Is it Live, or is it Mymorex?
URU Live was what URU was supposed to be— until the developers took 80% of the live-game content and turned it into the standalone URU game six months before URU’s release. I have already chronicled my long wait to get into the live Prologue and the assistance I received from Katherine Postma at UbiSoft. (I want to take this opportunity to once again thank Katie for her patience, answers and assistance with the game itself and for attempting to get me additional information about URU’s future for this article.) I’m not going to delve deeply into all the technical problems with the game; I talked about those in Part Two. I can add that there are now three servers online, though any one of them is likely to be malfunctioning at any given time, particularly during weekends. Slowly but surely, UbiSoft (which oversees the delivery of the online game, while Cyan controls the content) is working out the bugs. It is still common to have the game crash to desktop because it hangs while trying to “authenticate” the player when he first logs in or links between Ages. But this is getting better. The lag that would freeze your avatar’s movement every few steps is now mostly confined to the communal Ae’gura City Age. And since there are only thirty-five people total allowed in this Age at one time, you are unlikely to ever get into it to have to worry about the lag anyway. Eventually, I am confident that Ubi will get the remaining technical problems ironed out. In the meantime, someone who purchases URU tomorrow will have to struggle with some maddening technical glitches in trying to play online.

But the real problem with URU Live, at least from the point of view of an adventure game critic is this: there’s no game in that game. While there has been a slow dribble of new content added to URU Live, this has mostly consisted of a few new areas to look at, a new hide-and-seek game where players are looking for electronic markers instead of Journey Cloths, new clothing and new pages for your Relto book. To date, there has not been a single puzzle added to the online world, despite many cries for exactly that from the online community. It now appears to me that Cyan does not see URU Live as a “game,” or at least not as most people define the word. The steps they have taken in the development of URU have all been to increase communication and interaction between players, while offering little new interactivity with the game world itself. What Cyan seems to be offering customers isn’t an actual game, but rather a persistent online world in which players are free to invent their own games, personas, role-playing, stories and interactions. It is as though Cyan is giving the players a huge theater stage and building all the sets, then letting anyone who wants onto that stage with no script, no director and no props. Some less-than-happy players have described URU Live as “a really pretty chat room.” While that does a disservice to the experience, it is perfectly possible to utilize the game in this way. It is common to see conversations about boyfriends, TV shows or other mundane topics broadcast to everyone in the Age. On the other hand, you see “Avids” who are thrilled at the chance to invent their own role-play and take on the personas graphically which, until now, they have only been able to live out through the written word.

Most of the gushing reviews that the rest of the gaming press prematurely gave to URU were based on the game’s “potential” to create something new and wondrous in the online portion. Various critics who rushed to get out early reviews without waiting to see how the URU Live component was going to be implemented seemed to base their high scores on such statements as: “With the launch of Urulive approaching soon, the possibilities for expansion of the game are limitless.” And this piece of wild speculation: “URU is in fact a MMORPG… if it’s anything like the single player portion, I’ve no doubt you’ll enjoy it.” Now, some 2 ½ months after URU’s release and the publication of these “hot off the presses” reviews, I wonder how many of those critics are eating their words with a side of humble pie. Ubi and Cyan aren’t doing anything with that vaunted potential except making URU Live ever more shapeless and free-form. With no puzzles or other gameplay elements being added while the “stage” is slowly made larger and new degrees of communication between actors being introduced, the URU Live experience bears more likeness to The Sims than it does to any adventure game. Except even The Sims has certain goals. The only goal in URU Live seems to be to have no goal, the only rule that there are no rules, and the only purpose being to do whatever you want… so long as you don’t need puzzles, props (other than orange construction cones) or an interactive environment to do it.

Is that your final answer?
I have to admit, Constant Reader, that like many other critics, I was initially taken in by URU. It is beautiful. It has Myst elements. It had some pretty good puzzles. And it held the promise of becoming something unheard of, a Massive Multiplayer Online Adventure Game. Although the technology had yet to be proven on a large scale, we knew it had been mostly successful during the initial beta test. We had the brilliant and creative minds at Cyan promising us frequently updated and expanded online content. The interpersonal interaction coupled with the patented Myst puzzles virtually guaranteed an adventure game experience that would offer something to appeal to all fans of the genre. PC Gamer, in awarding URU Best Adventure of 2004, stated in this month's issue: "Visually stunning, this new Myst game will introduce yet another invention by the time you read this: online adventuring." If only that prediction had come true.

This is why games shouldn’t be reviewed based on their potential. We had as much patience as we could possibly stand, waiting on writing our final review until we actually had some evidence of what URU Live was going to be, prying and begging to try to get an interview that would provide a factual look at URU Live’s future...but it's a future that looks more and more bleak every day.

A few months ago I might have fallen for this bit of fool’s gold too. After two months struggling with the technical difficulties and the nebulous content of URU Live, I have had a complete change of heart. It turned out that what Cyan and UbiSoft have given us isn’t online adventuring or even a MMORPG, but rather a graphical MUSH. (Multi-User Shared Hallucination, to those of you unfamiliar with online text-based RPG’s.) They have turned players loose in a pretty but empty world, hoping that players will be so blinded by the pretty sparkles that they will overlook the lack of purpose or gameplay and invent their own. Given the lack of direction and the difficulty in getting and staying connected online, players are likely to spend as much or more time at the Ubi URU forums trying to figure out what to do or find something to do as they spend actually “playing” URU Live. I find it hard to imagine that any adventure gamer will shell out the $13/month I was quoted on the phone from the UbiStore to participate in such a formless, directionless, plotless, puzzleless experiment, no matter how pretty it is. As to the standalone offline URU game, it is a mixed success. However, it is certainly not worth the $50 being charged for it in some places. The price has dropped to $30 in many stores, reportedly due to abysmal sales. At that price, URU might be worth it to an adventure gamer starved for something different from the standard fare. But I’d recommend instead that the typical gamer save some money. For a mere $20 you can get the anniversary editions of Myst Masterpiece Edition, Riven and Exile on DVD and updated to run on WinXP. You’ll get a better value and a much better time — and about the same online experience that URU gives you.

(Editor's note: We will revisit URU as new expansion packs for the game are released. At this time, the 2.5 star rating represents our recommendation.)