The rest of Uru + final thoughts!
Added 2022-09-25 02:58:18 +0000 UTCWhile posting the Uru videos publically, I just realized that I never announced them on Patreon! The Discord has had them for months, but if haven't seen them and you've had trouble sleeping recently, I have the remedy:
My Patreon-exclusive review in brief:
Awful
My Patreon-exclusive review in slightly more detail:
It just didn't work out for me. At the beginning it seemed like it had the potential to do more with the Myst puzzle gameplay by giving the player more of a presence and being able to roam freely in the world, but right from the beginning, the game shows it's going to waste that by dumping you in a depressingly vast area of desert with only a couple of interesting landmarks.
I think the Complete Chronicles release is, oddly, greatly to the game's detriment - it's absurdly difficult to find the beginning of the game, if you make the wrong choice early on as I did in part 2 then you can just be wandering aimlessly for hours. People said you started off totally clueless in Myst 1, but this beats it by miles - and the storyline offers no direction at all.
Even though I was lost throughout a lot of Riven, I appreciated what it was trying to do in retrospect (a lot of this is helped by the way the story comes together right at the end, suddenly everything you did in the game makes sense and it's brilliant). In this and the other Myst games, you were part of the unfolding story - the puzzles had reasons for being there even if they weren't immediately obvious. In Uru, the story that you're uncovering is totally disconnected from the actions you're taking - you're learning about the efforts to discover more about the D'ni, but you never find them yourself, you're just knocking some objects about clumsily with your feet to eventually be rewarded with some echoey monologue that's very hard to hear.
It's so painfully obvious that the game was released unfinished - paradoxically the Complete Chronicles edition somehow makes it even more unfinished than the original release. The part I played through that comprised the base game (once I found it) was very blank and full of meaningless dead ends, and the bonus content just sort of expanded those dead ends into more dead ends. At the time the environments were more impressive than they seem now, but I'm baffled by the reviews of the time that lauded it as the best-looking full 3D game ever - there are so many other games from 2003 which did a lot more.
It was only years later when the fan community got hold of it that it came to any sort of life - I've taken a brief look at Uru Live, and while I haven't really got the idea of the game at all, it is at least populated. I'm glad that there are people who have spent their time taking this story and collaborating to put it into a game more coherent than the troubled original was... strangely, that's almost what the original idea of Uru was, just done in a very different way from how the creators imagined it.
Let's finish the series with Myst 5 soon!
Comments
Hi! It's great to see someone who was so involved in it - even though the game wasn't for me, it seems to have got a very dedicated following so there must be something in it :) I never went back to the city areas after completing the main game, but maybe if I can get into the right mindset some time...
DavidN Rabbit
2023-05-18 03:36:21 +0000 UTCGlad to see someone do at least some sort of LP of Uru nowadays at least! (Which, along with your MyHouse.wad and the rest of Myst, led me to your channel and Patreon...) I was a beta-tester for Uru Live back back in the day, and it's always fun to see responses to it. Agreed that the way the second expansion was integrated in was really rough, and without enough guardrails to keep people progressing the right way… :/ Really unfortunate the way the whole thing turned out. I know this is a long while later, but did you ever go back and explore the actual rest of the city? As you probably know, most of the context and contest you missed in the playthrough was because of a sequence break early on in not going back to the neighborhood (and Nexus) after you got the KI, which takes you to the rest of the game. Curious what you thought of some of all of that!
A
2023-05-17 23:01:48 +0000 UTCIt's my birthday, it's also 5am and I have been awake since 3am. I was struggling to sleep. Then, I remembered these videos as you point out serve a purpose.
John Postons
2022-09-28 03:59:13 +0000 UTC
