Another long episode review

belford · **Joined:** Thu Jun 08, 2006 7:01 pm **Posts:** 1890

(I think I'm not going to post the entire text to the forums any more. It's late, and I think the discussion has mostly died down. But feel free to respond here if you think I'm an idiot.)

My long review of "A New Light" is now up on my web site:

http://eblong.com/zarf/uru/rj/ep-newlight.html

--- edited to add:

Here are all the episode reviews so far.

They are all linked from my Uru review page, along with many other bits of review and commentary I've written.

Erik · **Posted:** Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:26 am

I think it was a very fair review. Good job.

Ged_UK · **Joined:** Sun Jan 21, 2007 9:21 am **Posts:** 508

That's a very good review, thank you!

Skrir · **Posted:** Thu Jul 05, 2007 10:12 am

It's always a pleasure to read your stuff, belford.

Robert The Rebuilder · **Posted:** Thu Jul 05, 2007 4:56 pm

Well done, Bedford! Your review seems quite fair.

Would it be worthwhile to mention that we actually received a third and fourth new area with Episode 6 (Uran and the two-level Bahro cave)?

Rusty_Russell · **Posted:** Thu Jul 05, 2007 7:02 pm

Could people get out of the habit of referring to ErcanaCitySilo as Uran? It's Ashem'em now, as you'll see if you have a conversation with anyone in there.

Marten · **Posted:** Thu Jul 05, 2007 7:52 pm

Rusty: It says "Uran" on the DRC Restoration Projects list, which was just updated.

So it's both

Ichabod_L · **Joined:** Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:51 am **Posts:** 501

Rusty_Russell wrote:

Could people get out of the habit of referring to ErcanaCitySilo as Uran? It's Ashem'em now, as you'll see if you have a conversation with anyone in there.

Actually, it's been Ashem'en for over 4,300 years. :wink:

Erik · **Posted:** Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:06 pm

What if Uran is in Ashem'en?

Just like J'taeri is in Ae'gura for example.

Ichabod_L · **Joined:** Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:51 am **Posts:** 501

Erik wrote:

What if Uran is in Ashem'en?

Just like J'taeri is in Ae'gura for example.

Uran is the old old old name for Ashem'en. To quote MYSTlore:

Ashem'en, originally named Uran, is a district in the D'ni city.

Around 5359 DE, King Me'emen renamed the Uran district to Ashem'en, in honor of his son Ashem.

belford · **Joined:** Thu Jun 08, 2006 7:01 pm **Posts:** 1890

To answer the original question: no, I didn't plan on listing every detail area that arrived this month. Besides, the silo and the Bahro cave act as rewards, not features.

raistlin75 · **Joined:** Mon May 21, 2007 5:51 am **Posts:** 134

I have to agree with your review and while it's nice to see Er'cana again, finding those 7 symbols and walking through the portal has to be the easiest solution to any of the ages. I was expecting a little more and a little extra content that they've had years to put in, but they just regurgitated the same exact thing we saw before.

I've given up on the story aspect of the game. They're seeming to of put less effort into in this month than last month. Just pathetic. I guess figure that the new players who join months from now aren't really going to care if there was any else going on where each age is released.

The real test of this game is what it looks like by the end of the year. They'll have run out of old ages to throw at us, until they get the rights to Myst 5 back and the hints that we'll be eventually seeing the original Myst island is interesting. By then we'll know if this lighting the lake mission will turn into another GZ fiasco and it'll give them plenty of time to see if this new Myst Online will sink or swim.

deerslayer · **Posted:** Sat Jul 07, 2007 8:06 am

It's a good well written review, hope Cyan reads it.

Alahmnat · **Posted:** Sat Jul 07, 2007 12:47 pm

raistlin75 wrote:

I have to agree with your review and while it's nice to see Er'cana again, finding those 7 symbols and walking through the portal has to be the easiest solution to any of the ages. I was expecting a little more and a little extra content that they've had years to put in, but they just regurgitated the same exact thing we saw before.

Um... Cyan's been kind of pre-occupied with re-writing large portions of their game engine's network cod, not to mention taking a year off of Uru to develop Myst V, to completely re-imagine Er'cana. It's more likely that the single-player incarnation we got in PotS was simply that close to the incarnation they had intended to create for Uru Live. Remember that Er'cana was almost complete at the time Uru Live shut down in 2004; screenshots of it were on UbiSoft's old website in the "why play Uru Live" slideshow. I doubt there was that much time to make changes to it in the first place for PotS.

Quote:

I've given up on the story aspect of the game. They're seeming to of put less effort into in this month than last month. Just pathetic. I guess figure that the new players who join months from now aren't really going to care if there was any else going on where each age is released.

I fail to see how one a story-light episode following one story-heavy episode last month creates a pattern of "less effort every month". Grey Dragon even posted that some months would be more focused on content than story, and this was one of them. Given that the content line-up for next month looks fairly light from the "coming soon" description on GameTap, I'd say next month sounds like another story-oriented episode.

belford · **Joined:** Thu Jun 08, 2006 7:01 pm **Posts:** 1890

Cyan seems to be taking the view that everything new to Uru Live counts as "new". And that's sensible, for two reasons:

First, if they felt they had to apologize for releasing old Prologue/POTS content, they would never have gotten started. Launch would have been delayed for months while they struggled to build a kick-off's worth of entirely new content.

And second, most players are not you. Most Uru players have never played Uru before. That *has* to be true. If Uru Live attracts only the long-time Uru fans, it can never achieve critical mass, and it's impossible to justify pouring more money in.

Furthermore, most of the long-time fans have already joined (or decided not to). Most of the *future* Uru players -- a potentially unlimited stream -- are not familiar with Ercana.

So rewriting Ercana has to be a lower priority than writing Jalak (and future new Ages). When you work out the numbers, with the goal of making the most players the happiest with your limited resources, that's what makes sense.

Another long episode review

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