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Myst Was Supposed To Change the Face of Gaming. What Is Its Legacy?
glowend writes "On 24 September 1993, computer users were introduced to Myst. Grantland takes a look at the game's legacy, two decades on. Quoting: 'Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it. Yes, Myst went on to sell more than 6 million copies and was declared a game-changer (so to speak), widely credited with launching the era of CD-ROM gaming. It launched an equally critically adored and commercially successful sequel, and eventually four more installments. Fans and critics alike held their breath in anticipation of the tidal wave of exploratory, open-ended gaming that was supposed to follow, waiting to be drowned in a sea of new worlds. And then, nothing.' Why didn't Myst have a larger impact?"
And turned brass was everywhere. I loved the puzzles, the incredible transport monorails, the sheer quiet brilliance. And quiet it was, and cerebral. Still looking for something quite that good again.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Doom, then 3D acceleration happened. Myst type games looked pretty antiquated after that.
because for teenage boys shooting things and blowing stuff up is a lot more fun over the long hall
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
It lives on in minecraft . . . :D
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I mean, yeah, it was gorgeous at a time when games weren't, and it had "new" gameplay.
Only. The gameplay, once you get over the "new", sort of sucks. Yeah, you're supposed to experiment with things to find out what they do, except you don't even know what experiment you'll be trying. There's no way to predict whether clicking on something will try to pick it up, or push it, or turn it, or whatever, so you can't perform interesting experiments to learn about things. And ultimately, it just sorta never gets past that. The writing was interesting, but it worked better as a book than as a game.
Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.
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I don't accept the premise of the question.
For one, Myst had a large impact, as admitted in the question.
For another, when did critics imply that Myst heralded an era of "open ended" gameplay? It was not itself some intensely open ended experience. It was definitely leisurely, but it effectively replaced a game on rails with a game on a Gantt chart. You could approach a few things in any order, but there was usually a limiting factor elsewhere in the world.
Finally, there are numerous games with hugely developed background worlds and interaction with that world that far exceed the slowly expanding maze of puzzle locked doors that made up Myst. I read the Myst books as a kid and loved them, but some LucasArts games of the same era had worlds with a more cohesive character.
Drive around in GTA V. Visit the beach. Go swimming and dive underwater. Check out the beach walk. Climb the mountains. Fly the blimp. There are about 20 square miles to explore, all with considerable detail.
That's the legacy of Myst.
No explosions. No strippers. No guns.
Not that I don't like my GTA fix. But I also thoroughly enjoyed the Myst series as well. Just making an observation.
I remember other similar games "The 7th guest" and "Monkey Island". Good games that make you think instead of just running around shooting. Wish there were more like that. Leisure suit Larry was pretty good too I think.
Open-ended gaming has open-ended playability. Linear progression games, have a definite ending and a limited re-playability factor. There's only so many times you will want to complete the same maps, run the same quests, kill the same bosses. You will inevitably be driven to purchase new games to solve your boredom. Buying new games is good... Replaying old ones bad.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Asking why Myst is no longer relevant is sort of asking like why people stopped buying Encarta. The reason Myst was such a sleeper hit is that it coincided with the start of the "multimedia era" in the 90's. Once you went out and spent $150+ on a soundcard, speakers, and a CD-ROM drive, then what?
Multimedia features are no fun without software, and Myst managed to be family-friendly and take advantage of your computer's new features. It was the right game at the right time.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...its legacy lives on in the strength of game sales to casual gamers who aren't looking for real-time stress, true open-world experiences, or multiplayer competition.
I don't intend this as a general argument, but in my own experience, Myst was incredibly popular among people who didn't play a lot of computer games, but none of the people I knew who were regular computer gamers played it at all. Again, just an anecdote, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's a wider truth in it.
As far as I'm concerned, Riven was the pinnacle of the series. The art was incredibly detailed, the music and sound work top-notch. Scene construction was incredibly dense with story - everything had meaning, everything was a clue. It was obsessively detailed. I remember reading somewhere that the artists didn't do any low-poly models at all; single frames took days to render back in 1996 on then-top-of-line SGI hardware.
I bought the GOG version a few months ago in a fit of nostalgia. It's kind of sad how low-resolution and overcompressed the in-game renders are by current standards. I'd love to see a modern take on Riven - even re-rendered high res stills would be sweet.
You can play with the remnants of the Myst Uru MMO for free here. I think you can even download and run a server if you want.
