I'm diligently trying to catch up on all the IC events that occured during Prologue, but an obvious question springs to mind. Will Uru Live pick up where Prologue left off, with all the various plot threads that were left hanging being resumed, or will this new Uru actually be a NEW Uru, a new beginning? On the once hand, there has certainly been a continuation of at least some of the plot threads since Prologue's demise: Marie Sutherland's apparence in the D'Mala shard to announce the election of DRC liaisons, for example. On the other hand, from a marketing point-of-view having a clean slate would make the game more accessable to new explorers. No one wants to be thrust into the middle of a complicated plot without a clue as to what's going on. There's been talk of providing background information in the library to help newbies get up to speed, but how many people want to spend their first week in the cavern pouring over transcripts and minutes from long past meetings?

I know Uru is much more that just the struggle between the DRC, Yeesha's followers and whatever other groups are out there. But it IS a significant part. Has anyone heard anything that might shed some light on this question?

I didn't follow the plots the first time around. I'm not sure if I'd even notice if it was new or recycled. Still a few months away anywho.

I believe that the story started in Prologue was just that - a Prologue. It wasn't the story that Cyan set out to tell with Uru Live. It was just a teaser. A little taste of the intrigue that could be.

The group I joined during Prologue - the Great Tree - is working diligently on a project to make the events of Prologue accessible to new players. (Stay tuned on this website and others for filming announcements and episode releases.) This is an entirely a fan project but we're very excited at the opportunity to bring this story to newcomers. We expect that some of the threads from the Prologue story will continue into Uru Live. Threads from Myst V will also affect the direction of the story today - we've been told from multiple sources (in Town Halls, and on the DRC's website) that some portion of the Myst V story happened in 2005 on the timeline. So the Uru Live story may have changed some to accomodate that.

Yet my theory is that all of the above will turn out to be very small, perhaps even inconsequential, once the full story of Uru Live begins. It is like comparing a single candy bar to a shop full of candy.

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MOULa 26838 | Prologue Video Project: On Hold pending Minkata support
Visit rel.to to explore Myst, Uru, and D'ni communities!

I didn't follow the events of prologue, deliberately. If the info is not accessible to me "in game" - I'm not interested. The way the story in Prologue was done did not make it accessible to an online player who wasn't around when a live actor communicated part of a story.

If it's important, I assume that any relevent info will be made available in game, whenever I log on, day or night.

Remember that not enough people signed up for Prologue to make the first online multiplayer Uru a go. The good news is that that is is a brand new shiny start to Uru Live - a new day! I assume that they want both people who happened to play the first online Uru and brand new players. if you make it so that people have to go away and read stuff (or play other games) before they can experience Uru Live, a number of them won't come back.

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Retired forum mod, mszv, amarez in Uru (KI 89257), other online games
Blog - http://www.amarez.com, Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/amareze

mszv wrote:

if you make it so that people have to go away and read stuff (or play other games) before they can experience Uru Live, a number of them won't come back.

And a number of them may LOVE it!

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Professor Daniel Askew - A part of The Great Tree - Seeking the Journey since 2003

mszv wrote:

I didn't follow the events of prologue, deliberately. If the info is not accessible to me "in game" - I'm not interested. The way the story in Prologue was done did not make it accessible to an online player who wasn't around when a live actor communicated part of a story.

I agree with this point, but have some concern with the way you've phrased it. You seem to be implying (and pardon me if I am reading you incorrectly) that Prologue events were never at times accessible to some Prologue participants. When looking at the logs of Prologue events, I've realized that Cyan made a determined effort to keep interesting things happening all around the clock during Prologue. I see events that took place across a span of times during the day, ranging from 8:30 AM at the earliest to 11:30 PM at the latest, with 10 AM, Noon, 1 PM, 4:30 PM, and 7:00 PM times in between. (I still missed all of the events though, because the events ended after December '03, and I didn't get into the cavern until January '04. One month of running around, trying to catch up on what had already happened... and then the plug was pulled.)

Now, that being said, Cyan has previosuly gone on record to indicate that beyond Prologue, live events were not the method they wanted to employ to introduce new storylines. Though they made a valiant effort at accessibility during Prologue, it still left some (many?) players out of the loop. So, I suspect that while live events won't disappear altogether, by no means do I expect them to be the meat and potatoes of the Uru story presentation.

Quote:

If it's important, I assume that any relevent info will be made available in game, whenever I log on, day or night.

I feel the same way.

Quote:

Remember that not enough people signed up for Prologue to make the first online multiplayer Uru a go. The good news is that that is is a brand new shiny start to Uru Live - a new day! I assume that they want both people who happened to play the first online Uru and brand new players. if you make it so that people have to go away and read stuff (or play other games) before they can experience Uru Live, a number of them won't come back.

40,000 wasn't enough people for the company funding Cyan at that time. Again, perhaps I am reading things that you did not intend, but you seem to be implying that the needed numbers weren't reached solely due to an unsatisfactory Prologue experience. (Especially for those who, like myself, arrived in January and could only hear of the events that had occurred through hearsay.) While that could have been a factor, I think it was a very minor one and that there were far bigger issues, which have been discussed to death already (let's please not get into them again).

