Came here to say that. This is the exact type of game that appeals to the Linux crowd too. I see no reason that it couldn't be made to also run on Linux.
Will there be another kickstarter in the future for Windows 11?
EDIT: From the KS page, "A Word to Mac Users"
This does not lead me to believe it's going to be something like an SDL2 port but a one off port. I hope I can be proven wrong.
The compatibility story has changed a lot since 1993. DLL hell has been solved, UAC has been introduced, and executables now have manifiests which state which versions of Windows they are designed to work with.
There’s also the face that video is no longer cutting edge.
Does this mean that Windows 10 apps released today will run on the latest “Windows 10” years in the future? Only time will tell I guess, but if there is one thing Microsoft has been good at historically it’s been backwards compatibility. Not perfect, but still so good at it that they deserve recognition for that. Credit where credit is due and all that, even for an operating system that I generally don’t like and don’t want to use.
I have an old version of Myst IV and Myst III, and they run just fine on my windows 10 installation. Totally thrilled by this project though :) The series (and especially Riven) kept me in front of the computer for a loooong time in my youth.
External yeah. But for most of my old games (that are not yet on GOG) I just turn them into iso and use a no-cd when necessary. Too lazy to plug the drive every time :)
What black magic did you have to do to get Myst III to run fine on Windows 10? I tried it a couple months ago and it was so slow and janky and low-res that it wasn't playable. (Maybe because I was using a USB CD drive?)
I don't remember doing nothing special really. For the slowness, see my other reply. I usually don't run directly from the CD drive.
The one that gave me the most troubles was Riven (before I got it from GOG). For this one I had to do some mumbo-jumbo to finally get a full screen yeah.
Huh, I wonder where I went wrong. Exile just... didn't function. But then, I was trying to run it on my shiny new VR rig, so it might've just been hardware compatibility. :/ Thanks!
Steam games are cheap, old games are cheap, lots to choose from.
Nintendo(or other consoles), full price 60$ games, 40$ on sale. First party games are the primary buy, and those are few and far between.
The last Nintendo console I owned was the GC, I havent looked back. There are enough cheap games for the PC that I dont miss out on the last 2 zelda games.
The Kickstarter is only for the physical stuff. Making games run on newer versions of Windows was done by GOG.com and will be released even if Kickstarter fails.
GOG has never been an "abandonware" site. Everything on GOG has always been appropriately licensed from the IP owners. The early focus was digital distribution of out-of-print titles (hence the original name "Good Old Games"), but it has always been a retail storefront.
Actually not having a fully rendered environment worked for Myst. If you were looking out a window or at a door, it was a good bet that there was something important to the plot there.
I think if I had a fully VR version, I would've ended up spending too much time on all the ancillary props that were scattered about everywhere.
And I'd end up about a hundred times saying "Oh, there's salt-shaker on the table. I'd better try to pick it up and examine it." rather than heading towards the stuff that actually advanced the story.
I may be susceptible to nostalgia, but I still go back and replay them from time to time, especially Myst. The puzzles and story hold up very well, and the game was never about immersive graphics.
I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty well. I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope of arbitrarily obtuse solutions to some puzzles. I ended up needing about 2 or 3 vague hints to point me to certain areas to advance the plot (luckily, though, IIRC no puzzle solutions), usually revolving around not understanding navigation options (like not knowing you could move through a certain part of a screen). I'm not sure how much of that was developer's being tricky or the low resolution of the game making it difficult to discern details, or the general shortcomings of the cursor-based UI.
If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).
Did you try search for "Riven hints"? Some people have set up some nice hints websites for most of the games, which give you hints in small steps. I have used the ones on The Universal Hint System. See for Riven: http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/riven.php
I think the difficulty of Riven is definitely cranked up a couple of notches too high. Myst seems to hit the sweet spot perfectly.
I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....
Myst and Riven are fond memories for me. Riven was a real masterpiece, though; after the success of Myst they went to town on it. I never paid much attention to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and they weren't made by the Miller brothers. In my own personal mind-canon Riven is the end of the series.
Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.
This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with.
There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example.
What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.
I also think Riven killed adventure games for a bit - regardless of what you think of it from a gameplay perspective, it's really pretty graphically, and the slideshow-style presentation honestly doesn't hamper what you can allow the player to do if you aren't twitch-reacting to enemies that the computer is throwing at you.