The biggest problem with the Myst games is that to run it on Windows you had to install the buggy Quicktime software. It was always breaking, either because of upgrade issues or just plain bugs. I think a lot of people gave up on it because of how hard it was to keep running if you had other games on the system.
The game was ahead of its time. It would have been much better with a 3d render software engine like Unreal. (Which did not exist at that time.)
Also, you did not get to kill anything. Modern gamers need a body count.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Myst spawned entire genres. There were a ton of copycat games that came out soon after. And today there are lots of escape games, machine games, hidden item games, and point and click puzzle games inspired by it. You just have to look for them. They are often found only on 'casual' game sites or online game portals.
The production quality of these games varies a lot, but for a high-production values recent game in this genre, see The Room: http://fireproofgames.com/the-room
Of course, none of these games looks exactly like Myst. Some focus on a high-quality visual look. Others on open-endedness. Still others take the written-clue and machine manipulation paradigm that it established.
How many people went into game design, seeing how awesome graphics and sound could be in a game - an actual, legit career choice - far more than can be counted.
More like "one of the worst games ever"
It was a pile of photographs (they literally used photo-like borders for the images) that you click through. It was like a web-based choose your own adventure novel, without the novel....
There weren't even very many of them. I'm not sure where people are getting this "huge, open-ended world" bit.
I suppose you could consider it a precursor to the FMV click-adventures that they had so much trouble giving away during the "try to fill a CD, but compress the hell out of it anyway, because no one has a quad speed yet to read it or a graphics card to show it" mid 90s...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Myst sold incredibly well because it was a novelty and people had never experienced something like it before. Unfortunately it lacked anything to retain people's attention. Sure it had puzzles, but the puzzles weren't part of the environment, and puzzles could be solved with cheap games that didn't require the then expensive hardware. Myst lacked anything that would lock you into engaging within the environment itself. The result was that it became nothing more than the pretty picture that may as well have been a background picture.
Because Myst never did take advantage of what it had and as a result the novelty quickly wore off. However other people in the industry quickly realized that what the beautiful scenery needed was guns, swords and zombies. The net result was that you had something to engage your attention in the beautiful scenery and adding pretend violence was the perfect recipe. The result has been years of first person shooters that have all been wildly successful by using open environments, beautiful scenery and violence.
Sure myst looked great, but modern games have much better graphics. Sure Myst had intriguing puzzles, but puzzle games are dime a dozen in the bargain bin. Sure it had a good story, but lots of games have had good stories. The properties that made it good at the time did not age well and now days the audience for such a game would be minuscule. Perhaps the gaming demographic has changed too. The games that have aged well are the games that allow a sense of advancement or that allow a lot of creativity. Pokemon, Diablo II, minecraft (for sake of argument I am saying it was born old).
I remember being excited waiting for it to come out, then it turned out to not be a real 3d game. I was so disappointed. Doom and Duke Nukem 3D were the ones that changed gaming.
It's legacy was that people enjoyed it intensely for a game or two, then wanted something else. Same as guitar hero. The novelty isn't the only thing either game had going for it, they were both well made, it's just not something you want to play forever.
Myst required a CD-ROM drive, and a bunch of RAM. This meant I had to put a CD-ROM drive and RAM on my credit card. This led to my having so much credit card debt that I had to drop out of grad school and get a real job to pay it off. This kept me from finishing my Ph.D. This is why P=NP hasn't been solved, and why we don't have flying cars.
Thanks a lot, Myst.
Why didn't Myst have a larger impact? The answer is in the article:
Much of the game's popularity was thanks to casual players who found themselves drawn to its evocative, violence-free world; many hard-core gamers found it obtuse and frustrating, its point-and-click interface slideshow-esque and stifling. Maybe Myst wasn't for hard-core gamers. Maybe it wasn't even really a game.
It also explains the distinction and the draw:
I was about 11 when I landed on the island for the first time — a couple years late; CD-ROM technology took a few years to come to our house. NES and Sega were more or less verboten throughout my childhood. That didn't stop me from playing hours of Zelda at my friends' houses, but because I didn't have nearly as much time to practice getting "good" at console games, I remember having a bit of anxiety about navigating a virtual world, feeling painfully inept in comparison with my friends, for whom a controller felt as natural in their hands as a no. 2 pencil. But now, here I was in a world where video game aptitude was irrelevant: rather than a mastery of timing and hand-eye coordination (ah, remember that old argument to get your parents to buy you a Nintendo? "It'll improve my hand-eye coordination, Mom!"), Myst required little more than your eyes, your ears, and a healthy sense of curiosity.
