Wednesday, February 15, 2006

New Beginnings, for all of us.

Can you do it? Can you walk through this door Cyan has given us, with open heart, open hand, and open mind? Can you start with a blank page, and begin anew?

Who gives a flying squee if such and such a group has a 'hood already? Who cares if so and so has made an avatar? Sure, we can go back to our own little corners and kvetch to ourselves, but are we humble enough to take what Cyan is offering, and make a fresh start of it? Can we let the wounds heal, or will we keep opening them? Can we put away the blame and judgement and rebuild, or, like the D'ni, will our pride keep us down?

What 'they' and 'them' are doing is unimportant. What matters is you. Me. Are we ready for d'mala, and D'mala? I sure the hell am ready to try.

*holds out hand*

Who's coming?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I agree! I'm more than willing to stop stewing over old hurts and join the new community.

Anonymous said...

From mszv -
You've cast this experience as some sort of religious experience. What's the deal with being "humble"?

Sure, I'm going to go to the new Cyan server, and I'm going to enjoy myself in Until Uru. I'm not on that much anymore - usually just go to the events - the Christmas party on Tapestry was so much fun! I do think that it's great that Cyan is running an offical server - very promising.

But, I feel no need to be "humble" - humble in front of what - a game company? Why should I be "humble" in front of people who produce a commercial product? What am I not getting here?

I think Cyan wants online Uru to be successful. That's great - I do too, and I'm happy to pay a subscription, if it comes down to that, assuming the online experience is something I enjoy. Does that mean I'm going to abandon my critical eye - of course not. For example, if there is lag, I'm not going to pretend it's not there, just because "it's Cyan". If it seriously impacts my enjoyment of the game, I won't be visiting.

Do I think the original online Uru was both interesting, fun to be in and seriously flawed? You bet - aside from the serious lag problem, the big issue for me was that there was so little to do, and remember I was in online Uru for a long time, considering that I was in entire 2003 beta, and the Prologue. Remember, good gamers were burning through new content in a day. I also didn't like the Prologue story. I'm not looking for a second hand story - if there is going to be a story in Uru, I want it presented to me when I'm playing, not as hearsay. If that means the story happens in a private age (you know, something akin to an instanced dungeon) - so be it.

The most promising part of this new situation is, in my opinion, the recognition by Cyan that people want to create their own ages. That's nice - it's a recognition on how people want to play the game, and something of a change for Cyan, a company that generally likes to control the player environement and experience to a strong degree - none of the solo player games were released with mod tools. That's fine, that's been their game model, and it worked for them for a long time. What's interesting to me is seeing a change in their game model.

Another difference is that I didn't feel "hurt" that online Uru was pulled. I was sad, but not hurt, not in the slighest. I didn't feel let down by either Cyan or Ubisoft, nor did I feel hurt or let down by the community. Cyan, Ubisoft and the community are what they are. My only, well, let's say "issue" with the community is that it is somewhat of a closed community, which makes sense, if you think about it. There's no online game with new content - so there don't seem to be any new folks coming to online Uru. For the solo player games, well, it seems to me that the "avid" fans are a small subset of the folks who just buy the games and enjoy them.

I do wish that Cyan and/or Ubisoft would have listened more to the comments we gave them in the beta, about what was and wasn't working. But, you know, maybe they did - listen that is! I'm not privy to that sort of thing. The fact that Cyan is interested in providing an enviroment for people to make their own ages - perhaps mod tools (a person can hope) - that implies to me that they are listening now.

So, yeah - great - but absolutely no need to be humble.

EleriCooks said...

the idea of humility comes not from the shutdown of Live, but from the numerous bitter conflicts that developed across the UU shards. Much mud was flung, many feelings were hurt, and UU imploded in many ways because of it. Shards stopped having regular attendance because of all of the bad blood flowing, and very few people felt like UU was 'home'.

The call for humility goes out to the people who were involved in taht, including me. Can we step down from being 'right', and just admit that the whole situation was fucked up.