Uru Live Lives!
When Uru Live shut down in February 2004, barely after it had begun, I was crushed. A lot of people were crushed. Unusual people, as it turns out: fans have held onto the hope of revisiting Uru Live for more than two years, and it’s finally, hopefully, paying off. Turner Broadcasting’s GameTap game network is reviving the game in a 500 player beta run, with 7,000 other players waiting in the wings.
What left me so crushed when Uru Live failed to fly wasn’t that I expected it to be the next big MMOG – in fact, I wasn’t at all sure how it would work, let alone if the experience would be worthwhile. Now that experiments like Second Life have come and thrived, I look back and see the kind of surreal community of like-minded odd gamers that Uru Live could have been. We were soccer moms and engineers, grandparents and middle-schoolers; many of us had little or no relation to the gaming world at large – it was Myst that brought us, that sense of peaceful adventure, the challenge to the intellect and imagination.
GameTap has improved the game with new sound support and a new physics engine that makes it much easier and faster to interact with others, something that bogged down the original game, and if things go as planned Uru Live may begin to incorporate content generated by its incredibly creative player community. If that works out, we could be in for ages and ages of fun. Here’s hoping.
Via News.com
tiny dancer
Posted to Video Games on 10 October 2006
Other stuff like this: cyan worlds, gametap, myst, ubisoft, uru live
Name: Dave