To that I would add that the pre-rendered graphics looked much nicer than most other games available at the time.
I was a gamer when Myst came out. I remember it being sneered at by the hardcore crowd. The people talking about it changing the face of gaming were the ones salivating over its sales figures. But casual games don't seem to create new genres so easily. For a while it was Myst, then it was The Sims, then Angry Birds, Farmville, Plants vs. Zombies, and who knows what else. And they're all different! Whatever makes a casual game popular, it doesn't seem to be easy to clone. At a guess, I'd say it's personality.
(Why did we sneer at Myst? Because every gaming executive secretly wants their company to be a casual gaming money machine. When they start talking about "the future of gaming" being being point-and-click slideshows, it sounds very threatening to us. The modern version of this is "the future of gaming is mobile", i.e. games with a terrible touchscreen interface. But since gaming happens across so many different platforms now, it's less scary. Plus, we're older, so we've seen this pattern a few times.)
(Also, I was 12, so I sneered at everything.)
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Both far superior games IMHO that came out at the same time. I think that Myst appealed to the nontraditional gamer a little more.
Having it not really be 3D kind of turned off the gamer crown, who was hungry for a real open world.
I don't think we really got something like that until far far later... I'm thinking around half life 1.
Right, it's basically a text adventure. That said, I love a good text adventure...
Was it ground breaking? Yes. It had an amazing immersive quality. The fact that it didn't try to bludgeon the gamer over the head with over the board sound, is in the age of over stimulation, very laudable. It was also the next iteration of the scummvm style games. If it wasn't for space quest, dragon's lair et al, it would have never happened. But consequently it's difficult to say if any other game would have not have been made in the same way.
There were not-quite-real-time games before Myst. Myst just exploited the available hardware of the time. Of course a newer game is going to look better than an older game.
The same goes for everything that followed Myst.
The not-quite-real-time aspect just got buried by games that were real-time.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It was a game that became talked about at a water cooler. It changed to game of "who gamers are".
In other words, it allowed gaming to be considered on level footing with books, movies and tv shows because it was something almost anyone could relate to and find interesting. It made gaming a respectible type of personal entertainment. Where as, prior to Myst, gaming was a very very niche market.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
.. and Myst was pretty damn boring. Oh look, a picture you can click on. You go north, you are eaten by a grue now in full color! That about sums up the level of enjoyment for me.
I also don't like dungeons and dragons and tabletop war games.
Wow -- it has actually been 20 years since Myst came out?? That seems unbelievable. I haven't done any "real" computer gaming in a long time, but I spent many hours working my way through Myst and absolutely loved that game.
I wonder if the popularization of the World Wide Web had something to do with the eventual decline of Myst and games like it. I remember that a big part of the satisfaction of playing Myst and other puzzle-based games, such as the King's Quest series, was that you really needed to struggle through the challenges until you figured them out. For example, a staple of those games was a maze that you had to traverse at some point (remember the little subterranean train thing in Myst?). To solve them, you had to spend considerable time exploring and mapping until you finally figured out how to get where you needed to go. If you were stuck, there wasn't much you could do except try harder until you got it. Sure, the game companies had "hot lines" that you could call for hints, but they charged you for it, and nobody I knew ever used them. As a result, the game was much more rewarding because you had to do it all by yourself. This environment also was conducive to playing the game with others, because two (or more) heads are better than one. My brother and I worked through a number of these games when we were kids, and playing them together added to the fun.
Once the Web became mainstream, the situation changed very quickly. Suddenly, game "walk throughs" were widely available for free, and much of the mystique that led to these games' success disappeared. You need to solve that maze? Just look it up on the walk through and you can be done with it in about two minutes. Once the entire game solution was readily available, the sense of accomplishment from solving the puzzles was greatly diminished, in my opinion.
So, imagine a world where there is no quick, easy way to look up game solutions. It seems terribly quaint now, but that was the environment in which Myst and similar games before it became popular. Once that changed, I think the days were numbered for the puzzle-based games, at least as far as their ability to become blockbusters.
I haven't done any research to compare how well actual market trends correlated with the rise of the Web. This is just my recollection of how the gaming world changed during that time.
First: It was a good game but it was just another game. It was not the story or the novel of the era!!!
PROS: graphics, sound, interesting story and puzzles. CONS: No interaction with NPC
Second: At that time windows was changing versions very fast. The problem with Myst as with many other games was quicktime, quicktime changed with every version of the OS , rendering unplayable many good games, Myst was unplayable with "new" OS and computers for a long time....
