Illegal Operation: Back from the Grave

Carda here.

While appropriate, the post title has nothing to do with my laptop.  It’s back up, so I’m able to start posting again.

No, the title of this week’s little rant concerns a game that is near and dear to my heart: Uru Live, also known as Myst Online.  It’s been proclaimed dead multiple times, but it just keeps coming back.  What is it about this game that grants it perpetual Lazarus status?  To understand the forces at work here, let’s have ourselves a little flashback to late 2003, and the release of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst.

When Uru was released, it was originally intended to be two games in one box.  Ages Beyond Myst, or “Uru Prime” as it’s known both internally at Cyan and amongst the fanbase, was a single-player adventure much like Myst, the key differences being a real-time 3D environment and a third-person view with customizable avatars.  Uru Live, on the other hand, was intended to be a Myst MMO, in essence.  Players could join together to solve puzzles and explore Ages together, often providing players with experiences they wouldn’t get playing solo.

Uru Prime worked out of the box all by itself, but Uru Live was something of a work in progress.  (Still is, to an extent.)  The biggest hurdle of all was the fact that network technology in late 2003 to early 2004 wasn’t nearly at the level it is today.  A high-speed internet connection was still more of a luxury than a necessity, and the servers that Cyan and Ubisoft had at their disposal just couldn’t handle the load.  Lag was pervasive, and you would frequently crash to desktop.  Just a few months into “Prologue”, the community’s name for the Uru Live beta, it was shut down.

But the ending had not yet been written.

Rather than complain about the failure of the project, the Uru community worked with Cyan to keep the game running, if only on life support, as it were.  In an effort that became known as “Until Uru”, private server shards were made available to players who still wanted to experience the game world with their friends.  Menawhile, Cyan released “To D’ni” and “The Path of the Shell”, two expansion packs for Uru Prime that expanded the game world and story.

Until Uru was essentially a temporary measure, though it almost saw the end of an era.  News eventually came that Cyan were closing their doors, permanently.  However, just a few days after the announcement that Cyan had shut down, it was discovered that everyone had been called back in; the company wasn’t down for the count just yet.  Eventually word began to spread of an interested party who wanted to assist in the reawakening of the project.  As it turned out, the interested party was Turner media, and Myst Online: Uru Live was released on Turner’s GameTap network as an MMO with episodic content releases.

While it seemed as though Uru Live had finally found a home, it didn’t last.  After one “season” of episodes, GameTap pulled the plug, likely because the game wasn’t pulling in as much extra traffic to their network as they’d hoped.  (I kept my account for almost another year after MOUL was taken offline, and when I chose to cancel my subscription, the removal of Uru Live was a potential answer for “Why are you cancelling?” during the cancellation process.)

It seemed to some as though this might have really been the swan song, but the ending had not yet been written.

Several months after GameTap dropped MOUL, Cyan announced that they would be doing something unprecedented: they would be making Uru Live open-source.  Future content, including avatar clothing, Ages, and possibly even the story itself, would be created by the playerbase, submitted, and put into the game.  Features that had never been available before would be accessible to anyone who desired to monkey around with the code to make things work as originally intended.

It was over a year before fans would see the first steps of this transition to an open-source MMO.  Between the decline in the American economy and Cyan’s work on Myst for the iPhone (the latter of which could possibly fund the necessary development for the tools to transition Uru to open source), there wasn’t much news from the Cyan front.

Until this week.

This past Monday, Cyan announced that they were reopening Uru Live on their own server as a first step towards the open source goal.  For most of the following week, Cyan has been struggling to keep up with the sudden demand on their server.  They expected a few hundred returning players; they got a few thousand.

So what is it about this game, of the many MMOs in the past that have tried and failed, that has managed to resurrect it not just once, but three times since its inception?

First and foremost, it’s the community.  Uru’s playerbase has been a very tightly-knit group from the very beginning.  Players help each other, they gather in-game for various events, and they have formed long-lasting friendships through this game.

One reason for this may be that the game encourages cooperation between players rather than fostering competition.  While there are competitive activities, those are peripheral to the core of the game, which is exploration.  During the MOUL episodes, a pair of Ages were released that required a high level of coordination between multiple players in order to unlock a door.

Another reason Uru hasn’t succumbed to obscurity is its story.  As part of the Myst franchise, Uru has an incredible amount of backstory already, and the story continues to build its own story from there.  As if that weren’t enough, players themselves have become an incredibly important part of the narrative itself.  Here’s an example: an addition to the main city I recently discovered was a memorial.  A memorial both to characters who have died during the story and to well-known players in the community who have passed on during the game’s lifetime.  It was such a touching tribute that it prompted a personal moment of silence when I discovered it.  Few game developers hold their fans in such high esteem, to be sure.

As Uru moves forward into a new era of open source, the game will likely expand further than it ever could have under the oversight of Ubisoft or GameTap.  Cyan’s fanbase is for the most part very mature and extremely literate; they take Cyan’s worldbuilding seriously and aren’t likely to deviate wildly from that foundation.  Cyan knows this, and that is why they feel that they can entrust the expansion of the world and its Ages to the fan community.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some exploring to do.  Because the ending has not yet been written.  And that’s how I operate.

((A small footnote here: Uru Live is now completely free as Cyan works towards releasing the source code.  If you’re interested, you can sign up at mystonline.com and get exploring.  Most of the login troubles that have plagued the game for the past week have been ironed out now; I updated my client this morning and have been able to log in first try every single time since.  You’ll find me in-game as Carda.))