The Chaotic History of Myst Online
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- Опубликовано: 19 мар 2024
- How did a commercially-unsuccessful MMO become the playbook for online communities? In this episode, we look at "Uru: Ages Beyond Myst" in various forms, and discuss the exodus of its online players into other virtual worlds. Digressions include The Sims Online, EverQuest, and the struggle of finding good walkthroughs.
Chill Wave Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b..." 
Игры
There are still quite a few people walking around who are mentioned in the book and who are still involved with the Myst/Uru community today. You should talk to them.
Oddly enough, I remember reading your blog a while back after I had finished Communities of Play. Loved the tone and earnestness of it all. Would love to pick your brain sometime about all things Uru!
I looked into the Myst series a few years ago, just out of curiosity, and the whole Uru thing with its countless releases was just impossible to wrap my head around.
Definitely a confusing part of the series! I'm glad the offline version is still for sale, but all the different options can be pretty bewildering for new fans.
Would love to see a long form video delving into Myst Online. Never played but was always fascinated by this mmo. Great coverage.
I remember trying this game on Gametap when I was way too young to comprehend it. Really everything about Gametap feels like a fever dream now, but this game especially stuck in my mind.
Great presentation! As a teen I was an uber fan of URU (an outrgrowth of being a 90s baby who grew up with MYST and RIVEN). It's so wonderful to see URU getting some attention outside of, well, the community! Thanks for shedding light on this for a mass audience.
This is my first video of yours! The quality is incredible and the information was presented really well!
Regarding the two 'expansions' which the original Ages Beyond Myst received, To D'ni is primarily made up of social spaces planned for the online component (the local neighbourhoods and large Ae'gura city zone), with a few bits of smaller repurposed locations and a very light set of puzzles to try any tie them together.
Path of the Shell is comprised of a more substantial set of puzzles designed for at least two players, reworked into an approximation for a single player. This includes a much more developed set of overarching ending puzzles that are simply not present in Myst Online in any form, depriving much of Path of the Shell's content of a satisfying ending.
The Ages Beyond Myst content from the original release is preserved almost entirely in Myst Online, barring some oddities with how you access it to begin with. Meanwhile you didn't even touch on how Myst V: End of Ages features even more repurposed Uru content, with all of its ages originally intended for the online release at some point and rushed to market to fulfil the remaining Ubisoft contracts for a full game. It tries to tie a bow on the whole Uru affair, and the Myst series as a whole. Hardly any of its content was ever reinserted back into Myst Online (an extended version of K'veer being the only example), though fans working on the Descent project are attempting to rectify that.
There are also a few playable demos Cyan released for the series' 25th anniversary, featuring some content made as early as 2001 that ended up verbatim in both Uru and Myst V, which perhaps illustrates the strange development. Some ages feel vestigial in terms of puzzle and story content while others are full to the brim. It's oddly uneven.
As for walkthroughs, the old Guild of Greeters site used to house detailed walkthroughs covering both the online and offline components on clearly distinguished pages, with some high production values as far as screenshots and visual guides go. I believe the site is now defunct, but the Internet Archive does have workable snapshots: web.archive.org/web/20200716204821/www.guildofgreeters.com/
And through all of this fascinating discussion of the game's development and the parasocial community of fans, I think one aspect worth touching on in a future look at the game would be its in-game narrative. I've compared it to the Silmarillion in the past, a vast dollop of distant backstory lore with barely any forward plot or defined characters. Then there's the weird meta aspect with the DRC interacting as if it's a real world organisation, treating level releases as 'age discoveries'. None of it quite comes off as intended I don't think, but it is certainly unique.
I lost my mind when this game was announced; the idea of exploring and solving puzzles with folks online seemed irresistible at the time. I know it ended up on the burn pile, but I always loved the concept. Great content, subscribed!
was really fun to see a bit of our age opening video at the beginning there. great stuff, Uru is so weird and cool!
it's fascinating how a game in most ways about anthropology ends up recreating itself in two ways. when i play Uru, a game about sort of excavating the d'ni culture, it feels more like i'm excavating the excavators. who are these people who found the d'ni, and built this whole society around figuring out their culture and architecture and technology? the footprint of the DRC is suspiciously absent from the game. Where are they? Now i know, they're in Second Life and There Online, recreating their interest in the D'ni.
I COMPLETLY missed out on Uru, but I remember being excited for it (at least in theory), because I was a MASSIVE Myst fan when I was a teenager. I'm hoping they're able to revisit the original vision and bring out something that's closer to that.
please make a long form uru video i need this in my life as someone who grew up on it
What a brilliant channel. I'm so happy I stumbled upon this.
I'd play a procedurally-generated version of Myst Online, where each game session generates a unique age, and puts a group of players in it for up to 60 minutes of puzzle solving. Basically an online escape room, with beautiful scenery.
Procedurally generated puzzles sounds incredibly hard to do.
I think either the puzzles would vary little or would often generate in a way where they are unsolvable.
Glad that James Rolfe video brought me onto your channel. I think this is a fascinating topic, I wonder if there are more "gaming ethnographies" around, about online communities.
