Myst IV Postmortem

Gamasutra.com is hosting an analysis of Myst IV: Revelation. The author explores the good and bad points of the game's production, and reveals interesting moments from the development process. From the article: "Less than a year before the end of the project, things were not going well on the Myst IV: Revelation team: no single zone was in a finished state, communication was difficult between team members and puzzles were taking too long to prototype. We looked at the quantity of work remaining and started brainstorming on how to close this project before the end of September."

Comments

Understandable

[Jorkapp]

It seems Ubi learned a hard lesson through the school of hard knocks. As a game developer myself I can actually say "More often than not, adding alot of man power to a project will only make it alot worse."

The new entries will be plagued by confusion with what is already created and how to create new things. This confusion will result in the already-there workers having to explain and document everything to them, and results in a huge slow-down on the project.

Their "SWAT Team" idea was really nice though. I should think of that next time I get some additional people to work on a project.

Re:Understandable

[SunFan]

"More often than not, adding alot of man power to a project will only make it alot worse."

This is because the complexity of human networks scale exponentially. This has been documented for decades (Fred Brooks, e.g.).

The days of myst are over

[madaxe42]

Unfortunately, while myst was an excellent problem solving adventure game, it's days are over. The main thing which lent appeal to Myst were its, at the time, stunning graphics. Now that we have the ability to render scenes like those shown in myst live, it's really hard to see how point and click adventures like this can survive in their current form.

Re:The days of myst are over

[Austerity Empowers]

I'd love to play one...if it was fun. I never cared much for Myst but the old Kings/Space/Porn Quest games were great fun, until they either disappeared or turned into Police Quest N - Advanced Bureacratic Tactics.

Graphics should help make games more compelling, but just because you can render a billion triangles in a microsecond, doesn't mean you HAVE to.

Re:The days of myst are over

[Bastian]

I doubt that they can, but I don't think that it is because of the graphics of the rest of the world catching up. The problem is that the entire culture of the gaming community has changed.

The best adventure games have always been an intellectual pursuit as much as they were a diversion - while a loosely-collected string of autonomous puzzles like The Seventh Guest tends to get boring rather quickly, a simple slideshow of pretty pictures isn't all that interesting, either.

But a game centered on difficult (often skull-crushing) puzzles has a necessarily slow pace. Most modern gamers, though, have been raised on video games that provide a large portion of their entertainment through a constant cycle of climax and denouement. My suggestion would be that if you've been raised on such a rapidly-paced form of entertainment, it becomes very difficult to remain immersed in a game whose challenge-reward cycle may be 100 times slower. It's the same with movies - most people I know who were raised on action movies tend to consider more slow-paced, thoughtful movies such as your average Orson Welles flick to be dreadfully boring.

I agree that Myst's success was largely due to its graphics, but the adventure game genre was dying out long before that.

Re:The days of myst are over

[Keeper]

Revelations isn't a series of static pictures linked together with mouse clicks. It IS a series of animated panoramas (think quicktime vr) linked together with a series of mouse clicks. I have trouble imagining current video hardware rendering this content in realtime.

I was actually quite impressed with the game.

Anyway, Myst games arn't appealing due to the point and click interface (though that does make it easier for non-gamers to get into) -- it is appealing due to its puzzles and its story. And that sort of gameplay will never go out of style.

Re:The days of myst are over

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're basically saying modern gamers are a bunch of spoiled ADD babies, right?

Re:The days of myst are over

[GeckoX]

I cannot agree with this at all.
Myst's target audience was never the CS fragger crowd, or the fanboy platformer crowd, or any of the other standard game crowds.

Know who played the Myst games the most? People that don't play games as a general rule. People that have never played a game on a computer other than solitaire and minesweeper. My parents played the Myst games.

My thinking is that it's actually Reality Television that has kinda killed these kind of games. No, I've got no proof, but anecdotally, TV was sucking pretty hard a number of years ago. (OK, it still sucks hard and always will, but for the masses...) At the same time, the Internet was booming, people were buying computers for the first time and trying to find things to do with them. Myst and other adventure games filled a niche at that time. Times have changed.

I personally love nothing better than a very challenging adventure/puzzle game. I'm sad to see that Myst IV isn't coming to light because this niche is currently, and has been for a few years now, sorely lacking.

Re:The days of myst are over

[Deltaspectre]

*sigh* the only sad thing is that once you beat Myst (any of them) you beat them.. that's it... ZIPPO replay Now to figure out how to get transition between panoramas below the 20 second mark (128 mb ram :| )

Adventure gaming still lives in the hearts of some

[frikazoyd]

No sir, Myst has more than just "wow" visual appeal. While it helped things visually that the brothers who thought up Myst have heavy art backgrounds, there was more to Myst's gameplay than that. Namely, Myst has some amazing puzzles, visually stunning worlds (Not just in terms of graphics, but in terms of sheer imagination), a very neat story concept (adding pages to books to make them more powerful) and the fact that it is an adventure game.

There are many of us who love adventure games of all sorts, and don't mind the point and click/puzzle game every once in a while. I find the Myst games a worthwhile pursuit, even if some of the puzzles are essentially "Random clicky maze" puzzles, and that most of them require some paper and time away from the physical game to figure out.

Fantastic article.

[Elwood P Dowd]

All the changes described in this post mortem helped but were not enough in themselves, and it has to be said that if Myst IV: Revelation came out in time and with zero critical bugs, it is due to the relentless work and ingenuity of most members of the team who, knowing they were working on a legendary brand, compensated for all the difficulties of the project.

That's one hell of a commendation.

Re:Fantastic article.

[Bastian]

I'd like to thank the team for it, too. After Myst III (which I finished in a weekend) and Myst Uru (a platform jumper!?), I was ready to turn my back on the Myst series forever.

I bought Myst IV in anticipation of a long business trip, and it turned out to be a very pleasant surprise.

Development Process

[8tim8]

no single zone was in a finished state, communication was difficult between team members and puzzles were taking too long to prototype.

Heh. Maybe they should go back to the two brothers working in their garage process.

Myst Uru caused the lack of interest

[cjmnews]

I was a beta tester for Uru, and found the world to be just as beautiful as the previous 3 games, sound was there, but since I had to reduce to 2 speakers instead of my normal 5 at the time, I'm not sure if it was up to par. I expect it was.

There was one thing missing: A compelling story. I did not have a reason to play Uru, other than my love of puzzles and awesome sound & graphics. You didn't know why you should try to travel to other ages, you just did. Combine this with the sudden death of Uru, and people could be a bit put off by the series.

There is also the confusion in the series with two games released in the same year. Was Myst IV part of Uru? With all the hype (and death) of multi-player Myst in Uru also contained in Myst IV? Is Myst IV an expansion for Uru? Will Myst IV suck like Uru did?

Reading the article, yes there were problems. The DVD9 issue may scare some people off. If there's bad press for that, and confusion on the versions, and poor acceptance for the previous release, people are not going to buy it unless one of their friends try it first.

Myst IV is on my wish list, maybe next birthday I'll get it. It only took 2 years for Hordes of the Underdark to come off of my wish list. Hopefully Myst IV will take less time.