It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.
Myst 5 also suffered from the fact that it was a "third season" excised at the last minute from Uru Live (on strange experiment network GameTap).
The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru: Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.
All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor" compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with "Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).
(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)
Well, you are correct - there's a lot of reasons - but I still think art is one of the primary ones. If you'll allow me to drop into a specific example: during Riven's development, Cyan hired a guy named Richard Vander Wende, who had previously worked on Aladdin at Disney. Much like Aladdin, he made color grading a focus of Riven - most images tend to be unusually warm or cool, dark or light, etc. in ways that communicate a mood or something about the world you are interacting with (even if it's not something you yet know about the world you are interacting with). Stuff like this is, IMHO, unusually effective in a game like Riven - the player is often too busy looking for a switch or button or whatever to consciously absorb little details like that, but there's a way that I feel like that communicates the mood of a location in a way that's very emotional and brilliant. The effect may work better on me than other people, but it's one of the reasons why Riven is the highlight of the series for me.
There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven.
(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)
I think that there was still a lot of things that could have been done in real-time graphics even at the time of Myst 5's release that weren't done simply due to the business economics that the Uru engine (Plasma) didn't support them, in large part due to the compromises Plasma made to support real-time multiplayer physics.
> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted
I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.
You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be pedantic in that way - more like I'm just gleefully geeking out about Cyan being in the news a bit. Your overall point above was completely correct.
I was a fan of Myst as a kid and recently bought it on Nvidia shield tv. It is absolutely stunning with surreal graphics. A VR version would really be interesting
Strange, does this involve Robin and Rand Miller, the creator? If this is just a W10 port I'm not as interested, but I WOULD be extremely interested if the Miller's ...revisited Myst a little. That game was a significant part of my childhood.
> Strange, does this involve Robin and Rand Miller, the creator? If this is just a W10 port I'm not as interested, but I WOULD be extremely interested if the Miller's ...revisited Myst a little.
Cyan Worlds already did this multiple times. I just want to mention "Myst: Masterpiece Edition" (adding 24 bit true color graphics instead of 256 color 8 bit graphics), "realMyst" (adding 3D graphics and (small spoiler) na nqqvgvbany ntr pnyyrq "Evzr") and "realMyst: Masterpiece Edition" (better 3D graphics).
That said, I really wish the creators remake these games for the mobile. These kind of puzzle games dont have any of the FPS requirements that today's mobile phones cant handle. The beautiful scenes that Myst was well known for can easily be rendered on a 4 year old phone as well.
But most importantly, touch and gyroscope opens up degrees of freedom that was previously impossible to conceive. Imagine an AR like Myst.
Just to iterate on your comment, while The Witness is one of my favorite games and very close in spirit to the Myst, the closet game after many many years I was able to find is Quern:
I suggested to one of the Niantic developers (Ingress, Pokemon Go) that they could make interesting "historical fiction tours" that people would likely pay for. Basically have the customer travel around a city to important places and solve a "mystery" associated with some historical event. You could use some of the Ingress mechanics where you would "pick up" a clue at a location that was a playable video file. That would lead you to the next clue. You could "uncover" secret locations by locating yourself relative to landmarks and entering a sequence, etc.
My understanding was that The Witness doesn't really have a plot. Was I mistaken?
One of the unusually good things about Riven is how well integrated and justified every puzzle was into the world; the storyline and environment genuinely didn't just feel like an excuse for the game to throw puzzles at you. Sometimes I play games which are puzzles for puzzles sake (I'm fond of DROD), but it's a very different thing.
The earlier games in particular used pre-rendered 640x480 graphics, so I'm curious about whether they will be re-creating the graphical assets to make use of modern display resolutions. Could be a lot of work depending on the state of the source material and dependencies. Riven, for example, was rendered using a package called Mental Ray which was discontinued last year.
The assets for Myst at least should be in decent shape, or at least the ones used in the real-time 3D Myst Live (I think that was the title) remake from a few years back.
I seem to recall hearing that there wouldn't be a similar Riven remake, due to loss of the source assets from that game. I assume the new package will be using the same GOG versions you can get now, with the original stills.
It's also worth checking out the fan-run Starry Expanse project[0], which is an attempt to manually recreate the entirety of Riven in a modern 3D environment. Progress is very slow, but already looks quite impressive.
