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Myst IV Postmortem

Posted by Zonk on from the remove-the-cover-letter-to-reveal-the-design-doc dept.

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."

3 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. The days of myst are over by madaxe42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The days of myst are over by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Adventure gaming still lives in the hearts of some by frikazoyd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.