• Registered: 2006-10-02
  • Posts: 123

Topic: URU Characters

With URU entering open beta soon, several people have said they will be taking part as soon as they can. If the events of the open beta are going to be the start of the URU storyline, then I may well join in myself. However there is one thing that I have been wondering about with regards to the URU game.

What sort of characters are we going to be creating? Are we going to me Mr or Ms Average, wandering into the game world, or are we skilled specialists who are brought in to solve problems?

As I understand from the source material available, there is an abandoned underground city which connects to the ruins of a dimension-spanning civilisation, and we, the players, will be exploring this. But how do we begin exploring? How widely known is the existance of the city? Is there an organised body conducting research which will have recruited us, or do we just stumble across its existance?

What it essentially boils down to is, why is my character going to be there, in the city? The source material on the web that I've seen doesn't cover this in any detail. It talks about the D'ni  and their history, but not about the people who explore the city.

It's probably going to be up to Norah to give more concrete answers to this, but I'm sure the rest of us will have some ideas. Just please don't say something like, "Who can we play? Anyone! *smileyface*". I'm well aware of that, and the more I think about it, the more it becomes a problem. We need to know if a certain type of character would clash with t he setting.

Naturally, this could all be avoided by simply giving your character no backstory beyond a name and concentrating on the city. But most roleplaying at first, between people who haven't played the game or the Myst series before, will involve detailss of who we are and where we come from. After all, simply having us all turn up at this mysterious ruin without explanation, saying "Hi, I'm Bob" and then getting down to deciphering strange relics together doesn't seem to be very good RP to me. In Seed we were fresh out of the cloning tanks- our lack of backstory and world knowledge had an in-game explanation. In URU, as far as I can tell, we come from our own Earth in the present day. Lack of backstory won't hold up.

By the way, since there are multiple threads about the game already, and it's going to go live in the near future, perhaps we should have an URU forum created soon.

  • Oluf
  • Administrator
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  • Registered: 2006-10-01
  • Posts: 343

Re: URU Characters

Took the liberty of making a new forum for uru

  • From: Ottawa, Canada
  • Registered: 2006-10-01
  • Posts: 158

Re: URU Characters

The cave was originally discovered in 1991 by Elias Zandi and another person who's name I cannot remember. They authorized Cyan Worlds to create the Myst games that would inform the public of their discovery of another culture. Elias Zandi subsequently died somewhere in there. When Uru was first released in 2004, the DRC had been working to restore the cave since '99 (well, Sharper had been, was reading his journal the other day). I think Joshua Zandi had something to do with the announcement, because as the son of Elias Zandi he technically owns the surface and the Cleft. He fought a legal battle with the DRC to bring people down, and might have announced it to the world. When people heard about this, they either felt a connection to D'ni or not, but those who did were drawn to the cavern no matter what. If you're in the cavern, you probably felt drawn there for reasons you don't understand.

That or your an insane player trying to act as one of the DRC, but ignore those folks, the DRC is Cyan employees.

Last edited by Sandling (2006-12-16 14:17:57)

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  • Norah
  • Da Vincian
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  • From: the Netherlands
  • Registered: 2006-10-09
  • Posts: 493

Re: URU Characters

Sandling wrote:

The cave was originally discovered in 1991 by Elias Zandi and another person who's name I cannot remember. They authorized Cyan Worlds to create the Myst games that would inform the public of their discovery of another culture. Elias Zandi subsequently died somewhere in there. When Uru was first released in 2004, the DRC had been working to restore the cave since '99 (well, Sharper had been, was reading his journal the other day). I think Joshua Zandi had something to do with the announcement, because as the son of Elias Zandi he technically owns the surface and the Cleft. He fought a legal battle with the DRC to bring people down, and might have announced it to the world. When people heard about this, they either felt a connection to D'ni or not, but those who did were drawn to the cavern no matter what. If you're in the cavern, you probably felt drawn there for reasons you don't understand.

That or your an insane player trying to act as one of the DRC, but ignore those folks, the DRC is Cyan employees.

The son's name is Jeff, afaik, though smile.
Elias left the restoration of the city to the DRC, his own organistation.
He left the land that the city is under, to his son.

Explorers are drawn to the city of D'ni in a very 'close encounters of the third kind' kind of way.
Zandi the second is then there at the volcano and cleft, to tell these explorers there is a city and a Yeesha waiting for them.
In the old Prologue, all us explorers got an IC invitation from Zandi, but that is not why you went to D'ni, it just gave official access to those that had gathered at the cleft.

Yeesha more or less gives you a choice: my side, or 'theirs'. The theirs not being very clear, but was always taken by most to mean the DRC. Now, however, it's not so sure that the DRC are the other side Yeesha talks about.
She asks you to take her journey ('consider it a quest. No, a Request.'). Up to you if you want to do so or not, and even if you do, that doesn't necessarily mean you've chosen Yeesha's side, it just means that at least you were willing to hear her out, more or less.
So I guess most reasonable people would take her journey, and then make up their own mind afterwards.
If you don't take the journey you go straight into the city.


Cyan's idea was that people play explorers, and not just that, they play themselves. Only, as explorers of an ancient city, with some magic and sci-fi technology. Myst games are a sci-fi/fantasy mix.
It's, of course, not mandatory to play yourself, you can RP any other personality as well. However, you are an explorer. You're not a D'ni, you're not a DRC member or engineer. Impersonating either of those is impersonating a Cyan employee. It would be like saying you're a part of TSR, in Seed. You just don't do it, it's lame.
Not to mention according to Cyan's EULA, it's actually illegal as well.
But even apart from that, you shouldn't want to do this. The kind of people that usually do this, are the kind of people that cannot stand the idea of being someone that's just like everyone else. They feel that their char should stand out from the crowd, without them even putting in any effort: by the character's title and profession. That's fine, but if you want that, you're in the wrong game. In URU, you're one of many, and if you want to stand out, it will have to be in some other way: creativity, heavy political involvement, being the best at a lot of puzzles and always solving them first, being well-known for helping people out. All those are ways people can stand out and have stood out from the crowd in the past. There are probably other ways as well. (being a complete lunatic perhaps, or being well-known for being annoying tongue).

Last edited by Norah (2006-12-16 14:50:00)

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

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  • Registered: 2006-12-31
  • Posts: 5

Re: URU Characters

Also, there are special-interest 'Guilds' you can join, peopled with linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, scientists, technologists etc. There's a guild of healers, a guild of writers, a guild of greeters -- each with its own forum where you can discuss matters of interest. This is all based on the way the D'ni civilisation was organised.