Interviews

Back in December of 2006 Myst Online, Uru Live finally went live at GameTap.  For the next four months Cyan tried to deliver continuous content in one form or another, but had some difficulty with pacing.  So they decided to go episodic. 

This means that for one week all of the content for the month - story line, Ages, collectibles – would be released and the players would have the rest of the month to catch up and digest.  Cyan, of course, would have the rest of the month to prepare for the next episode.

The first episode, Scars, began Saturday, May 19, with a riveting story line.  The story was just reaching its dramatic peak on Wednesday when Rand Miller agreed to step away and give us an interview.

Bob. Hello, Rand.

Rand. How are ya?

Bob. Pretty darn good.  Quick question, how long have you got?

Rand. I've got a half hour or maybe a little more than that.

Bob. OK,  'cause guaranteed I've got more questions than we have time for.  I made sure of that.
<Laughter>

Bob. Just to let you know, if you hadn't been filled in, I am a staff reviewer with JustAdventure.com, largest web site out there specializing in just adventure games with over a million visitors a month.  There, I did my piece for Randy, the editor.
<Laughter>

Bob. I have three hats sitting in front of me which I would like to wear, if I may.  The first hat is my journalist's fedora.  The following questions I would like to transcribe the answers to post as an interview on the website.

Rand. OK

Bob. So just to let you know, this will be On the Record.

Rand. OK

Bob. Question number one. So, just how is Cyan doing now financially? How are you doing?  Coming close to self maintaining? Self sustaining? And how's it going?

Rand. Ah, without going into details, because I'm sure I'll break some kind of confidentiality agreement somewhere...

Bob. No, no details needed, but how are you doing?

Rand. (Laughs) We're doing OK, It's not the heyday of Cyan used to be.  Business has its ups and downs and we have ours.  At this point anything that keeps people employed here is a good day at Cyan, so having a chance to have Uru Live being the thing that keeps us employed and the chance to redo that and get that running and actually, especially with this week kind of phasing in this whole new kind of first episode, we're all feeling pretty excited. So not only are we happy to be, you know, have our jobs and be working, but we're pretty pumped about, about Myst Online as well.

Bob. Fantastic.  Question two.  Is the game progressing in the way you had hoped?

Rand. Boy, you got me at a good time.

Bob. (Maniacal Laughter)

Rand. You know, we... ah... MMO's are hard.  Really hard.  And adventure game MMO's just aren't done.  So we're the guys who are kind of really trying some new stuff.  And I think from the time we've kind of ramped this thing back up with GameTap until basically this week we've put out a few little bit of content updates and kind of gotten things stable and gotten our servers working and fixed as much as we could with the resources we've got.  And this week is when we turned the corneRand.  This is when we got a taste of what Myst Online Uru was supposed to be and so that is incredibly exciting and this week has been the first time that we have kind of watched this interactive adventure game kind of play out the way we envisioned it, you know, how many years ago. Six years ago.  So that's been just invigorating.

Bob. This week Uru went from continuous update to episodic.  Do you foresee any other changes coming to help the game adapt to its current business model?

Rand. You know, I think that this episodic thing is a great way for us to take not the hey day resources that we might have had back in the day and still have a serial story telling adventure that has content releases as well and basically not strap ourselves by trying to fill all the blank spaces with content.  This gives us the best of both worlds.  We get time in between to build it, to fix bugs, to prepare for the next release.  We get to essentially do the PR and prep people for what's coming and build some excitement and then we get to play it out in a week that's just chock full of stuff so that people, you know.  Someone used the line that they were sitting in front of the computer, they were watching it, they were in the city watching what was unfolding like somebody would have listened to a radio show back in the day.  It was, you know, happening before their eyes like they were part of it.  They used the War of the Worlds as an example.  So it's kind of intriguing to watch that.  And so yes, I would see this, to answer the question, see this continuing in this mode for at least as long as our crystal ball sees into the future.

Bob. OK.  The current story line is being very well received and it isn't using much in the way of expensive new graphics or music.  Can we expect to see more of this type of content in Uru?

