Editing Reference:RAWA/DRC forum posts (section)

== Destruction is coming? ==
'''Posted: Friday March 09, 2007'''<br />
''Original: Unavailable''

This topic is jumping off from Anna Catherine's post in another thread.

<blockquote>
Anna Catherine wrote:

The thing is, though, that low-key Uru is very different from what the game marketing led us to expect. "Destruction is coming. Find a way. Make a home." That sounds like something pretty epic and dramatic is coming.

[snip]

People are waiting because they were told to wait. They were told something is "coming." If that's true, great. If not... I suggest Cyan try to find a way to convey that to the players who are expecting it. People need to have realistic expectations... whatever that entails.</blockquote>

I don't think many people are really surprised to discover a disparity between "marketing" and "reality" in any setting (not just Uru), so setting one's expectations based solely (or even mainly) on marketing is very likely to be setting oneself up for disappointment. I have been trying to help people to set more realistic expectations since these forums reopened in 2005. The DRC have tried to do the same in more IC ways.

But I do understand that the subtle reminders of "reality" are easily drowned out by the bullhorn of "marketing", so let me try to be clearer.

Short answer:

The marketing line "Destruction is coming. Find a way. Make a home." is accurate, but those words by themselves give no sense of scale. That phrase is not something that is going to be fulfilled overnight. Or in a week. Or in a month. Maybe not even a year. It's a glimpse at a "bigger picture", small pieces of which are already showing up in Uru.

Long answer:

"What do you see, Atrus?"

Throughout Atrus' childhood, his grandmother Anna repeatedly reminded him to consider "The Whole", the "big picture".

Well, imagine the big picture of The D'ni Story. The story told in Myst is a single pixel in that picture. Riven is another. Uru is another. Zoom in on one of those pixels, and you find that it's not just a single pixel. It's a full picture on its own, and if you zoom in on that, you find that it is also made up of smaller pictures. (Similar to this recursive photo mosaic, only with an end at some point. Or, perhaps this movie demonstrating the powers of ten is a more applicable example.) When we're fully zoomed in, the pixels of that picture are the actions of individuals. What you do can have an effect, even if it may not be immediately apparent when you zoom back out a few levels. Over time, the accumulation of even those small effects will become more and more noticeable from greater distances.

Let's bring this analogy back to Uru. Uru's "'Whole' picture" is made up of pictures from Uru: Ages beyond Myst, Prologue, the expansion packs, and now, Myst Online, among other things. Each of those are made up of smaller pictures for, say, each of the Ages. And so on.

The majority of your time spent in Uru is at the most zoomed-in level. Your individual actions, reactions and interactions matter and have the most visible effect at this level. Examples of things at this level are things like the interactions with the DRC members, or even the recent vigil for Yeesha. Since you're zoomed in to the highest level of detail, even a single person's actions can noticeably affect the picture, gradually changing the color of one pixel at a time, to extend the picture/pixel analog a bit. Events on this level of detail might only last a few minutes or days. Taken individually they may not seem like much, but some may have consequences that last long into the future. Collectively they eventually do have an impact on the bigger picture.

In the middle scales are things like the Ages. They are less flexible and require more effort to have a noticeable effect. At this level, there may be opportunities for the interactions of groups of players to gradually change the colors of the pixels of the picture over longer periods of time. We didn't really get to see many of these in Uru in 2004, but the hypothetical example that has been used several times before is the lighting of the lake: a gradual process that would take weeks or months to accomplish that has a fairly noticeable effect on an Age.

Zoomed out to one of the larger scales are pictures that are revealed over longer periods of time. Things at this scale are the most resistant to change. Player interaction may be able to slightly change the shade of a few of the pixels a bit, but for the most part, the picture when viewed from this scale may not change much at all. An example I've used before of one of the bigger pictures planned for 2004 was going to be the gradual revelation of the Bahro. Imagine everything that you learned about the Bahro in Myst V being gradually discovered over the course of at least a year rather than over the very short period of time covered in Myst V. A little glimpse at some point that they are able to link at will. Weeks later something in another Age demonstrating that they can affect the weather of the Age. Sometime later in another Age a clue about their fear of the snakes of Noloben. And on and on, so that the picture of the Bahro is slowly filled in as time passes.

"Destruction is coming. Find a way. Make a home." is a "big picture" kind of thing. Right now, that picture is mostly obscured for you. But that picture, too, is gradually being filled in over time, and if you view that picture as a jigsaw puzzle, you've already been given a few pieces.

So… all that explanation to get to a point where we can better set realistic expectations.

You can expect new opportunities to make an impact on the most zoomed-in scale to become available all of the time. Most of them will be simple interactions that you have with other players. Some will be interactions with the DRC, new Ages as they are opened, etc.

At the next level out are things like calibrating the Great Zero or lighting the lake. You can expect new opportunities for you to have a direct effect at this level come less frequently, though as explained earlier, you have an indirect effect at this level all the time through the accumulation of the effects you're having at lower levels.

Further out, with things like "Destruction is coming. Find a way. Make a home.", you can expect new opportunities to have major impact at this level to be very rare, but you can expect your understanding of these "bigger pictures" to be gradually filled in over time.

Big things are coming, but that doesn't mean you have nothing to do but wait in the meantime. Medium things are coming more often, and smaller things are coming all of the time. Some of them will be things that interest you. Some will not. Find the things that you like and do something with them while you're waiting for bigger things.

Hope that helps.

RAWA