People who bought the game at retail were invited to apply for entry into the online portion of the game. It was public and NDA-less, though it did require an invitation. Prologue, launched on November 17, 2003, was an aborted attempt by Ubisoft and Cyan at bringing Uru: Ages Beyond Myst to the masses for the first time. A page on Cyan's old website listed all the participants. Curiously, its focus was on single-player game testing most of the time. Ubiru įrom January 2003 to late August, Ubiru built upon Choru, expanded testing from dozens to eventually a few thousands and moved testing from Cyan-hosted machines to servers of Ubisoft's instead. Between March and May, Choru's former website stated 'Choru we'll miss you'. The term Choru, alongside Ubiru, was coined by 75th Trombone in response to the then-impending Ubiru launch. In the context of Uru's storyline, the Choru testers were referred to as Authorized Explorers at the time of Uru's launch, there were only eighty-three participants on the Authorized Explorer forums. However, Choru remained relatively small. Throughout 20, additional testers were added. It was a small group, but distributed across multiple continents. Greer, IMForeman, and Rivenchan) who are listed as Premier Explorers in the Uru credits. It began in March with the five explorers ( Rico, Blastercalm, Dr. In 2002, Choru (the Closed Beta) was the first test involving participants that weren't employees of Cyan. Main article: Second Restoration of D'ni Choru The first announcement of the game was preceded by an ( Alternate reality game) called Preafter. At this time, Cyan had an unusually high amount of employees working on the project, but in order to make the project financially feasible, they had to partner, and ultimately did, with Ubisoft, but this would significantly change the focus, and change the game's concept once more, towards a hybrid single- and multi-player one. Unfortunately, this rewrite took significant amounts of time (and money) away from Cyan, who hadn't had a notable product since Riven, with the exception of the minor realMyst release. In order to make Mudpie feasible, Plasma had to be rewritten, leading to version 20, with much improved networking facilities, and the ability to easily script Ages using the Python language. Mudpie mostly reflected a similar storyline to that of DIRT, but put a lot more focus on the City with the multi-player aspect, interaction in the City becomes a lot more feasible and realistic, leading to such ideas as a collaborative restoration effort, or, as in Uru, one led by a controversial organization, the DRC. This idea has been carried over to Uru and is perhaps most clearly visible through the avatar customization options: Cyan has over the years added additional adjustments such as more clothing, more distinct facial complexions, more hairstyles, etc., to make the avatar match the real-life appearance (or, at least, the appearance a user would like to have in real life when exploring) as closely as possible. In Mudpie, however, the user is not meant to play a role they are to be true to themselves. To date, virtually every MMOG implementation is a role-playing one MMOG is therefore often considered synonymous with MMORPG. Most importantly, Mudpie stepped away from the single-player nature of DIRT, radically replacing it with a multi-user model, commonly known as Massively multiplayer online game. The E is typically regarded as meaning Environment or Experience.The I is sometimes lengthened to Integrated, but more frequently to Interactive, alluding to the unparalleled amount of influence every player has on the story, another key aspect to the game.The P can mean Person or Player, signifying the role a user of Mudpie has: unusually, the role they play is themselves.The D can represent D'ni or DIRT ( D'ni In Real Time), the project Mudpie was original based on (DIRT, however, was exclusively single-player).(Uru, however, is both single- and multi-user).

The MU can stand for Multi-user, referring to the fact that Mudpie was, exclusively, a multi-user game.Still, the backronyms are a reasonable, accurate description of the project's objectives: acronyms whose original meaning was apparently never actually agreed upon. The name is both a basis of jokes (regarding Mud Pie ice cream, Mud Pie cookies, etc.) as well as of backronyms, i.e. Mudpie was the codename for Cyan's project that eventually led to the release of Uru, but had conceptual differences.

Myst online