Rand. We can.  And we would love to put lots of expensive graphics and music in there as well.  But we're having to work very efficiently and, and think smart about what we're doing.  And it doesn't mean we can't build content.  We're just using it as part of the story line and rolling it in as pieces that makes things maybe seem bigger than they are or plays just the way we want.  For example, we have a rather large Age that's coming out, as everybody knows, we kind of prepped it, this episode.  And it's not out yet.  We've had a lot of story play out... for days now.  It's documented... some great documentation of it. And that will kind of lead up to the release of this content which actually has some pretty interesting graphics and music and those kind of things.  So sometimes the story and the wiz-bang flashy stuff will tie together more.  Sometimes it will be more separated like it is in this episode.

Bob. Do you see Uru becoming more like an Alternate Reality Game?

Rand. Ah... I'm assuming that question means Alternate Reality in the sense that it uses the real world as well.

Bob. Right, ARG's are becoming a genre of their own and they tend to spill over into reality using more web sites, actual email addresses, actual phone numbers, but even more importantly, they take advantage of the Hive Mind of the users.

Rand. Yes, and we've played with that in the past and I think that is purely a resource driven item.  Back when we were ramping up for the first release of Uru we actually did some pretty extensive ARG type stuff.  Like with artifacts buried in various places across the United States and phones ringing in phone booths and all kinds of stuff.  This was before the Halo stuff, the Halo 2 stuff even.  And we loved how that felt, but you've got to have resources to pull that off and I think we don't want to do it in a shoddy manor, so if we can grow into that we have some things in the books that we would love to take advantage of, but right now we are purely concentrating on the on-line interactive stuff.

Bob. The forums appear full of people eager to volunteer as story writers and character actors.  Is Cyan contemplating the use of this free resource?

Rand.  We are.  It's hard to contemplate because there is so much synchronization that's required during this week and being in close proximity during that... believe it or not, we're learning.  We're learning how to do this as we do it.  And this week has been, you know, been a great session because the things that we planned worked OK.  But a lot of it has to do with the proximity of the people who are with... the people who are communicating so that we can listen to what people are saying in the game, we can respond accordingly, we can talk behind the scenes and doing that with remote users is a little more difficult.  So what we're doing to kind of ease ourselves into that is to take on some of the remote users as they kind of start to fill a need themselves. Amd I'll give you an example.  Recently we've been approached by a couple of users in game, in character, saying that they wanted to... they formed kind of a guild of ... a religious guild and they were studying the D'ni religion. Well... it seemed very appropriate because they kind of naturally filled themselves into that niche to start to release documents regarding the D'ni religion that we had quote/unquote translated, to them. And let them be the keepers of that information rather than letting that come from another source.  So we've started down that path and we're toying with that as well in other areas with people as they... as their abilities start to match the things in game and in character that we need.

Bob. Any word on the Book of Miriam?

Rand. No, it's still very close to our hearts but it's purely a resource issue.  We just do not have the time or expertise to do it right and that book we want to do right.  So we kind of released the little preface there which set the stage for it and we got really good outlines and a wonderful story thread.  But we'll serve no book before its time, I guess.

Bob. You're allowed to say “ditto” for the next question.  Any word on the Book of Yeesha?

Rand. Hmmm... ditto.
<laughter>

Bob. [That was] in the interest of saving time.  Anything in the works for increasing the population of the City and Bevins?

Rand. Oh boy, you know I just had... I had long discussions this morning already with more trouble shooting stuff on ways to get that done, and I wish we could go into details of what it is.  It's a mixture of us knowing what the problem is and not knowing what the problem is.  But at the core it has to do with what we're doing with... with what we think is a very unique aspect of our engine, frankly, and that is the ability to remember the multitude of states that everything can be in.  Most other MMO's, rather than trying to remember the states of  doors or monsters that were killed or weapons that were dropped or cones that were kicked, just kind of make things disappear or respawn.  We... we try to remember all those things and in the city alone there are so many states that have to be synchronized with the state server every time somebody links in.  And it seems to become a bottleneck and we may be closing in on exactly what that issue is.  It may have something to do with the fact that there are almost a hundred cones in there and that may seem like trivial things, but they're actually physical items that you can kick, that have velocity, that have direction and every time you load the city it's gotta figure out where all those cones are, put them in the right spot and then figure out if somebody recently kicked one so that as soon as you link in you can see it moving or into its new spot. So there's a lot of that going on that we are every day looking at trying to fix and please rest assured that we are doing our best to bump up those population levels, in the city in particulaRand.  The bevins are a little bit easier, I think we are over a hundred in a bevin and still functional during these interviews and stuff, and that seems more useful to beven, but for the big events we would love the City to have more people.  We're really trying to solve that one.