Third: When Myst tried to re. released the game.. the graphics were outdated
fourth: The internet began to conquer the world so gamesbecame social. Nerds like me were playing MUDS, The lack of social interaction inside myst, not even NPC felt lonely and empty. who wants to be lonely in this world?.
Personally I feel that the very thing that make myst a hit, (quicktime) was its death.
You know how Bioshock gets so much acclaim for its world building and details that rely on players to discover? Well, Myst did that first...and Myst created a game environment that treated its players with enough respect to allow them to piece together a story on their own.
Myst's impact goes far beyond just an open world and artwork.
I would say that games like Trauma and (I believe, as it hasn't actually come out yet) The Witness tap a similar vein from the player perspective.
As I don't often play video games, I would imagine that others could find plenty of other examples that fit. Of course, then I fear (this being Slashdot) you would have to deal with pendants who ignore subjective "feels like" perspectives... which are actually relevant in this case, as we are dealing with art. Still, there are spiritual successors out there that do comprise part of the legacy.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This is something I agree with. It did feel like a "graphic adventure" game, but the puzzles were made somewhat frustrating. I might have enjoyed the puzzles if they were something I could have played with outside of the game.
I never quite got into myst. Being a FPS player from far earlier than Myst ( Ultima Underworld ) - the openness of a vast free-form 3D world had already demonstrated far greater appeal, but only on the PC platform. The Mac was, at that time, very poorly supported and had none of the games that the PC players were experiencing at that time.
As such, I recall the "excitement" of anyone who had a Mac and could play Myst and while the graphics were pretty for the era ( look at the old screenshots ), the gameplay wasn't very exciting and took too long. Still, people played it, because those of us who had CD rom's needed something to show others that was different to the floppy-loaded games of the time. And at the time, it really was "eye candy".
The 7th guest was similar ( we used to call it the "7th guess" because of the guesswork in solving puzzles ) and arguably more enjoyable, but the concept of being alone in a 3D world was probably recaptured beautifully by the game "portal" which introduced a dynamic element to the puzzles, so if anyone is looking to what happened to games like "Myst" and "Riven" and "The Seventh Guest", they finally came of age in "Portal" in my opinion.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
It's claim to fame was that Myst used Strata 3D for the scenes. It had a good begining, on its way to become a known name like Maya is now. Then in about 1996 their new multiplatform version became an unmangeable mess with them trying to add too many features at once. Their bank forced them to release it uncomplete and they quickly got a reputaion for releasing buggy crap. Suprisingly they are still around, but after some research I found their company is registered to a humble residential home. The company may be only be a side project for its founder now.
I couldn't agree more. People raved about the puzzles. After about an hour of running around not knowing the context of anything, how to handle it, what to do with it, or why even it may or may not be important, the "new" scenery wore out and it just sucked. I couldn't complete any of the series without reading how-to's and that detracted from the spirit. Stopped being shiny really fast.
Personally I found Myst to be the most frustrating video game I ever wasted money on. There were virtually no clues for the puzzles it presented, which made them an exercise in futility rather than an exploratory challenge of thinking or creativity.
While the graphics were beautiful for the time, they're quite primitive compared to modern games.
Personally I think Half-Life and Deus Ex were far more groundbreaking and open-ended, despite the fact that you could attack the Myst puzzles in virtually any order you liked. Sometimes a bit of direction to the plot improves the story.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Saying the game will change the future of gaming was a pretty stupid thing to say. There's no way pre-rendered images would become the norm. It was popular because it was the first time people saw pictures looking that good in a video game.
Myst was a breakout game for its level of atmosphere, immersiveness and pre-rendered graphics. I still enjoy it and boot up ScummVM (development build) every so often to get a hit of nostalgia. Riven's even better in that regard, since it's fun to see if I can finish both games (particualryl the latter) without referring to a walkthrough.
But wtf is this article going on about? New worlds and open-ended gameplay? We have tons of sandbox games now such as GTA, Saints Row and Skyrim. The article doesn't make it clear what it's suggesting we don't have. Myst was a bit unusual in that violence wasn't a focal point of the game (you don't kill things to accomplish tasks), but apart from that they were atmosphere-full games with some interesting puzzles. They weren't out to change the world.
It was visually impressive and had voice acting and actors... but was the game play great? Not so much. There were some puzzles and some mysteries. But it was a point and click adventure game. And from a gameplay stand point, most of its competitors were better.
Which would you rather play again... Myst or Monkey's Island? Exactly.
