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Myst Obduction from Cyan (Myst, Riven)

Dexter

Arcane
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Mar 31, 2011
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15,655
Nice, I'm not that much of a fan but really hope it reaches $1.3 million because of you-know-what. :lol:
 

Whisky

The Solution
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Yes! Donated just in time.

Glad this is getting through. It has been so long since Cyan has really made anything new. It'll be good to see some cheesy performances by the brothers again too.
 
Repressed Homosexual
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Nostalgia goggles are strong in this one. For whatever reasons I could never play Myst even after several tries and a pestering friend raving about it. The entire concept sucks and the games were boring as hell.

Wasted money.
Why is Cyan cool all of a sudden, I thought everyone thought the puzzles were abstract and pretentious, and so was the atmosphere?
It's the anti-Myst squad like you two that is directly responsible for the real death of adventures games, i.e. shit like Telltale being called the "savior of adventure gaming" and retarded QTE minigames with fake c&c everywhere. No matter what the sheeple on IGN forums says, that's the one and only demise of adventures, not Cyan's success. If anything Myst gave the genre an entire decade of full viability instead of it being already killed at the early 90's by Doom.

I don't buy that. If anything, Myst gave this genre the wrong kind of attention. People bought it to stare at pretty pictures streamed off a CD-ROM, not to solve puzzles and enjoy the possibilities of the medium. Remember this was the time when there were tons of gimmicky "multimedia CD-ROMs" being made, and trash like 7th Guest was hailed as an all-time classic, while it's laughably bad in many respects today; Myst and Riven were no exception. I remember it being widely derided by PC magazines of the times who gave as much coverage as they could to adventure games.
 

Raapys

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
4,960
Myst and Riven were awesome. Still are, actually. Excellent locations, lots of average and a few really great puzzles, gorgeous visuals, great sound, superb atmosphere.

I do agree that most people probably bought them to stare at them though, especially Riven which sold like 7(?) million and is almost impossible to finish without a walkthrough or ridiculous dedication.
 
Repressed Homosexual
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I never got anywhere with even Myst's puzzles, much too abstract to me.

No way this isn't launched without some kind of hint system due to all the people who will buy it to play an interactive screen saver.
 

DeepOcean

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Messages
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My experience with Riven was: great, beautiful, atmospheric, gorgeous, alien, hmmm, I liked the concept of entering on a book too, and people that create books that are passages to other dimensions, interesting.Okay, I'm hooked... let's play for reals, hmmm, wtf is this thing and what is used for? It looks like a cilinder and has 5 buttons that don't do anything, everytime I press a button, a sound is emitted that means something, right?... what I must do? I pulled this lever, okay, it had an effect somewhere in the island and I have no idea where or what it did, if it did something.

Finaly I solved the puzzle!Yay! What? An even more obtuse one?I must be retarded, I gonna check out a walkthrough... Wtf I just read... okay, you must have an autistic crazy mind to design that, I appretiated the effort but I could had more fun with other things. I loved the alien vibe that Riven had but I think that many times they gone way overboard with the absolutely no tips thing. When you look for hours to a thing that looks like a telescope, a giant metallic dildo or a space ship and you are not sure even what the damn thing is let alone solve the puzzle.
 
Repressed Homosexual
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My experience with Riven was: great, beautiful, atmospheric, gorgeous, alien, hmmm, I liked the concept of entering on a book too, and people that create books that are passages to other dimensions, interesting.Okay, I'm hooked... let's play for reals, hmmm, wtf is this thing and what is used for? It looks like a cilinder and has 5 buttons that don't do anything, everytime I press a button, a sound is emitted that means something, right?... what I must do? I pulled this lever, okay, it had an effect somewhere in the island and I have no idea where or what it did, if it did something.

Finaly I solved the puzzle!Yay! What? An even more obtuse one?I must be retarded, I gonna check out a walkthrough... Wtf I just read... okay, you must have an autistic crazy mind to design that, I appretiated the effort but I could had more fun with other things. I loved the alien vibe that Riven had but I think that many times they gone way overboard with the absolutely no tips thing. When you look for hours to a thing that looks like a telescope, a giant metallic dildo or a space ship and you are not sure even what the damn thing is let alone solve the puzzle.

Perfect description of the series "gameplay". Reminds me a lot of bad memories.

It's hard to deride Sierra adventures and others for having "illogical" puzzles after that.
 

abnaxus

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My experience with Riven was: great, beautiful, atmospheric, gorgeous, alien, hmmm, I liked the concept of entering on a book too, and people that create books that are passages to other dimensions, interesting.Okay, I'm hooked... let's play for reals, hmmm, wtf is this thing and what is used for? It looks like a cilinder and has 5 buttons that don't do anything, everytime I press a button, a sound is emitted that means something, right?... what I must do? I pulled this lever, okay, it had an effect somewhere in the island and I have no idea where or what it did, if it did something.

