Thoughts on the closing of MO:UL

I have previously written a little about the closing of Myst Online: Uru Live. And as the post the night of April 9 shows, it actually did happen. Since the announcement was made that GameTap was canceling the game, there has been a lot of chatter about what killed this instance of Uru and their thoughts for what would have kept the game alive and what a renewed Uru should look like. I finally am making the time to write about what I am thinking. I don't mind being as far behind the curve in getting my ideas out there. Mostly this is due to the bit where I don't think anyone is going to read this and that I get the advantage of having read some other really smart people's thoughts. And for the most part, the people I read know somewhat more about the working of things Uru.

What killed Uru?

I do not know if anyone, including those that ultimately made the decision, will every know what really killed Uru. I am certain it was not any one thing. The game market, as far as I am aware of it, is rough. Corporate environments are rough on projects. Getting things paid for and approved can be tough. I am speaking from experience here. I have worked for months on really interesting projects, only to have them canceled at the last moment. I have worked for months on end on really cool projects and been left with nothing to show for it, because canceling the project was the right thing to do. I have made the deciion that a project that I thought was incredibly cool should be canceled. I have worked with others to cut the parts of a project that I thought made it special out of the project in order to save the project, schedule or budget. I can only imagine what it must be like in the game industry doing the exact same thing. The video game market has a lot of players in it. There are more outlets for gaming--online, casual and mmo--than any one person can ever be aware. And the expectations that players bring to games are incredibly high and in someways impossible to meet. Mostly because one groups expectations are mutally exclusive with another groups expectations. No wonder we had difficulty attracting players to a game that had no combat, no economy and little-to-no in-game community organizations. Games and game sites are more like social networking sites than gaming sites anymore. But then, seriously strong communities have grown up around games. I would be somewhat dishonest if I didn't list a few of the things that I thought didn't help the game. The change from starting at the Cleft to starting at Relto did seem a little strange. That seemed to cater more to the exisiting players that had been through everything already than it did to new players who really didn't know anything about what had already happened. The shift from round the clock delivery to four-to-seven day episodes really made it hard for anyone to get anything going outside of the main storyline. Too many people who only wanted content left the game for the four-to-six weeks of downtime between episodes. I found that trying to do anything player centered during the in-betweens was near impossible. People just didn't want ot care or show interest. Start of an episode, and most people just wanted the content, please get out of my way. Episodes really changed the character of the game. It turned most of the live events into press conferences and made everything feel artificially compressed.

What I would like to see in a revived Uru

To be honest, I do not expect to see Uru revived any time soon. I hope that Cyan Worlds does a fairly detailed postmortem of the project and take a really deep look and measure what they accomplished with what they wanted to do with the game before making any decisions. I am hoping that if anything continues into the future, the there are NOT player-run servers. UntilUru was great, it really got me into the setting. But in hindsight, there was a lot of fracturing of the community with the number of shards and way that some groups seemed to have difficulty reintegrating into the community as a whole after the single server stage started. I would like to say that the community was strong enough, but I discovered during D'mala (the phase of the game that ended UntilUru and start MOUL) that there were real issues between some groups and these things were not completely resolved. I would like to see them take whatever actions need to be taken to resolve the technical issues and deploy a client and server that really are platforms for playing on modern hardware. Part of me would also like them to kind of leave all the old content behind. Either redesign the city from the ground up or realize that reopening the city twice is one time too many.

Starting the game

I agree with those that hold that an MMO needs to start multiplayer as quickly as possible. And they need to spend some time getting the player ready and the character integrated into the setting. To that end, I think a revived Uru needs to start at the character's home on the surface. There should be a fairly automated cinematic where the player sees the DRC site and then an e-mail pops up confirming their travel arrangements to New Mexico, to travel to the Cleft. The rest of the opening should be either on a plane or a bus, or both, and present the user the oppourtunity to review their notes or a journal or scrapbook they containing background information. Maybe this should include the inital notes on how to find their KI and Relto books. I hadn't thought that through yet, but others have. There may be an automated NPC on the bus also going to the Cleft that the new character can ask questions of. Then the bus get's to where the action starts and we get into multiplayer mode at a public cleft.

Getting things organized

MOUL starte with everyone kind of trying to pick up where Prologue and UU had left off. Prologue was strong on a specific story, which appeared to be DRC v Yeesha/Phil. I wasn't there, so I don't really know. UntilUru had no story, other than where people tried to maintain it. As you can see, very different experiences. Add in the players who maintained some very non-canon fanfiction, setting up offices in the city, taking over locations that were either used for speicific things in the canon or were inaccessible once things got going, and you can start to see how that caused issues. We need guilds from day one. Some solid way of organizing Explorers when they first get exploring. And at the start, it might be best if Cyan-run characters were the leaders of each of the guilds, at least till the commuinty gets used to the idea. There also needs to be something of another side of the story. The history of the modern setting is the DRC wanting to be safe, no age or area open before it is ready, and Yeesha or the Bahro or a DRC rougue or even Explorers wanting to open things faster and causing things to happen. Make the players decide and make there be consequences to these decisions. It's an MMO, why does every character need to experience every single thing that happens? Just let the story progress naturally. And yes, there need to be story. Uru doesn't have combat, or an economy, or grinding levels. So the story needs to be as strong as the content. To elaborate on this, when I was trying MxO, it was strange. I know a little about where the story has gone from people at work who play. Yet, during the 2 weeks I was playing, it seemed I was stuck back in the begining. The game was never evolved so that people starting out for the first time got an idea as to where the story was RIGHT NOW. Cyan shouldn't make the same mistake. Once things get going, the Cleft needs to reflect how things are moving forward. I like the idea others have put forward of getting rid of the neighborhoods. They didn't really seem to serve a purpose. Mind of made things a little harder organizationally. Too many people in some hoods. Too many hoods with only one person (I was one of these). And having the hoods all be copies of the same exact place caused some issues. Forced us to talk about instancing too much when we should have been in character. Let group have places for themselves, but spread them out. Use the guilds. Do something meaningful with hoods and city districts.

It's an MMO, right?

Starting the game should be public. I covered that already. And more of the game need to subtly keep the players playing together. When I first thought about the multiplayer capabilities of Myst, I thought how interesting it would be to have areas that could only be solved and fully understood working in teams. Honestly, I'm not sure any game gets this right. Forcing multiplayer comes off as artificial and too often you have experienced players either taking advantage of new people or pushing them through, and making them miss the point of the encounter. All in the name of getting through things quickly. There needs to be a strong encouragement to explore together. While a lot of things should be available to the solo player, there should be some things that solve differently with multiple players. I can't think of examples for this. The garden ages were easiest with 7 or 8 people. Ahnonay could only have been solved with at least two people working together. There needs to be some way of getting people to work together that way without it feeling fake. At the same time, everyone should be able to experience everything in the game. There should be some consequences for the deciions a player makes for a character. If I choose to do this, then I am unable to also do that. The only thing we had like that in MOUL were that one could only join one neighborhood and posses one guild t-shirt. With the exceptions of the guild pubs, everyone had access to everything. That turns the whole thing into puzzle collecting. And it doesn't give people a reason to even worry about characters. If I follow Yeesha, then getting access to some DRC things should be difficult if not impossible. If I follow the DRC, then maybe I shouldn't reap all the rewards of Yeesha. If I'm not there one week, maybe I shouldn't be able to do something at all, cause it was only available one week in May. I'm going to stop here. It's getting late, and I'm starting to lose my train of thought. I will write more on this later.