avevale_intelligencer (
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2007-09-14 10:41 am
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Hard post
When Uru Live was resurrected by Turner/Gametap, I was as happy as a particularly cheerful clam on E. It promised to be everything I have loved in the Myst games, but ongoing. More new Ages to explore, more history to discover, and the company of like-minded friends. What wasn't to love?
Then they brought in their main storyline, in the first of the new-format episodes, and my first thought was that they had to be kidding. With all the unlimited potential of the setting of Uru, all the possible stories they could come up with, guess what we've been given.
It's a war.
Now, war stories are fine in their place. Killing things can be very therapeutic. I play EVE Online, which is one great big long war or going-to-be-war-real-soon-now story, and that's fine. But dear gods, not Cyan. Cyan does stories about understanding, about finding the non-violent solution, about exploring and co-operation and no-one having to die. I didn't believe it. I started looking for reasons why the war story was a front, a blind, a scam of some sort. I started arguments in the game forums because there had to be something more, some reason behind it, some way to resolve it. I wanted to be part of the story, shape it, change it, somehow make it right. That's where I ran up against my own blind spot.
Individual players in an MMOG *can't* affect the main story. It's logistically impossible, because of the MM part. What other games like EVE do is provide missions; linear, repetitive things for players to do while the main story rumbles on offstage. Cyan have provided things to do...they're just not very interesting things, and they don't have any relation to the main story, or distract in any way from its utter WRONGNESS.
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In this last episode it was made very clear that there is nothing more. This stupid, pointless war is going on, somewhere offstage, and we can't affect it. All we are supposed to do is carry on with our everyday activities just as if nothing was happening, learn to work together and communicate and blah and blah, and one day years down the line maybe something will happen to change things. I get enough of this in the real world, thanks.
I'm not leaving Uru, or closing my account, at least not for the moment. Cyan needs all the support it can get, if only so it can hire some decent writers (I'm cheap, but I'd have to telecommute). Besides, my leaving wouldn't affect anything. But my main characters are too hopelessly embroiled in all this to play now, so I'm going to have to use alternates who aren't involved with the storyline at all, and just wait and hope that something of the spirit of Myst and Riven and Exile and Revelation will one day return, and this stupid war story will softly and suddenly vanish away and leave us with something better.