This is a story about why I don’t like playing Myst Online much anymore.
Disclaimer: this article was written based solely on my own personal experience with Uru Live. The opinions expressed in this article are my own, and even though I have an internship at Cyan Worlds, neither Cyan Worlds, GameTap, nor any other party do necessarily agree with them.
How it all started
After Cyan Worlds made the incredibly popular Myst and Riven adventure games, they started working on a new and very ambitious game project. This new game would not only let the player experience Myst-like worlds in real-time, but even online, with other people. The game eventually became known as Uru.
Initially, Uru was a failure. It never even got out of beta—it got shut down abruptly, and was forgotten for years until it was resurrected by GameTap as Myst Online: Uru Live. The community was more than pleased to see Uru return.
GameTap’s incarnation of Uru Live was the first to leave beta, and it was also the first incarnation where Uru was available for Mac. Never having played Uru before, I didn’t hesitate a moment to start playing the game.
Initial impressions
I loved Myst Online the very moment I logged in for the first time. I actually felt overwhelmed at first: there are so many places to visit, and there is so much back story behind every place… you barely know where to start.
Quite a few people offered me some help to get me started. Running through an age and solving puzzles with somebody else definitely is a lot of fun.
Downfall
Online-ness ruins immersion
The main difference between Myst and Uru is the fact that Uru is online. While playing Myst is a solitary activity, playing Uru connects you to dozens of people who stay in contact all the time.
Online players can be divided into two large groups. The IC (in-character) people think of Uru as real: real places, actual people, real history, no fiction at all. The OOC (out-of-character) people, on the other hand, treat Uru as a game.
If you’re not familiar with the terms IC and OOC, you may be wondering what the point is of not treating Uru like a game. It’s a game, so why pretend it’s not? The answer is “immersion”. Let me give a quick example.
When you are playing Myst, you still know the game is fiction. Atrus is actually acted by Rand Miller, but when you’re playing the game and run into Atrus, you don’t feel the urge to ask “Hey Rand, how’s Cyan doing these days?” because you’re talking to Atrus and not Rand Miller. You’re in-character.
When you are playing Uru, you also know that the game is pure fiction. Atrus doesn’t appear in Uru, but the game has other characters, which are all played by Cyan Worlds employees. For the sake of the argument, let’s just assume that Victor Laxman is played by Ryan Warzecha. Now it would be possible to ask Victor Laxman about how things are going at Cyan, but from an in-character perspective that would not make any sense at all. If you think of Victor Laxman as played by a Cyan Worlds employee, you’re out-of-character.
Some people prefer playing in-character, and some people prefer out-of-character. That’s fine, as long as the two kinds of people don’t clash. If you start talking OOC in an IC session, you’re ruining other people’s immersion, and if you start talking IC in an OOC session… well, then you’re just a nerd.
All online games are out-of-character at times. In offline games, being OOC does not make sense—it only ruins your own fun. Uru is online, and Uru is about immersion. The two don’t mix well. At all.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is anything you can do about that. Except for making Uru offline, but I don’t think that’s a solution at all.
It gets dull
It doesn’t take a long time before you’ve solved all puzzles and visited all ages. Adventure games like Myst don’t have a great replay value: once you’ve solved a puzzle, you never forget how to solve it. In other words, replaying is dull because it’s reduced to routine.
Myst games don’t have any monsters to kill. There are no quests to take. You don’t level up. You can’t keep on playing just to get more experience and more money so you can buy better weapons so you can kill stronger monsters, so you can get more experience and more money, et cetera.
If you play Myst once, you can play it again and almost exactly the same will happen (unless you plan on playing towards an alternate ending). There is little dynamism in such adventure games—they’re more like movies.
Uru is mostly about exploring—that’s why players are usually referred to as explorers—but you can’t keep on exploring forever. The rate at which new places are being made available is not high enough.
However, I don’t think churning out new areas to visit at an increased rate is going to make Uru a lot less dull. It’ll help, but what Uru really needs is a much higher replay value. New areas help, but there are other ways.
Embedded games
Uru is too focused on puzzles and exploration. There’s little joy in solving puzzles over and over again. I’d like to see more “embedded games” in Uru.
For example: players can currently play “Ahyoheek”, which is a form of Rock, Paper, Scissors that not only requires luck but also strategy (this description doesn’t do the game justice). It’s a simple game, but it can be quite a bit of fun.
First of all, I’d like to see more such games. These can be simple board games, but can also be more complex, such as Minkata search games, real Jalak games, and even D’ni variants of paint ball. I’d also like to see a global score board that keeps track of player’s scores and ranks in all games.
Competition between players can’t be bad. It gives people something to do when there’s no puzzles left to be solved. Players could get “credits” or “experience” for games they’ve won, possibly allowing them to level up, giving them access to special items and more challenging games.
Uru is about a long lost and highly advanced civilization. You’d expect such a civilization to have many ways of entertainment, but you don’t see much of that in Uru. (No, I’m not saying there should be Bahro hunting arenas!)
Anybody interested in D’ni speed boat racing?
So are we doomed?
Myst Online is a very cool concept that is unfortunately not executed as well as it could be. The reason is not that Cyan Worlds consisting of nothing but incompetent people, but rather that the ideas behind the game—socializing and exploring—need some extra help to get right.
On a good day, there are maybe 100 people online at a given moment. On a bad day, probably not even a dozen. Compared with World of Warcraft, those numbers are very, very small. Uru needs to give players something to do when they’ve run out of ages to explore—there’s little that keeps them from logging off.
Exploring ages and solving puzzles may have worked quite well for Myst-style games, but Uru isn’t a Myst game. Uru has real people to interact with. You can never finish Uru—it just keeps on running. Uru is very different.
Cyan should stop thinking of Uru Live as an online version of Myst. There’s a reason why the game was called “Uru: Online Ages Beyond Myst”. There’s so much more “beyond Myst”, but we haven’t seen much yet.