(...seriously? I'm waffling on posting a thread about this because I figure no one else on here will care, and someone else beats me to it?
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No, despite all appearances, Cyan didn't just jump on the releasing-our-stuff-free bandwagon. (Besides, they did it a few days before C&C: TS came out.
) This has been a good amount of time coming for those of us in the game's fanbase, and it's hopefully the first step toward better things in the future, as Cyan is hoping to eventually release the game's source code and open up its development to the community. Depending on how you count it, this is the third or fourth time that Uru Live has resurrected itself; it's really an amazing story in many respects, so I'll try to summarize it without rambling too much for anyone who's bored enough to read it. (In retrospect, skip to the last two paragraphs if you're in a hurry.
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Just as a bit of background, Cyan Worlds initially started out as the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller working together in a garage making well-received educational exploration games for children. After releasing a few of those, they got together a few more people and started working on something else. Something else happened to be a little game called Myst, which wound up holding the title of best-selling PC game of all time for many years (until The Sims finally dethroned it) and was a major factor in the widespread adoption of CD-ROM drives. Cyan followed up that effort with a sequel, Riven, which also sold very well and improved on the original in pretty much every way; it's still one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen. The next two games in the series were developed externally, Myst III by Presto Studios (famous for the Journeyman series) and Myst IV by Ubisoft's in-house team, with Cyan providing a degree of oversight for plot consistency. In the meantime, Cyan themselves had started development on a project that would eventually become Uru Live.
From the beginning, Uru was designed as somewhat of a spin-off from the Myst series. Instead of point-and-click static screens, players would be controlling their own customizable avatars and moving through fully-3D environments. Story-wise, Uru actually incorporated the previous Myst games (and Cyan itself) into its own universe; they had apparently been based on historical documents detailing 200-year-old events in the history of an ancient civilization called the D'ni, whose abandoned city happened to be buried in a network of enormous caverns underneath the deserts of New Mexico. The ruins of this civilization had apparently been re-discovered in modern times, and you as the player were one of many explorers who felt drawn to the place. Most importantly of all, Uru was intended to be a multiplayer game from the beginning, the first (and as far as I know, only) massively-multiplayer adventure game ever attempted. All of the players would participate in and influence the story together, and they'd be interacting not with AI-driven NPCs, but instead actual human actors controlling character avatars in real-time. The original design really was unlike anything the gaming world had ever seen, and it would have been truly amazing if it had ever managed to get off the ground.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Due to the influence of its publisher, Ubisoft, the game was originally released in 2003 as the singleplayer title "Uru: Ages Beyond Myst," with the multiplayer component of Uru Live to be integrated later. There was a multiplayer beta test called "Prologue," which drew relatively-significant numbers, but Ubisoft apparently wasn't satisfied with the results, and they canned the multiplayer portion with little-to-no warning, before its long-term success or failure could ever be determined. As a result of all this, the stand-alone game sold poorly (though created a strong core fanbase...sound familiar?), and Uru Live itself never had the opportunity to be fully realized; Cyan themselves lost a lot of money in the venture and were left in dire financial straits. A good deal of already-developed yet never-used content for Uru Live found its way into two expansion packs for the singleplayer game that (roughly) wrapped up its initial storyline. Even more content originally meant for Uru wound up in the singleplayer game Myst V, which Cyan intended as the final game in the Myst series and an overarching conclusion to both the Myst and Uru stories.
Soon after Myst V's release in 2005, Cyan all but shut down, laying off everyone but two employees due to lack of funding. However, there was a bit of good to come out of this: prior to the shutdown, Cyan released Uru's server code to the public under the name "Until Uru," allowing members of the fan community to host their own game "shards" and play through the game's content in its originally-intended multiplayer form. Then, in 2006, Rand Miller the creation of an official Cyan-run shard called "D'mala"...and more importantly, soon after, the monthly-subscription gaming service GameTap announced that they would be backing Cyan in the development of a new effort, "Myst Online: Uru Live," which would be available through their service. Cyan re-hired most of its staff and ramped up production, and Myst Online launched in 2007. Unfortunately, most of the original backlog of content from Uru Live had already been released via the expansion packs and Myst V, and Cyan simply didn't have the resources to sustain development of new content at anything near the rate which they had originally intended. The game's progression was slow at best, and Cyan eventually limited new story and content releases to one-week-per-month "episodes" to try to retain player interest. Eventually, GameTap decided that they could no longer justify their expenditures for the game, and Myst Online was shut down for a second time in 2008.
Since then, Cyan has sort of barely managed to scrape by, working on some third-party testing and porting Myst (and soon Riven) to the iPhone, where it has apparently sold quite well. More recently, they also repurposed Uru's game engine for a PC-game version of the live-action RPG
Magiquest. As far as Uru was concerned, Cyan announced not long after the GameTap shutdown that they had regained the rights to the game and intended to relaunch it as "Myst Online: Restoration Experiment," which would rely primarily on user-created content to expand the game world; some time later, they also expressed the intention of releasing the game's source code, allowing the community to go wild with bugfixes and new features. Unfortunately, with the economy being what it is, Cyan hasn't yet been able to dedicate employee resources to either initiative, which has left the Uru fan community somewhat in the lurch (though there have been some impressive initiatives involving reverse-engineering the original singleplayer game and adding custom content).
This was the status quo until the start of this month, when out of the blue, Cyan announced that they would be starting their own Myst Online server and re-releasing all of the GameTap content for free under the name "MO:ULagain," as somewhat of a hold-over until progress could be made on the source-code release. (Even I've lost track of all the name changes.
) The initial response to this has exceeded even Cyan's own expectations, with several thousand downloading the game within the first few days; one or two iterations of the Amazon cloud servers Cyan's using were essentially completely overwhelmed during that first week until they could be beefed up. Cyan's set up an optional PayPal donation page to cover the cost of the servers, and by all accounts, the response has been more than generous. Even if there's nothing new available right now, the community is definitely overjoyed to have their digital home back.
(Okay, that was absurdly long. I'm dangerous in fanboy mode.
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To make a very long story short, the Myst/Uru fan community is one of the most remarkable I've ever come across. Just as one example, on multiple occasions in the past, fans have pooled money and bought pizza parties for the Cyan Worlds office. And during Uru Live's downtime, "refugees" established an area in Second Life re-creating a few of the game's environments. The feeling seems to be mutual, as Rand Miller himself has hopped in-game on multiple occasions to thank everyone for sticking with them for so long; in addition, whenever the annual "Mysterium" fan convention has been held in Cyan's hometown of Spokane, Rand has opened the company office's doors for a group tour and barbecue. For my part, though I'm not incredibly involved with the community, I've been in love with the Myst universe ever since I stumbled through the original game (woo strategy guides!) on our family's old Gateway 2000, and I'm incredibly grateful that Cyan has been able to give all of us this third/fourth chance to explore the universe they've created.
So...can I recommend this game to any of you guys? That sort of depends. I'm comfortable with saying that, to really get something out of it, you'd either have to already be a fan of the overall Myst universe or else interested in learning more about it. And there is the caveat that there's currently no new content being produced for the game: once you see everything that's there, that's pretty much what you're limited to. That being said, the community is fantastic, and there's an overall feel to the game that I've only very rarely come across before. If anyone who managed to get to the bottom of this post is at all interested in jumping in, I'm more than happy to help get you started.
