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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."

6 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Understandable by Jorkapp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
    1. Re:Understandable by SunFan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "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.).

      --
      -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
  2. 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. Re:The days of myst are over by Bastian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. 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.