URU - AGES BEYOND MYST
ECTS Preview 2003
By Simon "Auz" Austin

Over the years I've been playing games, the storage requirement seems to be in a never-ending upward spiral. From 48k stored on audio cassette, via double- and high-density floppy disks (880k and 1.4MB respectively) to 750MB CDs. The box holding Riven - The Sequel To Myst gathering dust on the shelf clocks in with a whole five CDs worth - the result of its use of high-quality pre-rendered backgrounds for the scenery.

Thankfully though, the advances in graphics cards over the years have allowed equally stunning images to be drawn in real-time, and its my supposition that URU - Ages of Myst, when released, will not need quite as many CDs. There may be another price to pay though, and the minimum spec is likely to be a P3 and a GeForce 2. Meanwhile, the demonstration at ECTS this year on Ubi-Soft's stand was running on a P4 and a GeForce 4 - and even it stuttered in a couple of places.

Said demo - 80% complete according to a little placard below the monitor - was of the single-player elements of the game. Unlike The Sims Online, which expected its legions of fans to switch wholesale to the online multiplayer genre, Ubi-soft is betting on a more gradual switch from single- to multi-player. Once you've grown tired of completing (or not completing) the puzzles in the game, you can go on-line and team up to try out different puzzles that need a number of people to complete.

So, with only the single-player game on display, how does it perform? There's a fully 3D world to wander around in, divided into various "Ages" to which you can move to and from via your own personal age. In each age, you, as your customisable avatar, have a number of puzzles to complete, which move you further along in that age. If you get stuck you can go and try your luck in a different age though. Completing the puzzles provides a number of other rewards too, including things to change the appearance of your avatar.

Some of the early puzzles seem unnecessarily obscure - one involved using a button three times - though perhaps there's a reason given in the game that the demonstrator skipped over since he'd been doing the same puzzle over and over already…

If they can get a worthwhile set of multiplayer puzzles going though, URU could be an interesting change from the number of hack and slash games around.

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