A post mortem is a term for a review meeting or document you can (should!) do at the end of any project. It's not reserved to games. The term literally means 'after death' and traditionally refers to an autopsy. Now, all that morbid stuff aside, it by no means has to focus only the negative, so 'after death' should really read 'after completion' in our case.
Here's a bit of a summary and several links to some of the most well-known game post-mortems (although sadly, those are really after death for some companies):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000736.htmlIt helps to bring closure to the project (often lost in the rush of development) and helps to draw some lessons from what has gone before that can help old and new team members alike to cherish the triumphs and learn from the mistakes.
Since I doubt the community is interested in a technical post mortem (which I suspect Cyan did or will do for their own benefit), I would like to propose to them to do a design post mortem for us. Specifically, it would be good to see what the team hoped to achieve, what challenges they encountered along the way, what ultimately worked great and what in the end failed. Any furhter outlook would be appreciated but we should not expect that for the reasons already explained above.
Why do I think this will help? One, it allows Cyan to put their thoughts on this together, and it will provide the community with some insight and perspective on game design, I suspect many do not possess. Finally, I think it will soothe some ongoing pains, and hopefully will help to manage expectations of what is to come.
Regarding Robyn Miller & Richard van der Wende, I think mszv hit the nail on the head here. For me Riven was the ultimate achievement in in-depth world creation. It wasn't so much a game, as it was an interactive piece of art. There is just so much attention to minute detail and care in this work it seems almost obsessive (and it probably ways listening to the accounts from people involved). However, that was over 10 years ago! The technology and the market has fundemantally changed since then.
While both Richard and Robyn are tremendously talented people, I doubt they could have any impact on the game we have before us today, in addition to the fact that it would also be very hard to motivate someone to work on something already so broadly established.
In the end, re-engineering something is always extremely painful, and most often a wasted effort compared to starting something new from scratch.
If you look at games today, and especially online games, you will see the industry embracing a growing casual player-base. Gone are the designs catering to only the hard-core enthusiasts. There is both good and bad in that. Mostly, the games mechanics and gameplay has been severely simplified (displeasing the old guard) and opened up to gameplay catering to the 30 minutes a day players with short bursts of entertainment.
On the positive side, MMOs especially have now found ways to deliver meaningful and evolving story-lines, something almost entirely unheard of before. In a way, their basic design had always been favourable to it, it just took a lot of learning and refinement of what had gone before. Notable examples in this category are Lord of the Rings Online, Tabula Rasa and GuildWars (and probably others I don't know about).
Uru has not evolved with the market. In fact, it entered the market with the hindrance of an entirely different content creation model. Then again, it tried to achieve its goals in a completely different way, so it is not quite fair to compare it on those grounds.
One thing is sadly obvious, however. Uru will never be able to cater to the 30 minutes a day crowd, that all the other titles are recruiting their players from and specifically designing their content for these days. That is really quite ironic, because it was Cyan who opened up computer game entertainment to a casual and largely untapped market segment with Myst. As much as I would hope it wasn't so, Uru has systemic, basic design problems that no Robyn, Richard or other notable designer could easily fix.