Uru: Ages Beyond Myst - PC

To whomever at Cyan may be concerned or cares:It took me about three days to beat Riven. It took me exactly 26 hours (minus sleep and food) to beat Myst III: Exile. As soon as my roommate gets done with Myst, I'll beat that too.I'm not on my fourth day/night of Uru, and I have a few observations for whomever makes product/marketing decisions around there, or whomever wants to read this in general. I don't really care if you read it or not, but it'll make me feel better to write it.... I just spent over an hour and a half of perfectly good screen time unsuccessfully attempting to correctly place two FISHTRAPS in a river using my feet. WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE THINKING!? You took a perfectly good idea and completely demolished it.Here's why your first three titles were fun, and why Uru isn't, imho.1) They were very binary. Do something wrong, *crickets chirp*. Do something right, *poof! presto chango*. Even when you had to go see if your action had positive consequences or not, it was very clear-cut. Or, as I like to put it, "Repeatable Results." Things work the same way every time.In Uru, however, depending on how one jumps, leaps, kicks, walks, runs, etc., there are a finitely much greater number of possibilities. And, doing something "more or less" the same may not necessarily return the same results. Or, more simply put, "Marginally Repeatable Results." Attempt the same maneuver 100 times, you might get it right 80 times or so. Those other 20 create a severe amount of frustration in a game with so much complication already built into the objectives.2) Your first titles had a distinct visual style, which very much led to the first point. While this style may have been the result of a lack of funding, technological difficulties, attempts to make the software package smaller, what have you, it made the games!! This style defined your demographic! No joysticks, no 3D engines, just a slideshow.Uru, while attempting to catch up to the rest of the electronic gaming universe, completely abandons the low-res charm of the earlier titles. We don't WANT to have to move a character in these games. We WANT the SLIDESHOW!!3) No freely moving objects. You click a button, you pull a lever, you zip down a ladder with a click of the mouse, and you're there.Uru: see fish trap rant above. The rocks in Teledahn prison weren't so bad. They were still way more than I wanted, but nowhere NEAR as bad as those fish traps. If you went to so much obvious trouble coding the engine and animating the avatars... couldn't I just pick the stupid thing up and carry it where I needed it? It's not that much of a leap! In fact, unless I'm very much mistaken, it's a heck of a lot easier to code/animate than kicking stuff around.4) Skip animations. This is HUGE as far as I'm personally concerned. There were so many places you had to go back and forth over the same ground in the first three titles, that when you pushed/pulled/opened, you just wanted to get it over with quickly.Uru... You know what? I saw that wonderful elevator graphic the first ten times up and down. I'd rather just get back to where I need to reread the map as fast as possible. If there is a skip animation key, I sure couldn't find it. If it's there and I missed it, then I apologize for the rant.5) Speaking of looking for keyboard shortcuts, I never saw a manual in the first three games.Why do you all of a sudden put out a game with a manual? WHY!!!! This should be glaring error numero uno in the unbalanced equation that is Uru.6) This one is more or less all of the above rolled into one. When you put in Myst and fired it up, you were in the game. You didn't have the first clue in heck where you were, what you were doing, or what you might be expected to do. That was so..... refreshing.The stupid stupid stupid very very stupid Desert. I can completely understand it from with respect to back story, visual excitement, and kicking off things with a puzzle, but:a- It was huge. I spent way too much time examining fence posts and scrub bushes.b- I didn't want to have to spend so much time learning how to move my character. See above.c- What happened to just getting into the thick of things? "Training courses" always have and always will completely suck. Noone wants them except the people who put them in the games. No matter how you spin it, that was a classically cliche training course, complete with help manual Zandi.Why did you have to kill Uru: Live? Why didn't the subscriber base come calling? As far as I'm concerned, see above. I never would've paid to push fish traps around.I hope that another Myst title comes out. I really really do. The overriding concept is great. The ball ride at the end of Amateria in Myst III? Awesome. I went back to the top of that building at least 5/6 times to do that over. The plants in Edanna? The first time I figured out how to get into the Idol's mouth on Village Island in Riven? All stupendous. I'm a sci-fi/fantasy buff, love the story, love the characters.Believe you me, though: I'm reading reviews and watching demos first. If the next one is anything like this - count me out. The only reason I'm going to finish this Age and get to the end of the game is pure stupid stubborness. It won't be out of enjoyment.

