I would love to face a villain in Live. Not a jerk (I'm looking at you Sharpie), a villain. Perhaps creating a common enemy would cut down on division drama, or at least package it in a new and exciting way.

One of the reasons I love the Myst series is because of the villains. I was used to Snidely Whiplash-type bad guys in my games, where they have no real reasons to be bad, or mindless demon monster "bosses". But all the Myst villains were fascinating for their dimensionality. Gehn, Veovis and A'gaeris, Saavedro, Esher, even Sirrus and Achenar--all had their own joys and hopes and fears as people, which made them all the more dangerous to deal with as The Stranger. I got chills seeing Achenar's cage in Mechanical, leaned away from the monitor when Gehn got close to the cage in 233, had hairs stand on my neck from reading the brothers' original plans for Atrus. The fear only helped me to be more immersed in the story and environments. And the fact that Cyan didn't resort to showing overt violence just made it that much more chilling for me.

So give me a Cyan-colored bad guy (or girl). Make me look over my shoulder when I wander the Ages alone. Make me startle at every loud noise in the cavern. Make this "evil" in D'ni be a genuine threat that we can interact with.

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DRC, give us more city areas, would you kindly?

The villain is lag.



No, really, I like your idea, but I don't really want to see an ongoing, single, individual villain (or a married one, for that matter!). I wouldn't want a long-term character to be that clearly defined. For me, part of the allure of most Myst games lies in being consistently unsure who to trust.

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"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
-Jorge Luis Borges, "Poem of the Gifts," from "The Maker"

I thought I was the villian.

Yeah, I agree with what you're saying. Especially if that villian
was played by a real human being . Of course the player
would probably not see him, and then only a glimpse, until the
story escalated. I can see someone escaping a prison age that the
DRC was checking out, and laying ages like Kemo or Delin to waste
or something like that.

UbiqriD'NIculous wrote:

The villain is lag.
For me, part of the allure of most Myst games lies in being consistently unsure who to trust.

Now we could be talking about a conspiracy!

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It's a pity that Cyan used Esher in EoA. I imagine that if they got to use him in the old Live, he would have been very charismatic, and dangerous for that charisma. People might not have known he was a villain until a long time after, or some could even agree with him and not see him as a "villain" at all.

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DRC, give us more city areas, would you kindly?

If they do put any villains in the game that aren't live, I won't be saddened. Esher's character was pretty well animated. (Even though he never looked in my eyes.) I'm still for live villains, though, if there are villains. There probably won't be for a year or so.

Cyan! Take a look at the NPCs in Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion! Bethesda did an awesome job with the eyes and the lip-syncing. All you have to do is steal their technology! just kidding.

I entirely agree! That's what Uru has so far lacked. I real bad guy. There is no sense of tension in Uru ABM as such. That's one of the reasons Riven is so good - you see Gehn's influence everywhere, and you never feel very safe. It was always tense. I felt the same way in Exile, especially when exploring Voltaic - that age put me on edge.

I really hope that Live will have that kind of storyline, with some kind of bad guy. I think that's what made the other Myst games so good

I like the idea of a common foe far more than dividing ourselves against each other. I think it makes for happier subscribers, too.

But I wonder how Cyan would deal with a NPC (computer-generated character) interacting with so many people equally, saying all the same things during the same point in each game? Cyan has made great efforts to maintain a high level of immersion to keep everything as if it were "real." What would be their IC (In Character/Cavern) explanation for a foe who could appear in so many places at once without advancing the story for everyone?

Hmmm....

Esher could be expanded substantially during Uru Live, which would be cool.

I figure that all characters are controlled by Cyanists, like the DRC members are, as opposed to them being actual WoW-style NPCs. I remember in Asheron's Call, the sleeping demon (Bael'something) that awoke to start the Apocalypse wasn't an NPC as such, he was "driven" by a person who worked at the company. Like with Phil's accident, not everyone in Asheron's Call was physically there when he awoke, but everyone in the game felt the consequences ("oh look, this town is now a smoking crater and the seas are turning to blood!").

And who said the villain had to work alone? Even if he didn't have Cyanist-controlled allies, the villain could be persuasive enough to get some of us to assist him (whether it be by charisma or through threats).

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DRC, give us more city areas, would you kindly?

I'd like a villain too - as long as we could be reasonably sure that physical danger wasn't so much a problem. If it were, we would start to want weapons to protect ourselves, and I feel that would be a bad thing to introduce and complicate things in the cavern. But if the character were someone like Esher, who is very canniving, but not wholly nasty, who gives chances to people as long as they do what he wants, and can be quite charismatic, now that would be interesting.

Andrew

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Silence. Introspection.
The weighing of possibilities.
Inking the pen,
eyeing over the Elements.

But it wouldn't be very tense if there was no physical danger.
Besides, there are other ways of defending ourselves. We
could kick a cone into the villian's path and trip him .

Perhaps someone like Saavedro, not in that he threatens to hurt you (doesn't he at the end?)but that he fiddles witht the Ages. Maybe at some point in the storyline he screws up your Teledahn book and you have to go through again to fix it?

No idea how the story could be involved in this, but corrupted Ages would be cool!

I think the villain or villains in Uru are much more subtle than the other games and for good reason. In the single player games, you had a beginning, a middle and an end, complete with bad guys, just like a good book. Uru Live, however, is meant to be a living, breathing, evolving storyline, and so having one main focal character as the "bad guy" would limit the reach of potential plots, sub-plots and mysteries to be unraveled over time. Remember, there is no real end to Uru's capacity, it's not a single player game with a finite ending point, and Cyan can keep building on it for a very long time to come (I hope!).

We need to keep 'digging' both literally and figuratively. More and more of the story needs uncovered as the DRC continues the restoration and as we are left more clues, more Bahro, more Yeesha, more ages to be discovered and solved.

It's a giant ongoing riddle. There may be far more than one villain in this plot, an entire race of people were wiped out and that usually requires a lot of people participating. Maybe it was one particular guild of D'ni, one group of the top-most class, who obviously used very diabolical means. Maybe some of them will start popping up in odd places to add some 'spice' and fear factor to our adventures?

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~Envie
KI: 02127837

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Ryan Warzecha (greydragon)
Former Cyan Employee