Bob. Much of the multi-player aspect of the game appears to be taking place outside of GameTap in the several forums and chat groups. Is this activity being noted by GameTap as an indication of the popularity of the game?

Rand. Boy... I can't speak for GameTap... we are happy to send forum posts to the people at GameTap just to bring things to their attention and I think there are some key people at GameTap who do read, keep up with things on a fairly regular basis, so without knowing for sure, I would pretty, it would be a pretty good guess to say that all that is going on in lots of the forums is being watched by people at GameTap.

Bob. The point of the question is GameTap is obviously keeping track of the number of hours people are playing the game through GameTap, but what about the number of hours they are also playing it outside of GameTap, indicating just how addicted they are to this game.

Rand. Yeah, I think it's a combination of both how long people are playing and... the addiction level, and how many people we've got in, that GameTap's interested in.  And so for obvious reasons, if you've got a core group of addicted people, but it's too small, then you may not generate enough revenue even though they're avid and they're in a lot, they may not generate enough revenue to justify additional content.  If the people keep growing, if we keep adding new people, regardless of how few it is, but it's a regular increase ramping up, that kind of changes things and maybe you can project that into the future and justify a little more here and there.  And all I can say is that I'm glad I'm not the guy making those kinds of calls and determining and anticipating what all those budget constraints are. That's a difficult task.  I only hope that, you know, that we got enough people and enough interest and enough addiction, and I use that word in a light addiction way 'cause I think that's what we are, to kind of keep things rolling 'cause, you know, especially after the resent changes it's just been a lot of fun to watch.  Hopefully the next episode we'll actually see an increase because of some word of mouth and some excitement level.

Bob. Speaking of generating revenue, when will we be able to buy our DRC tee shirts and Bahro plushies?

Rand. <Laughter> Boy, oh boy, I would love a DRC tee shirt.  Once again it's a resource item, a resource issue, and as soon as we kind of build those, there's two ways to make that happen... 

Bob. Not in-game.  I'm talking about e-commerce. I want to spend more money on you.

Rand. Right, right, right, that's the, that's the one that takes resources, too.  That's the one I was talking about.  There are two ways to do that.  One way is to use the Cafe Press method which means that you have incredibly expensive stuff and you don't make too much on it.  And the other way is actually design it yourself and build an inventory and ship it out and sell it yourself and that requires people and personnel and we are, you know, in electronic meter terms, we're pegged.  We just don't have a lot of cycles left to put towards stuff.  So it's not for lack of wanting things, in fact we get some good suggestions from fans not only on those things on, you know, things like tee shirts and plush toys, but stuff for in-game as well that is on a big list of things that we would love to implement, but it's just... boy... If someday if we put a few more cycles in we will start picking away at a few more of those things on the list.

Bob.  Discussing the movie rights with anyone?

Rand. No.
<Laughter>
Rand. At this point, not really. And I think the way that works, you know, there's been much better, I'm going to say this in a kind of humble tone, there's been much better franchises than ours that have had a harder time making a movie, so we don't put a lot of eggs into that basket and if it just pops up and just jumps into our lap then we'll be happy to make that movie and it will be wonderful, but I think that's a long shot.

Bob.  Thank you.  That was the end of the prepared questions.

Rand.  Thanks.  Good questions.

Actually, there were a few more questions, but they were specifically for the players.  If you are a player, you should be able to find them posted on any of the major Uru forums.

The next day Rand appeared in the game to a crowd of 180 players in one location.  This set a new record for their servers in a game where it is unusual for more than a dozen players to get together in the same place.

Rand was there to announce the release of the latest Age, Minkata.  This could possibly be the largest Age made to date.  One player calculated that it represents over nine square kilometers of playing area.  But more importantly, it contains clues and information needed to understand the story and help solve the mysteries.

“A storm is coming.  He is coming.  And I will come.
Destruction is coming.  Find a way.  Make a home.”

Yeesha

Listen to an MP3 of this Interview