Uru: Ages Beyond Myst Review

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Uru: Ages Beyond Myst

Review by JenDecember 2003

I have played all three previous Myst games and liked them all fairly well. Unlike many adventure gamers, though, Myst was neither my first nor my favorite.

The first two, Myst and Riven, were designed by Cyan, a company formed by the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller. These were both groundbreaking in their visual beauty and in their gameplay style: they are inventoryless, first-person, environmental games set in a parallel world in which it is critical to pay close attention to your surroundings. Exile, the third in the series, was developed by now-defunct Presto Studios under license from Cyan. Exile continued the point-and-click tradition of Myst and Riven, with the addition of node-based panning instead of largely static slideshow-style screens; the overall feel of the game, though, was pretty much the same as its predecessors.

Uru is not the official Myst 4; rather, it marks the return of Cyan to the development of the D’ni universe as well as the first real massively multiplayer online adventure game. Cyan began designing Uru for online play some years ago; recall the hue and cry when it was announced not only that the next Myst was to be an online-only game but also available only to those with broadband internet connections.

Only recently was it announced that Uru would come with a single-player component in addition to the subscription-based online “dungeon,” for want of a better word.

This article is about that single-player experience since, as of this writing, the online component is available to very few players worldwide, and I’m not one of them. It is scheduled to open to everyone who wants to play (and who has a credit card number to pay for the subscription) in January 2004.

Well … one thing’s for certain: This ain’t your daddy’s Myst.

The most marked differences are the 3D graphics with attendant direct control, the ability to switch between first and third person, and … wait for it … your character jumps! Yep, you read it right. There are a number of puzzles that require multiple (meaning two or three, in most cases) attempts to complete a finicky vault to a high ledge or a low mesa surrounded by flowing lava.

Let me elaborate on that jumping part a bit. Yes, you must make some death-defying leaps, but you never have to rush and you don’t really die. Most of the time, if you miscalculate, you just go back and try again. Sometimes you have to travel a bit to get back to the part where you must make the attempt, but that’s by far the worst of it. If you’re determined never, ever to play a game with jumping, no way no how, then you’d best give Uru a miss; if, however, you’re willing to give it a try, you’ll likely find the jumping is no big deal.

The graphics are stunning, as you might expect from a Myst game. Eye candy junkies will eat this with a spoon and smack their lips in satisfaction afterward. As well, the sound design is masterful—as your character turns, the sounds move with her. The environmental ambience is very realistic, at least within the confines of the game world. Water cascades, rock grinds against rock—the sheer scale of the visuals and their attendant sound effects is really something to behold. This is a big game world!

On the whole, the puzzling style is pretty true to the Mysts that came before. You are thrust, in all of your wondering ignorance, into a strange place and must absorb clues from your surroundings as to what to do with the artifacts that you find here and there. Some of the puzzles are obtuse, as might be expected—you’d best have that walkthrough handy before you start. Others, though, are “gimmes,” which is unusual in a Myst game.

The control scheme takes some getting used to, as with all direct-control games, but it is simplicity itself. You have your movement keys and your jump key. That’s about it. All of the commands may be assigned to whatever keys suit you, and you can even use the mouse for much of the moving around if you so choose, although it is awkward. You will be required to use the keyboard to do things like jump (eek! there’s that J word again!), toggle run/walk, switch points of view (between first and third person), and sidle.  Not that I ever actually had to sidle, mind you … but I could’ve if I’d wanted to.

In each Age, the object is to find and touch seven Journey Cloths, which take the form of handprints on burlap. Once you have found all seven and then touch a final eighth handprint, you are through with that Age. (Or are you?) You are free to return to these Ages at any time, though, just to explore further or see if you missed anything.

After a relatively brief introductory Age that takes place on Earth, in New Mexico, to be specific, you get your own little Age called Relto, a platform in the sky with a hut and a hill.  Inside the hut is a bookshelf where all of your fine, shiny new linking books are stored as they become available, with plenty of empty slots for subsequent online Ages. You carry a linking book with you at all times that takes you back to Relto when used.  If you “die,” you are carried back to Relto. As well, Relto contains a wardrobe where you can change your appearance, not just your clothes but your features and I suppose even your gender.

Within each linking book, you get a choice of going back to the beginning of its Age or to the last Journey Cloth you touched.  In addition to finding linking books within the Ages, you will come across a different sort of page for your own book, green hieroglyphs that, when activated, add little personal touches to Relto. These can all be turned on or off at your pleasure.  I’m still not quite clear on what these are good for, other than some slightly amusing farting around; I suspect they will come into play when the MMOAG (now there’s an acronym I never thought I’d see in print) opens and you must distinguish your Relto from those of others to which you may be invited. For now, they are just fun little extra goodies to locate and obtain.

Bear with me while I theorize a bit here: I suspect the single-player experience was built from some of the episodes originally planned to be online-only. The mechanics of the whole thing are set up to accommodate online play. For instance, you can’t save in Uru—your progress is marked on quitting, and you always begin subsequent sessions in Relto. This can be a curse when, say, you miss a jump and land back in Relto and have to link and trek back to the jumping-off point to try again. Fortunately, at least for me, no jump took more than two or three attempts, but still … a bit of a pisser, ’twas.

Also, throughout your single-player Ages you will catch glimpses of a great cave city that you will not actually visit. I think this is the city of D’ni that forms the nucleus of the online experience. As well, there are areas that are blocked off with cones and barriers such as you find around big potholes in real life. I bet those will go away as new online content is developed, giving access to more areas within the Ages you’ve already visited and tying them all together.

A drawback, a big one, is that you play an able-bodied chick (or guy, if your inclinations run that way) and yet you cannot use your arms or hands. When you have to manipulate an object in the environment, your only choice is to bump into it, sometimes lots of times, to nudge it into position. Unnecessarily time-consuming—I think a better approach would have been to allow the player to pick up and drag objects with the mouse or somehow hold items for a brief period.

All in all, I had more fun with these five single-player-afterthought Uru Ages than I did with any of the three previous Myst games. I was completely addicted. I think the jumping and the necessity of switching between third and first person to solve certain puzzles adds an enjoyable extra layer to the gameplay.  And Uru seems to have a certain indefinable joie de vivre missing from either Myst or Riven.

To those who complain that this is not their daddy’s Myst, I can only point out that there is nobody in this world more qualified to define—and redefine—the Myst world than Cyan. It’s their baby, after all. You don’t have to like it … but I sure did.

I’ll even go out on a limb here and predict that this, in addition to or instead of Broken Sword 3 (which I’ve not yet played at the time I write this), is the future of adventure gaming. Love it or hate it, I believe we will look back in five or ten years and see this as a watershed moment in our brief gaming history, in much the same way as the original 1993 Myst is now viewed. That being said, how can I give Uru anything but the Gold Star?  Besides that, it’s loads of fun to play. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Cyan Publisher: Ubisoft Release Date: November 2003

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback

Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows XP/00/ME/98SE 800 MHz processor 256 MB RAM 32 MB video card DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card DirectX 8.1 (included) 4X or faster CD-ROM drive (not recommended for use in a CD-RW drive) 2 GB free hard disk space Mouse, keyboard

Where to Find It

GoGamer 37.90

Prices/links current as of 12/13/03Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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