greydragon’s “The Future of Myst Online: Uru Live” saw a largely positive reception. There’s exceptions to that, but for the most part, people showed support in the discussion thread. This is surprising, because the concept conflicts with what Uru Live should be all about. It is also unsurprising, because it was high time for a drastic change to be implemented, and subscribers were, accordingly, desperate for anything.

The change in question is a move from irregular character appearances and storyline updates throughout the month to a more streamlined, compacted schedule for a single week each month, with the remaining three-weeks-and-then-some essentially turning into ‘free for all’ exploration time. Each one-week period is called an “episode”, and receives its own name (with the first one known as “Scars”) as well as a rough plot outline. There is an unmistakable resemblance to the episodic Sam &aml; Max, also available on GameTap. One poster says that this is largely the influence of Rick Sanchez, GameTap’s Vice President of Content.

I do feel that episodic games have their place, and from what I hear, this has been working extraordinarily well for Sam & Max. Myst Online: Uru Live, however, is an entirely different beast. Cutting out a single week out of every month for things to happen gives everyone the impression that, for the remainder, the world (or, at least, the City of D’ni) is standing still. To add insult to the injury, it also flies in the face of player-contributed content.

But I don’t feel it was the wrong decision. For now. If we regard the episodes as an interim step to allow Uru Live to gain momentum, and to let Cyan Worlds (through the DRC, Yeesha and other focal points) steadily, regularly (yet not too quickly) develop story arcs, then I won’t mind things going on like this for a while. Perhaps a year. Perhaps two. In the meantime, the thing would become a lot more mainstream-friendly, attracting people who previously hadn’t even heard of it, much less considered participating. Not every hardcore fan will like that, but Cyan’s budget will. More money means more staff, more staff means more enjoyable, higher-quality, richer-in-storyline content, and more of that means more players; now go back to step one.

My point is: I don’t agree that turning Uru Live into something episodic will fulfill its vision in the long run, but I do see it as a necessary evil, or – to put it less cynically – as an essential intermediate step towards an Uru Live closer to how it’s been originally imagined. Ironically, this can apparently only accomplished by pausing one of the very core aspects of what was to be: namely, user-created content, which is now being heavily de-emphasized.

That, however, wasn’t yet ready anyway. The user-run storylines weren’t a better Second Life; absurdly enough, they didn’t even come close to matching the quality level of your average fan fiction story at MYSTcommunity’s Creativity Corner. So to most, the changes won’t be a big loss. And if things do work out as I hope, we’ll soon have a larger, more ambitious and more determined Cyan Worlds, which can not only improve some of the still-nagging problems of the client – say, the near-unplayable lag with several dozen players in one and the same Age – , but at the same time also focus more on pushing out content whose quality is worthy of their company history.

So, don’t fret. Don’t think of it as a step back; think of it as a step to the side that will, sooner or later, allow an entire trip forward. For everyone.