Uru Live and a note about environments

Uru Live - or Myst Online, if you like - is back. It went away, in a curious and opaque tale of last minute mismanagement, or some such: all I know is, they got this <---> close to launching, and it all went black.

And now it's back! And in beta. You can sign up here. I'm going to: Uru Live is the first MMO since WoW (and previous to WoW, SWG and CoH) that has made me sit up and take notice, and I realised this morning why that is. It's the environment. The world. Myst was just the most gorgeous, ethereal place, and even in flat screenshots I really felt like I was really in there.

I think too many of the recent MMOs have little to distinguish them: yet another swords-and-sorcery land, with turrets and tudor houses? Archlord is a good example of this (sorry to pick on you, Archlord): while the ability to become the arch lord is tooted as the main draw of the game, more or less nothing is said of the world which Archlord and potential arch lords live in. For me, that means, no interest is piqued: after all, if I'm going to commit to "living" in this land of their creation, I want to know what makes it special.

CNet's got the coverage, and this bit jumped out at me too: as with pretty much everyone else, the developers understand that player generated content makes both creative and business sense:

"We're still working out how this will work, but people could create clothing, objects or even entire new worlds," said Meiners. "The 'Myst' games are based on travel to new worlds, and the solving of challenges there. The community created a few of those...Part of the whole mythos was the creation of whole new worlds as an artwork and we're working on enabling the community to engage in that."

Of course that's also where it could fall down, but I'm remaining open-minded about this. Player or User generated content can easily be super appropriate if the creators are given sensible guidelines, and if they know their story...

Lastly, point of note: do you think maybe they've cracked the idea of  the casual MMO?

Players can move at their     own pace, spending hours discovering visually stunning real-time 3D     worlds, solving a large variety of mind-challenging puzzles, enjoying     the company of other explorers, and following an epic storyline.

Comments

[bob]

Looking at "Archlord," i wonder if they should stop using the term MMORPG and start calling them YAPTFCG (Yet Another Post-Tolkien Fantasy Cliche Game). Game developers, take note: Fantasy does not have to equal Orcs+Elves+Humans. Really.

The "casual MMO" is long overdue, and giving the player more creative power is very smart (I think WoW would benefit enormously from a more creative crafting system).
As for the "epic storyline" of Uru, this is one of the problematic aspects of "standard" MMOs such as WoW. I assume that it wouldn't be integrated any differently here. Epic narratives make perfect sense for a single player RPG- after all, the player *can* change the world. But telling us that we're "holding the fate of the world in our hands" in most MMOs isn't fooling anyone. We all know that as players we have absolutely no impact on the linear storylines. The most we can do is choose not to advance to the next text blurb of a narrative thread (but we also know that plenty of other people will). The only impact on the world that I have as a WoW player is the cost of goods in the auction house. (And that's assuming I'm willing to grind and sell.) It's rather perverse to use the promise of an "epic storyline" to draw players to a game where they are actively shut out of that narrative.

Actually, the whole idea of the world changing narrative is very much a Post-Tolkien Fantasy Cliche as well. Can we not be interested in a game world unless the narratives are on the grandest scales? Or are game developers just not able to create compelling narratives on a human scale? Perhaps some game developers are lousy at compelling narratives, period, and fall back on familiar cliches to propel things forward?

[Aluvius]

Interesting and yet the level of WoW fangirl/boism here is just as fevered as ever. I'd love to see some other genres developed as well, particularly sci-fi, but the reason most mmorpg's are fantasy based is because it sells.

[bob]

Aluvius, you've hit upon the problem right there- the idea that fantasy *must* equal Elves+Orcs+Humans. That *isn't* fantasy. That's a particular micro-sub-genre of Tolkien-by-way-of-DnD fantasy. It's as if every time anyone talked about 'vehicles,' they were only referring to 1997 Honda Accords.
Fantasy didn't start with or end with Tolkien (or Dungeons and Dragons). There's no reason to act like it did. Certainly the mechanics of DnD are the basis for the mechanics of most RPGs, but paper *fantasy* RPGs have moved far beyond DnD, and it's time that computer RPGs and MMOs did the same.
As for what sells or not, I think much of that has to do with how narrowly the game industry has defined the game mechanics and settings of various genres of games. If Hollywood worked the same way, they'd only be producing self-referential Arnold Schwarzenegger action movies. Some people would like and watch them regularly. Others wouldn't like them at all, and would decide that they didn't like "movies" as a result. If someone made a film version of say," Sense and Sensibility," the people who might like it wouldn't see it, as Hollywood had already convinced them that they didn't like movies. The film would do poorly, and as a result people would say that non-Schwarzeneggerian-action films 'didn't sell.' The game industry has created a similar situation for itself.
WoW has almost 7 million subscribers, worldwide. Hit American TV shows have almost 20 million viewers in the U.S. alone.

[Alice]

Gawd, Bob, INSPIRED. Perfect. Beer is on me for that one.

[Deg]

It's great to get Uru Live back. It alone will justify GameTap's subscription cost for me.

The environments definitely surprised me in the game (when it was in beta the first time around). I remember seeing a concept art sketch and thinking, "that could never be created in a realtime game." Then, after turning a few corners, there it was. I was soaking up the vista view I deemed impossible.