In summary, I'd like to again mention that the Prologue video project that The Great Tree is working on is intended to bring the story of Prologue to that audience that does not enjoy thumbing through musty old chat logs, or the DRC's website and forums, or possibly even in-game in Sharper's journal. (To this day, I have not read all of the journals in the Hall of Kings in The Path of the Shell. Standing around and reading them all just doesn't appeal to me.) This is a project that we know Cyan just doesn't have time to do, but we are dedicated to solving this accessibility problem for the Prologue story threads. Going forward... I don't think we'll be doing the same thing for Live. I agree with you 100% that Cyan needs to make the new Uru Live story more accessible than Prologue was. And I have faith that Cyan is taking the steps necessary to make it so. I also believe that in the Town Halls, they've already given us a few hints on how they intend to accomplish that.

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MOULa 26838 | Prologue Video Project: On Hold pending Minkata support
Visit rel.to to explore Myst, Uru, and D'ni communities!

Oops - sorry - wasn't clear. I don't know why enough people didn't sign up for Prologue. There's been lots of debate on why that was so, but I'm not going there. Ubisoft, the former publisher of an online multiplayer version of Uru, said that there weren't enough people who signed up during the free signup period, and so they cancelled the prevous online multiplayer version of Uru. That's what Ubisoft said, and that's the story I choose to believe, simple as that. It wasn't that the experience with Prologue was unsatisfactory (and how would one know that anyway?) - just that enough people didn't sign up.

Anyway, that was then, this is now - we have shiny new Uru Live!

I do think (and yes, this is my opinion) that the story in a Prologue was something of a throwaway. I thought that Cyan didn't have the resources to make a new story part of gameplay during Prologue - you know, solving a puzzle unlocks something in the game, lets you watch a video - a story that affects gameplay. I thought that most of the development resources were devoted to things like fixing the lag, fixing bugs, and making modifications to support a multiplayer environment. with more online players in the game at one time. So, I thought that Cyan attempted to create a story by means of using live actors. Assuming that they weren't paying, for example, screen guild actor union fees, it was essentially a cost free way of doing a story, again assuming that people from Cyan would be actors in the game, as, I suppose, part of their jobs. Oh wait - "cost free" is not exactly right, if you cost out what they were dong in Prologue, as opposed to working on something else, but you get the idea. I thought it was a relatively inexpensive and quick way to let some people experience something new in the game, if you didn't have the resources to make a story part of gameplay. Anyway, that's my theory.

The Great Tree project sounds wonderful!

And yes, I'm also sticking to my belief that if you send people away to do something before they can play the game (read stuff, play other games in the series) that enough of them won't come back to play the game, and you'll lose subscribers. I'd love to see some research on this - that would be so interesting. I'm hoping that Gametap and Cyan push the idea that you don't have to do anything to have a great time in Uru Live except sign on and show up!

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Retired forum mod, mszv, amarez in Uru (KI 89257), other online games
Blog - http://www.amarez.com, Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/amareze

There's no replacing the feeling you get when you run into a character with a live person behind the helm. You have influence over how situations turn out. That character can make decisions on whether or not they like you, trust you, whether they're annoyed by you, whether they agree with you.

You can't get that with a "scripted" character that you can run into at any time of day or night.

[quote="Cycreim"]There's no replacing the feeling you get when you run into a character with a live person behind the helm. /quote]

All the other Explorers are live people.

Scripted characters, while less flexible in their movements, conversation, and reactions, are potentially available for interaction with all Explorers rather than a few. I like that.

I believe the Cyan plan is for both history and immediately gratifying gameplay to be available.

Thanks for the clarification rsjm! And a fine analogy. It's like when I wake up in the morning. I seldom remember what happened the night before, but that doesn't stop me from dragging myself out of the trash bin, finding my pants and moving on with my day.

For my two cents - you can bet that Cyan will do what they have always done with the games, and books in the Myst series. You really don't have to have played past games or read any of the books to enjoy any future releases of either. Avid fans of course, will read / play them all anyway.

I have a feeling that less attention will be given to events that happened in Prologue - more emphasis on the new.

Stories, theories, conspiracies etc that stem from Prologue and evolve in UL will undoubtedly be introduced by diehard fan-based members anyway. It's a free country, and individual choice - you either take it or leave it. My guess is that most members will have enough on their plate with new stories, theories, conspiracies etc that will naturally sprout from the new game content.

We have all learned that reading through all the history books in the game doesn't necessarily give one an edge in gameplay - again individual choice. If you happen to like reading about past D'ni kings (I know I do!) so be it. There will be players - who will give these tomes a body swerve - their loss (in my opinion), but it won't make any difference to their gameplay. Cyan in their wisdom is out to please us all.

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oh wad some power the giftie gie us - tae see ourselve's as ither's see us

Last edited by Tokai on Tue Sep 12, 2006 10:47 pm; edited 1 time in total

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What about the content introduced in the expansion packs? I understand that it was initially intended to be introduced over time in the online version of the game, but had to be re-approached due to obvious reasons. Will this content share a similar fate as the events that took place in the prolouge? Will it be gradually re-introduced into the game as origionally planned? Will it be included at the very start? Will it just be set apart as another single-player experience, exclusively?

I played mostly through "To D'ni" but didn't ever buy "Path of the Shell," so I am fairly unclear as to what content was actually introduced. I heard some mention of a return to Myst(?) and the addition of a couple new ages, as well as more story regarding Yeesha.

I never had the chance to participate in the prolouge and only recently discovered the existence of Until Uru and the return of Uru Live. I am extremely exited to finally play Myst online.


EDIT:

Whoops. Upon further browsing, I found my questions already answered. Here's a link to anyone who may stumble upon this thread and ask the same things. Sorry for taking up a little extra space.