URU Diaries: Part 2

When last we left you, Constant Reader, my girlfriend and I had just completed the single-player offline portion of URU and were eagerly awaiting our invitation to join the online “Prologue.” Well, we waited. Then we waited some more. I decided to spend some time reading and slogged through Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (all twelve volumes). Theresa spent the time double-checking the work of the Human Genome Project team. We both finished our respective diversions and then we waited some more.

At last we got word. On the same day, I received e-mails from Bill Slease, Director of URU Online Content for Cyan Worlds and from Katherine Postma, URU Community Manager for UbiSoft. Both of these prestigious personages wrote to tell me that they had just read the first part of this series of articles, that they had thoroughly enjoyed the piece, that they considered it quite fair in my assessment of both the game’s strengths and weaknesses (with one exception… I’ll get to that), and that they were eagerly awaiting the next chapter. So eagerly, in fact, that they offered to “slip me in” immediately instead of making me continue to wait for my place in the admission queue. I, of course, was delighted, and assured the duo that I would take care of correcting the one error I had made in Chapter One.

So here it is: You may recall, Constant Reader, that I mentioned a particular puzzle that struck us as completely illogical involving a cavern with seven pressure plates on the floor and a map that, once deciphered, appeared to give clues as to how to open the locked gates that prevented exit from the cavern. Our experience was that the actual solution had nothing to do with the clues on the map. It turns out that the deciphered map is supposed to be combined with a second piece of information that is not readily visible except from one particular spot. We failed to see the second half of the clue and therefore stumbled upon the solution by trial-and-error. The solution only appeared to be unrelated to the clues on the map. There was, in fact, a “logical” way to derive the solution.

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With that taken care of, back to my URU adventures.

So we get our approval and rush to login to URU Live. The initial login screen gives you the option of either creating a new character or importing the progress of one of your single-player characters. You may only possess a single character at a time in URU Live; after the first time you play, if you want to play a new or different character you must first delete the previous one. We chose to continue playing the redheaded Mystic Rainbow from our offline game. We clicked the final “Play” button and sat back, waiting to be dazzled…. and waited…. and waited. We sat through over three minutes of game loading. To be fair, there is an option on your login screen that gives you the choice of updating all Ages when you startup or updating each Age as you link into it. We had chosen the former option, deciding that we’d rather have a longer wait at the beginning and shorter waits during gameplay. Those of you who have played the single-player version of URU know how frustrating the long load times between Ages are, and we were hoping to trim those down some. We also discovered that the startup load time is quite a bit shorter if you are using a returning character than it is the first time you import/create one. But still, three minutes? Anyway, we clicked through our brightness adjustment screen and sat a-tremble, prepared to be astonished by the sights we had been so eagerly anticipating…..

….and got the avatar customization screen instead. It seems that while you can import a character’s progress from the single-player game, you can’t directly import their appearance. In fact, you may change your name or even gender during the login process. One positive aspect of avatar customization is that URU Live offers a much wider choice of clothing than the single-player version. The skin-tone palette, unfortunately, has not been improved. Anyway, we got Mystic Rainbow looking the way she used to and crossed our fingers. Surely this time we would be able to see the breathtaking world of URU Live. At the very least, we knew we would be finally linking to our Relto, from which we could link to and explore the wonders and mysteries of the great underground city that we had been recruited by the D’ni Restoration Council to help restore. We clasped hands and clicked the button to take us into actual gameplay…..

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….and materialized in some stranger’s Relto. Nor were we alone. Some dozen or so other people were stuck there with us. And I mean stuck. If you missed the screenshots from the first chapter of my URU diaries, your Relto is your “hub,” a personal home and nexus from which you link to other Ages and to which you return whenever you “die.” It consists of an outdoor plateau and a hut which contains your wardrobe and a bookcase for your linking books. In this Relto, the door to the hut was closed and no amount of clicking or bashing would open it. (In fact, it turned out that nothing in this Age was clickable except the window shades.) We were stuck outside in the rain. It turned out that those who were stuck outside were the lucky ones. Yes, it was a soggy nightmare, populated by lots of confused people who had nothing to do but run around practicing jumping over each other. But if you used your own personal Relto book to link out of the Age or threw yourself over the edge of the plateau in frustration you merely reappeared inside the hut! No need to imagine the depression of being trapped in a tiny hit with eight total strangers; I took a screenshot to show you our first experience with URU Live.

This situation continued for almost two days. Every time we started the game, we appeared in some version of the same stranger’s Relto. Sometimes it was raining, sometimes sunny. In some versions a wooden deck overlooking the cloudy chasm that surrounds the plateau had appeared. Sometimes objects were clickable, other times not. Regardless, there was nothing to do here except talk to other likewise-stranded players, and no escape other than quitting the game.

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