explain the painstaking attention to detail, but it might also explain the hubris. Rand Miller's official answer as to why Uru didn't work: it was ahead of its time. Translate that statement however you wish. Maybe after the successes of Myst and Riven, the folks at Cyan started to believe they could do no wrong, who knows? It does make a good story, though: a team with uncompromising artistic principles and an innovative, but flawed idea trying to appeal to gamers' better nature. Cyan is a company that always kept its soul, but a soul is an inconvenient thing when there are financial decisions to be made. Despite the ideals, Cyan pulled the plug when money ran out, like any sensible company would. Good decision, considering the company had to lay off employees and almost went out of business. You could say Cyan is company whose artistic reach exceeded its financial grasp. Still, more than a decade after Uru was born, it's not quite dead... Epilogue In 2009, Cyan has reclaimed the distribution rights from Gametap's owners and plans to re-re-release the game once again, this time for free! It's hard not to recommend one of the longest, most challenging and most inspired adventure games... all for zero dinero, right? In this new project known as MORE (Myst Online Restoration Experiment), Cyan would stop providing new content but give age creation tools to the players so they would make any new content, while Cyan would sit back and maintain a certain degree of quality control. This sounded like a wonderful idea. "Sounded", because this project went down the drain almost immediately. On the other hand, Cyan still decided to make age creation tools available to the players in the future, except in an Open Source format where people will be able to do whatever the hell they want. Less headaches for them, but for a series built on immersion and intricately constructed universes, it's pretty worrying to think the fans could muck it up with inferior work. Amateurish modeling, crappy textures, people flying around, rampant porn... Second Life anyone? To be fair, some of the early projects do seem to fit the bill wonderfully, though. As of February 2010, Uru is open for explorers and downloadable for free. Its new name is now MOULagain. While there was a lot of traffic on the first days of re-re-re-release, things have mostly calmed down since then. Uru is exactly like it was when it went offline in April 2008. It lives on, mostly deserted, but with minimal activity, as in some state of undeath. Uru is supposed to be about a dead civilization, so it shouldn't really matter to new players. If anything, it makes the place feel more authentic. However, there is still no set date for when Open Source creation tools are going to be released and player-created content is made possible. MP3s Download here Air Stream Badlands Beyond Gira Gallery Theme

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