I'm really excited to see that they've finally got the rights to III and IV, which I always felt were the technical/visual peak of the series.
62 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#Production
EDIT: From the KS page, "A Word to Mac Users" This does not lead me to believe it's going to be something like an SDL2 port but a one off port. I hope I can be proven wrong.
EDIT2: Another World/Flashback was ported a while ago, but that was built on a VM, which is very cool: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php
There’s also the face that video is no longer cutting edge.
Instead new versions of Windows are released as updates of Windows 10.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/09/windows-1...
Does this mean that Windows 10 apps released today will run on the latest “Windows 10” years in the future? Only time will tell I guess, but if there is one thing Microsoft has been good at historically it’s been backwards compatibility. Not perfect, but still so good at it that they deserve recognition for that. Credit where credit is due and all that, even for an operating system that I generally don’t like and don’t want to use.
I gave up on CDs when I was dealing with a corrupt CD drive or SATA cable.
It was weird, but after I disconnected it, it took me years to use it, and that was for Ubuntu install.
The one that gave me the most troubles was Riven (before I got it from GOG). For this one I had to do some mumbo-jumbo to finally get a full screen yeah.
They've already surpassed their goal.
Edit: I just noticed they released the original Myst on 3DS back in 2012.
Steam games are cheap, old games are cheap, lots to choose from.
Nintendo(or other consoles), full price 60$ games, 40$ on sale. First party games are the primary buy, and those are few and far between.
The last Nintendo console I owned was the GC, I havent looked back. There are enough cheap games for the PC that I dont miss out on the last 2 zelda games.
I think if I had a fully VR version, I would've ended up spending too much time on all the ancillary props that were scattered about everywhere.
And I'd end up about a hundred times saying "Oh, there's salt-shaker on the table. I'd better try to pick it up and examine it." rather than heading towards the stuff that actually advanced the story.
If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).
I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....
Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.
This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with.
There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example.
What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.
It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.
The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru: Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.
All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor" compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with "Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).
(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)
[1] https://mystonline.com/en/
There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven.
(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)
> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted
I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.
You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.
https://obduction.com/
Cyan Worlds already did this multiple times. I just want to mention "Myst: Masterpiece Edition" (adding 24 bit true color graphics instead of 256 color 8 bit graphics), "realMyst" (adding 3D graphics and (small spoiler) na nqqvgvbany ntr pnyyrq "Evzr") and "realMyst: Masterpiece Edition" (better 3D graphics).
Yes it does.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/
That said, I really wish the creators remake these games for the mobile. These kind of puzzle games dont have any of the FPS requirements that today's mobile phones cant handle. The beautiful scenes that Myst was well known for can easily be rendered on a 4 year old phone as well.
But most importantly, touch and gyroscope opens up degrees of freedom that was previously impossible to conceive. Imagine an AR like Myst.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noodlecake...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thou...
If you like Myst, give it a try, you want be disappointed.
And its Linux supported too!!!
I suggested to one of the Niantic developers (Ingress, Pokemon Go) that they could make interesting "historical fiction tours" that people would likely pay for. Basically have the customer travel around a city to important places and solve a "mystery" associated with some historical event. You could use some of the Ingress mechanics where you would "pick up" a clue at a location that was a playable video file. That would lead you to the next clue. You could "uncover" secret locations by locating yourself relative to landmarks and entering a sequence, etc.
Cyan's most recent, Obduction, has VR support.
One of the unusually good things about Riven is how well integrated and justified every puzzle was into the world; the storyline and environment genuinely didn't just feel like an excuse for the game to throw puzzles at you. Sometimes I play games which are puzzles for puzzles sake (I'm fond of DROD), but it's a very different thing.
They worked just fine. There is no need for a kickstarter to 'bring these games to Windows 10" because they already work on Windows 10.
Can you say money grab on nostalgia?
Whatever, I'm almost certainly in on this.
I seem to recall hearing that there wouldn't be a similar Riven remake, due to loss of the source assets from that game. I assume the new package will be using the same GOG versions you can get now, with the original stills.
It's also worth checking out the fan-run Starry Expanse project[0], which is an attempt to manually recreate the entirety of Riven in a modern 3D environment. Progress is very slow, but already looks quite impressive.
I'm really excited to see that they've finally got the rights to III and IV, which I always felt were the technical/visual peak of the series.
[0] http://www.starryexpanse.com/