Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Waiting for Uru

Marten said:
My point is: If Cyan is not involved, whatever you have is not really [i]Uru[/i]. You can call the game whatever you like... you can pretend that it is Uru, you can put the word Uru in the name, but it is like calling the sky green and the clouds purple; it doesn't change what it really is, and any incarnation of D'ni won't be Uru without Cyan.


Yes. This.

Fan made, fan driven, fan centric is a good thing. People can fine-tune their social and sandbox space the way they want it. There is already tangental way to do this, witness the thriving Uru-centric communities in There, Second Life, and (to a lesser extent) Guild Wars. There should always be a place in the Uru world for fan creativity.

But fan run live options are not Uru. They are using D'ni as a setting, but they aren't built around D'ni, and the mythology of Aitrus, Ti'ana and descendants. Uru *is* that story. Always has been. Always was meant to be that story. We were meant to be players in that story.

So, if Cyan stepped up today and said "You have a choice, you can have access and rights to materials, you can make fan shards or servers or Ages or whatever, but the price is that we will never move forward with Uru or the D'niverse again... or you can wait, bide your time, and eventually we'll pick up where that story left off." then my vote would be for waiting.

Not because Cyan is perfect, not because they haven't made any mistakes, but because, when it comes down to the bottom line... Uru, the real Uru, the settinggs and mythos of D'ni, is *theirs* not ours. It's their creation, their story, their vision, their world. And it's also their IP. We don't have the right, legally or ethically, to demand or expect they hand any of it over to us, no matter how much we want it, no matter how cool it would be to have UU2: Electric Boogaloo, no matter how much we miss hanging out with others in the cavern.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well said.

Anonymous said...

I agree completely with your view, however this part isn't all true:

"But fan run live options are not Uru. They are using D'ni as a setting, but they aren't built around D'ni, and the mythology of Aitrus, Ti'ana and descendants."

Some fan made content (Whilyam's Ages) is built around the D'ni storyline and perfectly fits in the canon. You could compare it like how the Lara documents were accepted, not made by Cyan, but still built around the D'ni. However, you're right about most fan made content.

Anonymous said...

I would also vote for the bide my time were Cyan to give us that choice. However, I don't see any UU2 being a lasting presence. More a structure to tide us over until something from Cyan can happen (as UU1 was).

I would really rather not have either of your two options, but instead the third in which Cyan produces content when they can (without giving release dates like they did with the episodes, thus having the cavern mostly empty most of the time in-between)and the fans produce content when they can.

I understand what you mean about fan content (about little of it having to do with D'ni and little of it making sense), mine fits into those same categories as well. However, 1. keep in mind that only recently were we even ALLOWED to make D'ni content at all and 2. Uru has had nothing to do with the story of Atrus and only little to do with Yeesha. The rest was centered mostly on the D'ni themselves (which a number of fan stories/initiative are based around as well). All of that doesn't particularly matter to me, however, because I'm of the opinion that you allow as much content as you can (barring stuff against your own Terms of Service) and let the community determine quality on their own. I'd like to see a "visits" sorting option in any fan age distribution (or "downloads"). People would naturally gravitate towards the Ages they liked done by writers whose work they enjoyed

EleriCooks said...

Yeesha had more to do with Uru than you think. And what we saw of the story in Prologue and MOUL is tip of the iceberg.

Anonymous said...

From mszv,

Oh - I don't know. There's Uru, the online environment, Uru the story - all that. I think it's a bit more complicated.

You could have fan made story elements become part of the canon, officially, assuming some approval process on the part of Cyan. The story elements that were done in Myst III and Myst IV are part of the "official" story, and those games were not created by Cyan.

Regards,
mszv

Anonymous said...

"Yeesha had more to do with Uru than you think. And what we saw of the story in Prologue and MOUL is tip of the iceberg."

What do you mean? The primary topic for the content (histories, areas, even the journey) was the D'ni and what they had done both to the Bahro and other cultures. Myst V dealt mostly with Yeesha accepting her power/her place. True, I'm sure Uru would have gone there eventually, but I did not see or get hints that Yeesha was the focus of the story. It was always the D'ni. If you have other information, I'd like to know.

Interesting to see what Chogon's talking about now.