New game in the Myst series

[Chacal Profile Website]

For the Myst series fans, check out
URU: Ages Beyond Myst, by Cyan, produced by Ubisoft. It went retail during the holiday season.



Rand Miller, one of the two brothers who made the original Myst back in 1993, has come up with this interesting new addition. It is not Myst IV (which is in the making), it is set in the present, about 250 years after Myst. The D'ni cavern has been discovered, and an archeological society called the DRC (D'ni Revival Society) is exploring and restoring it.

What's interesting is the new mechanics of the game: while Myst, Riven and Exile consisted of pre-rendered scenes, thus limiting your movements to a rather small set of possibilities, Uru is completely 3D, like BF1942. On the plus side, this allows switching between 1st and 3rd-person views, it allows you to go wherever you want unless the way has been blocked on purpose, and it all fits on a single CD (Riven had 5 CDs). On the minus side, graphics are a little less spectacular than in Riven and Exile.

The game begins in a cleft in the desert, which you will recognize if you've read the novel "Myst: the book of T'iana". It's the cleft T'iana lived in with her father, and from which she went on her exploration of the crater leading down to D'ni, where she met and married Aitrus, and had her son Gehn. She returned to live in the cleft and raised Gehn's son Atrus, the central character of the Myst series.

I've just begun exploring the game, and already I'm immersed in the Myst atmosphere we loved so much. Ambient sounds and music are up to par, and on my ATI 9800 pro I've put the graphics to 1600 x 1200 with full effects, so I can't see a major difference with the last 2 titles. Characters met in the game are /D models, however, instead of filmed actors, somewhat this breaks the spell a little.

I didn't know about it before buying it, but Uru was slated to become a massively multiplayer game, by including "UruLive", the on-line component. Sadly, this went on-line for about one month and then closed on Feb 10th, with a note from Rand Miller explaining that there were not enough projected paying customers to justify the costs. There might be various reasons for this.

Instead of Urulive, the company will provide new content via expansion packs.

[hightimber Profile ICQ]

I've also purchased this title. I started it but stopped because another game came out that I'd been waiting for. I wasn't a huge fan of the early Myst games because I don't really like 'puzzle' games all that much. What I've played of this one, I like a lot better.