Out of Cavern

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.

Tonight, at 00:01, is the shutdown of Myst Online: Uru Live. 

My goal for the next few hours is to spend time in the game with the rest of the community that have stuck it out till now.  It is hard to avoid the cliché from the Myst games.  Within the games, and the community, everyone wants to say that "the end has not yet been written." 

With the game shutting down, for the second time, with the second publisher, it is hard to see how MOUL will ever be anything more than a curious oddity in the history of online games.

For the last five weeks, there have been a number of forum posts, blog posts and articles by members of the Myst community and the gaming industry, that have talked about the end of Myst.  There have been passing remarks on yet another game being canceled or closing.  There have people wishing for, demanding and begging for a restart of UntilUru.  There have been wild, impossible plans for continuing the game without GameTap and even without Cyan.  Like I said: impossible.

There have been discussion about how the game could have been run.  How the very essence of the game was changed by Ubi's insistence that at least part of the game (the Prime ages) be available as a standalone game.  There were arguments and debates about how the Cleft, the hoods, even the city and ages should have been organized, instanced and delivered.  The value of Yeesha, the DRC, various community organizations, role playing & playing Uru in character (cavern) and playing Myst out of character (cavern) all have been debated. 

The community has talked about what happens next.  What we can do. Where we will go after the sound of the last link fades in our ears and the stark reality that it was merely just another game, and now it is over.

And through most of this, I have been somewhat quiet.  Unless, of course, one was listening on CyanChat.

What is left of the community has started gathering together in the places we hold dear.  The last in cavern meetings are being organized and everyone is saying their good-byes. 

Not really good-bye.

This community has been together in one form or another since shortly after the release of the first Myst game in 1993.  Here we are, fifteen years later, gathering together both in and out of the game, celebrating what we all hope is not really the end.

Had a pleasant surprise tonight while I was looking at the statistics for sysmango.com.

About once a month, I take some time and go through the logs produced by the web server. I used to post the findings once a month, but I have not done that recently. There are sometimes interesting things buried in web logs.

This month, the interesting thing was a number of inbound links from an article at apple.com. The article is part of Apple's support for GameTape and Cyan releasing a version of Myst Online: Uru Live for Macs. On page 3 of the article, there is a quick introduction of In Cavern v Out of Cavern perspectives in Myst. Guess what site they picked as an example of In Cavern?

One of the statistics packages I run reports only 18 links from apple.com. Another reports only 9. I was only able to find 5 in the raw log, but that only represented 23 March to 24 March. Still it was interesting. Only greeninkforall.com has provided me with more inbound hits.

And here I thought nobody was even bothering to read that content.

I do have to wonder when they made the decision to use Sysmango.com's IC feed as their example. I haven't posted anything since 08 February.

Looking at the statistics from Google Analytics, I have had zero real traffic over the last couple of weeks. Just getting a casual mention on big website does not automatically mean your site is going to get killed by all the hits. Mostly because there have not been any.

I actually woke Natalie up to show her the page.

I am just really surprised. There are a lot of Myst websites. There are about thirty-two other Explorers registered via Uru Blogs as having In Cavern blogs or content. Honestly, there are other sites that are more active and better focused than what I have posted In Cavern, with authors that are a lot more involved in the happenings in the Cavern and the community.

Is it enough to just say that I am amazed?

What if the worst thing that could happen to Myst was that Myst Online: Uru Live becoming a successful MMO? I am sitting here about two weeks till the official launch date of the game. This is something I have been waiting for since the idea of an online version of Myst was first announced. I look forward to so few things, I think I could list them all, and Myst has been one of them. I am sitting here right now actually a little afraid of the idea of this game being opened in two weeks.

In many ways, the community that has grown up around the Myst games is more at risk now than it ever has been.

Myst was first released 1993 and the concept of an online version was proposed on 1997. The original attempt for an online version was canceled in 2002, before it ever went live. But the community remarkably kept together and continued. When Cyan released a version of the online server for anyone to run, and a patch to allow the available clients to participate, it was almost good enough.

Today, the end of the network of servers has been announced.

And the feeling of what is coming to this community is making itself felt again.

How will we deal with this game no longer being “just for us?” It has felt that the Myst games since 2002 have been for the community from the canceled online version.

In fifteen days, it becomes something for GameTap to market.

There is an understanding that what we are doing right now is waiting. We are waiting for the official release. We are waiting to see new content. We are waiting to see the continuation of this story. We have waited four whole years, almost to the day of launch.

I have to wonder what will be coming through the front door once it has been open. I wonder who will walk out because this is not the game “just for us” anymore.

I have heard from people playing MxO that they get people from other SOE games all the time who have never seen the Matrix movies. I wonder how many of them have played a fourteen year old video game, read the three novels and played UntlUru for the last couple of years.

Who am I kidding, they have all been playing WOW since 2004.

I think I have said before, I am not really a fan of forums. I do have a forum here, but you can see that I really do not use it in a manner of a traditional Internet forum. Mostly, I do not have enough people coming here to support having busy forums. I have had less than 100 visitors in the last week.

But I have been looking at forums quite a bit really. Myst Online's website. the DRC website. A co-worker's MxO website. And what do all these sites have in common? The majority of the content that brings people to these sites are in the forums.

I am not saying that forums do not have their place on the Internet. My problem is in how people are using forums to do very non-forum things. What do I mean by non-forum? Ever try to use a forum as the medium of communication for a IC story? How about for the posting of a tutorial or walk through or howto?

One of the issues I have with forums is that they make it very difficult to create a narrative. And they make it almost impossible to follow one.

How can anyone enforce a narrative flow using forums? Do you post a new topic for each “chapter?” Do you do introduce the narrative in the original topic and then post each part in comments? Do you take a mixed approach for each section? What happens when people start commenting on your thread and even start adding to the narrative, spinning it off in really weird ways? Ignore? Assimilate? Give up?

And how do you or your readers navigate the narrative once it is together?

One of the people at work has a website dedicated to his MxO faction, an IC group. They had originally been using phpBB to run their site. Like most groups they had content that just didn't fit in the forums. So they had a separate section and a page that launched either the static, hand-coded content or the forums. Myst and Uru Obsession sites run pretty much the same way.

But is this the best way?

Yes, the web allows for easy linking between resources under different domains of control, even between different hosts. But this makes for a somewhat fractured experience, even when one implements a solution that integrates the static and dynamic content under different domains of control into a single interface.

I convinced the coworker to look at Drupal and other software like it. I use Drupal here, and I am quite happy with what it has allowed me to do, after the original mix of MovableType and Blogger I was using. Is it perfect? No. Does it give provide all the features that a lot of people have gotten used to with various forum solutions? Not exactly. But isn't that the point?

Using the facilities in Drupal, a number of the more active IC posters on that site have started posting their IC content as Drupal books. There have been less comments on the book sections, but the stories are now told in a manner that makes a little more sense. There are still issues with this approach, but the site is growing, and learning its editorial workflow and how to most effectively use their main page.

I really do not like forums. I really prefer the 'River of News' style of presentation that I get from the 'View new posts' function at a forum. Most people seem to actually read sites that way, only resorting to reading the content via the forum interface when they have to catch up after a long time or are new to the forum.