Myst

[Garamoth]

Hey thanks Fabien, I appreciate the positive comment. I don't use expressions like "I think, I feel, I consider" unless I want to emphasize that something is my opinion. Those expressions add unnecessary weight to a sentence and generally weaken your position when you're trying to state something. And yeah, I guess you have to trust your readers to an extent. Everything in a text is always the author's opinion, unless he's quoting someone else.

In hindsight, I think the original Myst deserves a bit more criticism, but it's a balancing act mixing description and criticism without drowning the reader.

As for the rest Ryochan's reply, well, thanks for your input, but I'm just not going to go back and forth on the same points.


FAKE EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot to respond to Weasel's post:

Jul 3, 2010 4:40:48 GMT -5 Weasel said:

One thing most people miss about the Selenetic and Mechanical ages in Myst: you're supposed to do the Mechanical Age first, as it provides an essential clue to the maze in the Selenetic age - specifically the full solution, in sound effects.

In the Mechanical Age, there's a "Fortress Rotation Simulator" that you mess with - you can goof around with a holographic image of the fortress, but the trick there is that every time you stop the fortress, it plays a different sound effect based on which direction it's facing. If you make note of these sounds, you'll come across them again later in the Selenetic Age when you're going through the maze - every time the cart stops, it'll play a sound through a speaker. If you point the cart in the direction the sound corresponds to and then press Forward, you'll make it to the end of the maze after doing this several times (at some point the speaker will play two of the sounds together - this means you'll need to go between those directions, i.e. northwest if you hear both the North and the West sounds together). Takes a keen ear.

Yeah, that's something I just realized when revisiting the game for the article. According to my very official handwritten notes, the sound for North is pink, East is drwij, South is bonk and West is driwwww. So if the sub goes pinkdrwij, that means you have to go northeast.

Sound puzzles deserve a conversation of their own. Some people are just allergic to them. I used to be, but I think my musical ear is getting better. Maybe Patapon forced my brain to listen better.

[kal]

Hey I had trouble with that damn spit pipe puzzle in The Neverhood...that damn music puzzle SLAUGHTERED me as a child in Myst. I really should play Riven with my more *mature* adult brain (though I recently played RealMyst and still got my brain kicked to the curve).

[Garamoth]

There's a thread I've been reading about in the Uru forums that's really interesting:

BOMB in the City!!! Help us deactivate it!!!

Basically, one user programmed a bot avatar a few days ago to be a bomb that must be deactivated by telling him a specific code. So it's a user made puzzle.

Solving it involves some pretty intense stuff, like turning a seemingly random series of numbers and punctuation marks into more numbers by interpreting them in D'ni font through a computer. There's also equations that can only be solved by taking into account the bomb's countdown. Heady stuff... that was solved in a mere 6 hours. So if you weren't there at that specific time that day, you can only hear about how others pulled it off.

Afterwards, posters start complaining that some people were more interested in making light jokes than solving the puzzle, thus disrupting the community effort (as if light jokes were the worst you could expect from MMOs). Then others started saying that everyone should put the emphasis on the team, not on who solved what.

Right after that, one user just goes on a tirade about the New Age notion of raising yourself to higher Life Levels beyond lowly selfishness into universal acceptance, holistic love... and beyond.

This is pretty much the entire Uru experience in a nutshell. Uru is so dysfunctional compared to other MMOs...

EDIT: Hah, funny, the voice he used for the countdown is actually John Cleese from Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic.

[kal]

Honestly though with the way most MMOs have one really basic goal, Kill stuff, I'm honestly amazed the Uru game didn't just spontaneously combust.

[syntheticgerbil]

Not to be offensive as well, but I'm like Ryochan, but the way this article is written is way too snooty for me. The whole "curator at the Louvre" bit confirms it for me. I'm sure we assume the curator is some kind of highest of the high brow type fellow who thinks every tourist who comes to the museum is such a Philistine, but I would bet the curator is more than happy masses of people come to the museum fascinated by art, willing to pay the price to get in.

I stopped reading adventure game sites and reviews because of this sort of prose, that just continuously gushes on and on about the games and the creators. There are more than enough articles like this on Myst all over the web.