I had "pre-reviewed" this game a while back by making three stipulations that would either make it or break it as a great game. First, the developers, Cyan, had to stick to their promise of allowing the player to switch from the new 3rd-person perspective back to a 1st-person perspective. Second, they also had to stick to a promise of allowing a player to play by him or herself, even within the new "Uru Live" online scenario. Finally, they must continue to live up to the lofty standards set by their previous Myst titles when it comes to graphics and gameplay (i.e. puzzles).With regards to the first stipulation, Cyan came through marvelously! Even though so much effort went into allowing players to create personal "avatars" to represent themselves in the new 3rd-person perspective option, they also made switching back to the classic 1st-person view extremely easy by using the F1 key. Cyan touted this new perspective as the best way to enjoy the game citing, for one, that the 3rd-person view would give the player a better sense of scale in the enormous environments of the new ages. Personally, me wife and I found the 3rd-person view to be very awkward at times because, in several places, the only view available was from in front looking back and down at the avatar which then made moving of the character exactly opposite to what was intuitive. For most of the game, we kept the view in 1st-person and just tollerated the times that we needed to switch back (or the game purposely switched back) to a 3rd-person view. This was usually necessary in order to solve some of the new "physically challenging" puzzles. More on that later. A game of this beauty must be viewed from a first person perspective. Avatars just spoil the view. I don't need to see what I would look like super-imposed into these environments. I know what I look like; I don't need some goofy representation of me to distract from the wonder of the ages.Judgement on the second stipulation will have to wait until the Uru Live option of play opens up to the general public later on. Apparently, in order to handle the crush of users that the online gameplay is expected to generate, Cyan is relying on the cashflow generated from the sales of the standalone game in order to upgrade their hardware accordingly. We're probably talking teraflops of CPU and terabytes of disk needed. Regardless, from the documentation I've read so far, it's looking like the online world of UruLive is going to be exclusively a communal affair with emphasis on neighborhoods and cooperative puzzle solving. Sure, you might be able to download an age or two to explore on your own, but you'll only get as far as the first "physical" puzzle that takes at least two avatars to stand on separate platforms or some such (yes, that's how imaginative the puzzles have been so far). I like Myst games where its just me against the environment. I don't want to go exploring where other "tourists" will get in my way. Looks like the online world won't be for us. If you like the SIMS Online and Everquest genres, then go for it.Finally, to the meat of the game: the tech. Yes, the graphics are, once again, drop dead gorgeous. I still can't believe the view once we finally got "topside" on the first rotating building in the Gareeshen age! All four main ages had visions of pure beauty and, believe me, we had no problems appreciating the immenseness of these environments from the 1st-person perspective. What's even more incredible is this game comes on only ONE CD! Gone are the days where they have to pack 4 or more CD's (or a double-sided DVD) with tons of JPEGs and video clips linked together. Everything now is rendered in splendid real-time 3D. I knew this game was being developed based upon the technology similar to RealMyst so I expected it was going to take some real horsepower to run it. I got all new hardware recently and, trust me, it was worth it. On a cherry machine, this game is gorgeous in sight and sound!Where Cyan failed (and miserably so) was in the gameplay. As you can probably tell by now, we weren't too thrilled with the added layer of physical puzzles. Now that you have the freedom to go anywhere, do anything, the developers thought it was a logical step to add agility tests (running, jumping, pushing objects) into their puzzles. The overused puzzle of "pushing" objects made us think we were playing a soccer game! I'm expecting a Myst game, not a FPS or Mario clone! On top of that, more than enough of the other puzzles in this game have such impossible levels of logic and lateral thinking built in to them, that they've taken all the joy out of solving them. We had to resort to hints off the internet more times than I am proud to admit. Myst and Riven were hard, but at least the solutions to the puzzles made sense. Finally, we didn't appreciate playing hide-and-go-seek with all the Journey Cloths and Relto Pages. Three words: what a copout!PLEASE, take the tech from this game and meld it with gameplay on par with Myst and Riven! If that is what you are expecting, try something else. I'm holding my breath that Mysterious Journey II might get it right.

I purchased URU for my husband for Christmas from Amazon.ca. He is such a fan of the entire Myst series that I knew he would love this new release. However, as mentioned in other reviews, be very careful re your system requirements. We did have the minimum listed but after literally hours of him trying to get the game to load properly, downloading upgrades, etc. etc. it turned out our videocard was insufficient. We had to upgrade to a Radeon 9600Pro with DirectX9.0. Needless to say, my $70 videogame, and $25 stragegy guide turned into a $400 surprise. To it's credit, however, it now plays wonderfully and he loves it. I guess that's what it's really all about. Maybe I'll change my mind when the VISA bill arrives.

I like the game