Man I remember trying to play my dads copy of Myst as a kid and I was uber stuck. I had a friend who had riven and I'm like how do you even get anywhere in that game's sequel. When the unreal engine 4 remake of Myst came out for 30 bucks, I bought it and that game still thrashes me even as an adult. I found a copy of Uru ages beyond myst at Goodwill and Its been sitting on my shelf for a long time now. Myst always seemed to be a super contemporary example of great marketing and distribution. Its hard to imagine making an MMO of it unless its people chilling and soaking up all the Myst Lore.
My introduction to Uru was a world in VR chat that was a port of the hub world to the online game I think, and man it was cool to look at in VR. It makes me want to see a VR port of the game to be honest, I really should give the online version a shot, I did buy the single-player version from GOG and got stuck almost immediately
Also, as a furry it's hard for me to not call it Uwu
@@chrisfratzas a furry please stop. :3
@@Mr.SpicyIce ok. :P
I'm surprised to hear there's any Myst stuff in VR Chat at all, so that's great to hear! It's been a while since I logged in, but I remember being really impressed by the levels people had made. The Black Cat and that one Undertale town were some of my favourites. I'll have to check out the Uru world at some point!
@@ComputerLabHighjinks oh yeah, there's also somebody that did a quick and dirty port of Myst island from realMYST Masterpiece Edition which is the remake so it makes sense that someone would try to port that world to VR Chat. Heck, if I remember correctly there is a Myst group in VR chat.
I remember starting Myst in the mid 90s around the same time I played Tomb Raider and later Doom.
Eder Gira you kick a log so you don't step in water so you keep fireflies. Not a joke. Good video!
I remember going through the entire Uru debacle start to finish. Being a huge Myst fan, I was nervous to see how they'd make a puzzle-based MMO work, because it's not like you can just keep changing the solution over and over. Cyan really took their two major successes and bet the farm on this. There was briefly a talk of a Myst movie made by fans than Cyan authorized, but then after losing big time on Uru, tried to bully their way back into owning the movie rights so they'd have some kind of life raft.
I was not attached to Myst Online, so after it sank I moved on. I was rather attached to Star Wars: Galaxies, though, and was devastated after that got gutted by Sony and eventually canceled. I tried moving to SW: The Old Republic, but it just wasn't the same experience.
I miss my Unreal Tournament (original '99) online community 😢
I'm still in Uru Online. Been there since beta 2003 and still pop in occasionally. I'm also a Greeter :) Can't take to There or SL really. I loved Uru it's shame it never quite made it
This channel is awesome!
Robyn wasnt involved with uru
Most fascinating. Myst fans are just built different.
Some notes from a mega fan...
1. Re: the thumbnail... "Myst Online" **IS** "Uru Live" - so it would probably be more accurate for your thumbail to read "Uru CC & Myst Online" (or even just "Uru & Myst Online") rather than "Myst Online & Uru Live."
2. As @trapez77 pointed out, Robyn was not involved with Uru; he left Cyan after Riven.
3. I gotta take issue with the question marks around "Guild of Writers" in the vid, it's really not warranted. It's right there in the name - this is a different community org that does a different thing - "Writing," or in this case, developing fan content. Very different from the Archivists Wiki.
4. Also, the goal of the Archivists Wiki isn't so much to provide walkthroughs but to provide a "lore book" of sorts, so I don't think expecting them to have age walkthroughs is necessarily fair - that being said, the fact that there are almost no walkthroughs designed for Myst Online IS definitely a problem; arguably an accessibility one! That is definitely a fair callout and something it might be prudent for the Uru fan community to reckon with.
If you are interested in doing a bigger deep dive into Uru, @eternal_sophomore and I would definitely be good resources to reach out to - we're both involved with The Cavern Today, a podcast that has existed in some form since 2005 (though there have been a few hiatuses) and has chronicled a lot of the ups and downs of the Uru rollercoaster, often in real-time. I'm also involved in the ongoing fan effort to bring new content & client updates to the official server Cyan still operates. We'd definitely be able to dish!
I appreciate the feedback! Those are fair points. I'm shocked I missed something as factually basic as Robyn leaving before Uru. I knew he left at some point and even directed a movie, but I didn't realize it was so early in the series. Strange.
Love the podcast, by the way! I've listened to a few episodes and it's such an incredible archive of the different eras of Uru. Also incredible that it's run so long, I think on some level podcasts were supposed to be these sorts of fan-run passion project shows, self-hosted online, before the word "podcast" became synonymous with celebrity interviews. Would love to pick your brain sometime!
@@ComputerLabHighjinks Thanks! And just to be clear - besides those particular nitpicks I listed, I gotta say I really enjoyed this video. Uru is an interesting little oddity, and being among its fans has been a pretty WILD rollercoaster ride of ups and downs over the years - I feel like you've done a great job of capturing both what is great and what is also kind of baffling about it pretty concisely.
1:18 Hey hey hey! It's my favorite. Don't take this from me too. T_T
subscribed ! great video.
cool
freeso