The whole first page is filled with tons of rambling text praising the game, the series, repeatedly stating it was a runaway hit, going off over and over about the wonderful subtlety and expertise of the art direction and what a mysterious game with more story than meets the eye it is. It all comes off very condescending towards other (adventure) games to me.

But other than that, it is a very thorough article.

I personally would have liked to read one by a person who is not a huge fan but doesn't have a ton of Myst hate either way. It's very hard to find that sort of balance.

[kal]

The game boasts some of the best texture work out there. It's in the skies, the caves, the clothes, the architectural details, everywhere. I just don't know how these guys do it, but you just CAN beat solid texture work like that. Plus, a game with really inspired texture work will weather the test of time much better than a game with a few more polygons than its contemporaries. There's magic in them textures!!

Was re-reading the article when I noticed this exceedingly minor typo - but it's there so when you guys have a sec to fix it.

[KeeperBvK]

Sorry for bringing up this old topic, but I absolutely felt compelled to say how much I've enjoyed reading the article. Back in the days my Mom got me Myst, but I only touched it for a few minutes before being utterly bored. The article however made me want to go out and get most if not all Myst games ASAP. I can't really agree with any of the criticism brought up here and I think it's a shame Garamoth hasn't been around here in a long time. Are there any other articles done by him?

[Discoalucard]

He did Secret of Evermore as well. I'd certainly be down with him contributing more! I still don't particularly care for the Myst games myself, but this article did a fantastic job convincing me of why other people love them - it was enough to let me see the games in a different light.

[Garamoth]

Another year, another Myst remake.

First there was Myst: Masterpiece Edition
Then there was realMyst
As of today, there is realMyst, Masterpiece Edition

Basically, it's an enhanced version of realMYST, so it's in full 3D. It has all those new-fangled things kids like these days, like bloom, blur and depth of field. You can also apparently compare images with the slides from the original, so that's having the whole package. It looks quite nice, though certainly not cutting edge, and I'm all for keeping the classics updated. Provided it runs well, that would make it the new "definitive" Myst.

Here are some screenshots for comparison (couldn't find the exact angles):

Myst: Masterpiece Edition


realMyst


realMyst: Masterpiece Edition




On another note, I never saw those last messages. I've been away a while. Glad to hear the article was appreciated. Well, if there is a demand for more... I have something in mind. I'll PM Discoalucard about it.

[jorpho]

Have they no inclination to do realRiven? But then, adding tweaks to the realMyst engine (if that's what they're doing) would be much less of an undertaking.

[Garamoth]

The fans are already on it, with some support from Cyan, apparently.

The Starry Expanse Project

[edmonddantes]

Regarding the original Myst, I always got weirded out when people said they found the railcart/maze segment hard.

This may be an extension of the same kind of natural sense of direction I have that allows me to never have to draw maps for Wizardry or other first-person dungeon crawlers, but when I was a kid I got through that simply because it occured to me that I started at the southwest so I figured I had to get to the northeast... which is kinda correct since, after awhile you do wind up travelling north then east.

I played it again yesterday and noticed the sound cues (I may have noticed them as a kid too but I don't think so) and was able to figure out which sound meant what by process of elimination (you hear North and West right off the bat in parts where there's only one right way to go, so there's only two you have to figure out... it helps that there's a pattern: North and South are both doink noises while East and West are both a kind of air rushing noise). To be fair on this recent playthru I had seen websites mention the soundcues so I can't claim to be a genius for that anymore. I will say tho that as a kid Myst was one of the first adventure games I beat without help or walkthrus (the absolute first one was Space Quest IV, but Myst was probably the second or third such game).

Riven on the other hand I wound up going to Gamefaqs, but I might've been suffering from burnout--when I play too many adventure games at a time I get to a point where puzzles get obtuse and annoying. I wish burnout wouldn't happen.

[blackdrazon]

Any chance we might transfer the Uru article to the new site, or replace it? The old one doesn't exactly follow the current format but it feels like something's missing without it.

By the way, the banner picture at the top of the Myst IV article is actually from Myst III, and the two paragraphs on Spire from the same game seem to alternate drafts of one another. Might be a few ideas to salvage but mostly they feel like duplicates.