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My top five ages in Uru:
#1) ours - think about it, almost a third of Uru, including basically all of the public areas, takes place on, or under the surface of, the Earth. There's the cleft, and Ae'gura and Bevin/Kirel, the Great Shaft, Great Zero, K'veer, the pubs... all these sections of the cavern city that are full of lore and history and massive in scope. A lot of the diehard fans were excited about Uru in the first place largely because we'd see these places, that up until 2003 had only been legendary text in the novels, and never shown visually in a game. Many of them have amazing audio too, like the Kadish Gallery area.
#2) Ahnonay - not only is there some awe-inspiring stuff accessible by the end, but the story behind the age is fascinating and the progression through the different parts of Ahnonay is great. It's great to watch it all unfold in front of you. There's some really nice music in places here too.
#3) Kadish Tolesa - beautiful to look at and listen to, substantial, maybe the most iconic part of the game out of the gate with Teledahn as the arguable exception - and logically structured, as others mentioned already.
#4) Teledahn - again, reasonable puzzles that make sense, a lot of interesting places to explore, and a real atmosphere to much of it.
#5) This is trickier to decide what deserves to be up here, but I'll go with Minkata. It's got some real navigational frustrations, and you can frequently get lost, and plenty of vacant space, but the flip side is it is large, the completion of the age as you explore and make actual progress is great, with some strong visuals and wow moments, and the music's really top-notch too.
Honorable mentions - ages that don't make the top five and why for me they didn't:
-Eder Gira and Eder Kemo are both beautiful and have some great bits, but the freaking basket thing is a badly executed piece of puzzle design, which in my mind disqualifies Gira from top five... and Kemo doesn't have enough content on its own to match the above listed ages which is why in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst the two ages are lumped together as 1/4th of the core quest. They're not substantial enough individually.
-Gahreeseen has some real insights and good puzzle design generally, a lot of areas to play through, plus there's some reliance on timed puzzles, which is not my preference usually but these ones aren't awful. But it hasn't aged all that well and was not particularly pretty in many places to begin with. The aesthetics are a bit too drab and gray - even the outdoors is a bit dull in some ways - and that monotony visually compares poorly with the more visually striking areas of Uru.
-I feel about the same way with Er'cana, large swaths of 'not all that pretty and not too interesting' punctuated by the occasional beautiful thing. But Er'cana's more brown than gray. The pellets at the end are a waste of time too.
-Delin's beautiful, one of the more appealing ages, but it's way too limited in size to consider. There's simply not much there... and even less in Tsogahl.
-Reziksehv, i.e. the pod age, has variety of views, which is nice, but no real exploration, just windows out into something, and actually solving the puzzle that ties it all together and completing it is pretty tedious. Plus, the Tetsonot pod lacks much of anything interesting.
-Relto's nice. It's pretty seeing an island in the clouds, and the nod to Myst Island's shape is appreciated, you can do a few things with it like change clothing, customize the Relto pages, etc, but it's limited in size, has no actual puzzles, and mostly ends up being a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else with more to do.
-Jalak was intended to be a physics playground where people made games, but not much ever came out of it for most players, mainly because Uru's physics aren't all that solid, and the Jalak interface has only so many good things that can be done in it. This said I'll admit it's also pretty, but sadly very very small.
FOOTNOTE: There are SO MANY AMAZING AGES IN URU, but in the end though, we need to look forward, not back with Uru. Our challenge as a community is to create NEW content, new material that can help Uru thrive for players, instead of endlessly revisiting the existing ages. If any of you are interested in making new ages, good ages with high levels of quality, the sort that can come at least somewhat close to Cyan's standards, visit the Guild of Writers website and start working with Blender & Korman. This fanbase needs more people who are skilled in:
-3d art
-texture art
-music composition and sound effects design
-programming
...and who are willing to make an effort to make more great ages that are MOULa compatible [even if, realistically, Cyan won't approve most of them due to limited quality.]
_________________ Matthew L. Hornbostel, creator of Panoramic Worlds,
a Myst fansite, and
various other stuff.
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