Improving Uru: A Game Proposal

[saluraropicrusa]

So, a friend of mine recently wrote up a game proposal, based on improving the now-dead Uru. He posted the idea to the Guild of Writers forum, but I was interested to see what people who weren't exclusively Myst fans thought of this idea. Here's the link to his forum post (which contains a link to a .pdf) and I'll provide a quote of his post introducing the idea.

http://forum.guildofwriters.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5904

Spoiler

Recently, something has been bugging me, lurking in the back of my head. That little something is Uru.

For the past several years since MOUL's demise I made it my duty to play as many games that had Myst-like elements but offered a wholly different experience than Myst. I dabbled in Zelda titles but eventually found my way to the wonderful world of Elder Scrolls. Oblivion had just come out and I immersed myself in the open world gameplay and lore. I was actually quite enthralled. A whole new form of gaming opened up for me - the concept of total non-linearity and alternate world immersion suddenly struck me as quite wonderful.

After playing all three major Elder Scrolls titles, I found myself still itching for something bigger, more immersive, more Matrixy and intellectually stimulating. I attempted to play a whole slew of MMOs and found most if not all were extremely repetitive, boring and/or restrictive in a way where they might as well have just been single player games with a co-op mode. I tried EVE online and was actually surprised by what I found... a living breathing world. One which was not force fed a linear story a la Bioware SWTOR or quest hub crippled a la Guild Wars and LOTRO, but actually one where it felt real...

I remember reading an interview with the EVE devs where they said that in many ways they are more social engineers than game makers in the traditional sense. That is when it dawned on me that Uru may not have been the entirely failed concept that so many describe it as, but perhaps more potentially an unrealized, unrefined version of something much bigger and better. A theme park killer. The ultimate story driven, alternate reality sandbox. I began to realize that had Cyan had more trust in the players and given us more tools both in and out of the game world to make our stories and influence theirs, Uru could have been the game of the century.

So recently at work, daydreaming while waiting for calls (yes I`m a call center boy being a recent university graduate), I started envisioning, if Uru ever had a third chance, with proper funding ... perhaps by utilizing Kickstarter... and a brand new modern engine capable of Riven-like graphics in realtime, how would I realize it to be both a modern MMO and an innovative genre breaker at the same time. How could I please people who love MMOS but hate what they've become. Just look at all the big titles going F2P... Age of Conan, SWTOR, LOTRO, but not EVE. On the other hand, the sandbox games that are out there right now seem poorly made and uninspired... Darkfall and Mortal Online come to mind.

So I wrote this little game proposal.
I want an MMO whch prides immersion, player dynamics, story and exploration and lore as its primary features, not repetitive quests or combat or non-persistent environments where if I kill ten enemies they return 10 minutes later. Barf.

Anywhoo, constructive criticism is welcome very much so.

To sum up (since I know the proposal's rather long), he described a version of Uru where there were multiple factions (the DRC, D'ni, Moiety and Bahro), an economy, combat, and no more instances. As well as a story driven both by characters played by actors, and the players themselves, who'd be able to create and approve ages and work for whichever faction they chose, even going so far as to infiltrate and/or undermine the work of another faction.