Finaly I solved the puzzle!Yay! What? An even more obtuse one?I must be retarded, I gonna check out a walkthrough... Wtf I just read... okay, you must have an autistic crazy mind to design that, I appretiated the effort but I could had more fun with other things. I loved the alien vibe that Riven had but I think that many times they gone way overboard with the absolutely no tips thing. When you look for hours to a thing that looks like a telescope, a giant metallic dildo or a space ship and you are not sure even what the damn thing is let alone solve the puzzle.
If you ever end up in hell, I think you will be forced to play through Schizm for all eternity.
 

Redlands

Arcane
Joined
Mar 23, 2008
Messages
983
absolutely no tips thing

Do you mean "no hints at what to do at a specific point in time", "no hints as to how things work" or something else?

If it's the first, then yeah, the Myst games are not going to be for you. You're not given a whole bunch of direction about what to go and what to do (at least in Riven I think the other ones give you far more specific goals at every stage, but see my second point about this). I can get why someone might not like it, but there's definitely people who like the whole free-to-explore aspect of adventure games (considering story- and guidance-lite games were what was common early on in the genre), so that by itself isn't going to make a game bad.

If it's the second, then you must have missed a lot of stuff, because the games are swimming in clues on how things work. What you have to do is find them all, then figure out how they fit together; you often have to play around with buttons and levers, and go explore to see if something has changed, then note it down. Sometimes the puzzles can be really fucking annoying, especially in V where you have to contend with drawing symbols on a tablet, and hoping the computer gets the right one and doesn't have it magicked away somewhere inconvenient. You have to do this with the story as well, a lot of the time, which can be a bit weird if you've not played a lot of the earlier adventure games where this was very much the norm.

I never got anywhere with even Myst's puzzles, much too abstract to me.

Yeah I can see how you might get stuck. The very first puzzle in the game involve reading a one-page note and counting.
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
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Myst was NOT responsible for the death of the Adventure Games™. Filthy greedy Publishers who found out how many copies Myst sold and then told all their developers to stop making classic 2D adventure games and now only copy Myst are to blame.
 
Repressed Homosexual
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They would've kept being made and kept to a niche. The reason they died is simply because of the rising cost of making assets, like with everything else. Myst ushered in a definite paradigm shift in that regard, forcing everyone else to start measuring up, or be gradually condemned to obsolescence and to retailers shunning them.
 

Redlands

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Messages
983
Considering that when the Myst series came out, we also had:
  1. increasingly cheap computers,
  2. easier-to-use computers with the oncoming release of Windows 95, and technologies like DirectX,
  3. the advent of FPS games,
  4. the fall of Sierra as a studio after being sold to CUC,
  5. LucasArts working/going to work on five more adventure games, three of which ended up being cancelled.
When you have a huge market shift in demand, and the two major players in your niche going through substantial changes in focus, it's not too surprising that adventure games died out from their prominence when they did. Blaming it on just Myst seems really fucking stu- oh wait, it's you saying so.

Additionally, it's not as though Sierra and LucasArts weren't generally raising the bar on graphics when they released games. The GrimE engine and Sierra's new FMV and 3D engines were being used at this time as well.
 

Jaesun

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So this made it! Oh man... I was biting my fingernails.

:yeah:

I am very curious how this will turn out. <3
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
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Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,393
Likewise, just because pen and paper are an absolute must it doesn't mean the games are hard. Write everything down and even Riven isn't a problem. That's part of the charm too, to take your time and write your discoveries and possible hints found. In a way, these games are quite the hardcore take on the genre, like a tough dungeon crawler without automapping. It always surprises me when I see people bashing them on the very freaking Codex, one of the few places I know with lots of people that enjoy a good title without hand helding and intrusive stories with 50 mins of dialogues at every corner. Not that I dislike the typical "storyfag" adventure, I love this genre, but Myst is definitely the "hardcore dungeon crawler" of the bunch and it always feels to me like the "Myst is boring, couldn't stand it" people are the same that would say exactly the same about the games praised around here
That was my main mistake, I was used to solve all the adventure games I played without writing anything down, just played from memory and occasionally written something down when there were mazes. Myst like games need you to write down the clues or things get confused pretty quickly.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
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almondblight

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Aug 10, 2004
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2,549
Likewise, just because pen and paper are an absolute must it doesn't mean the games are hard. Write everything down and even Riven isn't a problem. That's part of the charm too, to take your time and write your discoveries and possible hints found.

Ah man, that's what I loved about Myst. Wandering around the world with a notebook in hand, writing down every single random thing I saw, flipping through the notebook to see how these things were connected. And I agree, the puzzles (and world) in Myst were much more logical than other adventure games, but I can see how that would have thrown some people off.
 
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Pyke

The Brotherhood
Developer
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Nov 29, 2011
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1,196
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South Africa
I really liked how they handled the interaction with objects, although walking around terrains is (unfortunately) no longer impressive. I'm looking forward to seeing the strange architecture of the world! Enough trees - show me buildings!
 

Raapys

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
4,960
Looks like the graphics quality is almost back to the level of Riven again.
 

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