Myst was pretty. That was what it was... And since there have been prettier games. So yeah... no one cares about myst anymore.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The game Syberia was a bit like Myst but the puzzles weren't quite as bizarre, although I did end up having to look for how-to's I wasn't as stumped as I was with Myst.
~S
Nonsense. I'll grant that it wasn't always clear what interactions were possible, given the choice to use a minimalistic interface in order to produce the most immersive experience possible at the time, but what separated Myst from contemporary point-and-click puzzle games, as well as most of its created-by-other-companies sequels, is that the puzzles actually did have a logic to them that removed the need for guesswork. The gear puzzle that's accessible right from the start is a prime example. It's there in front of you, the mechanisms for controlling the puzzle are simple, yet the actual solving of it is not so trivial. You need to actually figure out how it works and what result you're trying to produce from it, since otherwise brute force and guessing won't do you any good.
There were a handful of "here's the key, now go use it" puzzles, which generally are a cop-out in place of a well-crafted puzzle, but in this case, those puzzles were a part of the larger puzzle: figuring out how the world itself was put together. Each of them had a logic to them that made sense in the context of the world as a whole and contributed to your understanding of how each of the parts fit together with the rest. Sure, figuring out that you need to turn the water on to power equipment in one of the worlds in the game is just a matter of finding the right spot to interact with, but there are clues all over pointing you to the fact that such an interaction must exist (e.g. pipes all over, obvious ways to direct the flow of water, etc.), as well as more clues pointing you towards where you can find that spot (e.g. the pipes all lead to it).
Riven was much the same, though it was even made its puzzles an even more fundamental part of the world. In contrast, Myst III (developed by a different studio) was filled with numerous puzzles that made no sense at all (rather than having the puzzles be a natural part of the world, it relied on the idea that the worlds had been created specifically to be filled with puzzles as a training ground for some of the characters in the story, which the developers used as an excuse to shoehorn in all sorts of nonsensical stuff) and relied on simple brute force or happening to look in the right direction at just the right time to solve. I even recall hearing a quote at one point from the CEO of the company that made Myst and Riven, talking about how he wasn't a fan of the fact that some of the puzzles in Myst III required random guessing to solve. Myst IV was marginally better. Myst V was created by the original company, but it suffered from various issues as well, though it was still better than either III or IV.
If you don't think that the puzzles made sense, then I'd suggest that you simply didn't explore the world as fully as you were meant to. I've found similar opinions in the past from folks that opted to use walkthroughs, usually because they see the puzzles as obstacles keeping them from the story, rather than recognizing that the process for solving them is how you learn about the story most fully.
... and adventure games died out because they depended upon puzzles to regulate the flow of the game.
If you thought like the game designer, that was great because you could explore the world and think your way through the puzzles that you encountered.
If you didn't think like the game designer, it was a nightmare because you would be trapped in a small part of that world without being able to figure out how to escape. In some cases you didn't even know that you could escape. In other cases you knew exactly how you should be able to progress, but the game designer didn't think that way so you had to figure out the game designer's solution.
Since different game designers thought in different ways and different gamers thought in different ways, buying a game was always hit and miss.
Other than that, I'm trying to figure out how Myst was different from prior games. You certainly had adventure games before Myst (Infocom being the classic example), and you had graphical adventure games (Sierra Online was famous for them), and you had sophisticated rendered graphics in games. About the only difference that I can think of is that Cyan tried to make it photo-realistic, within the obvious limitations of technology back then, and they threw in video clips. It required a CD-ROM in order to conveniently store that much data, which was uncommon for games of that era.
QFT. Myst sucked. It was like getting lost in the maze in Zork II, where everything you did got you more lost, until a grue ate you. The only people I knew who played Myst were suckered into it because it was 'cool', nobody actually played/won it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Should have gone to the Computer Show and Sale at the Vallejo Fairgrounds.
I'd argue the opposite. It was what made us despise the closed worlds in the mid-era of FPS, where you couldn't go the direction *you* wanted to go.
Myst was, at least to many of my friends, Return to Zork's slightly retarded cousin. The presentation was very similar, yet somewhat more isolated due to a lack of other characters in the world. Elements like Zork's sound recording puzzle were brilliant, and aside from a brutally challenging second last puzzle (if you had dropped any items throughout the game, it could not be beaten) the level of challenge would not be seen again until Access released it's Tex Murphy series with Under a Killing Moon in 1994. For a time adventure style games lulled, but with the rise of companies like Telltale the format is being somewhat revived. 2014 will see a new Tex Murphy instalment
It was not just the unique puzzles that made RTZ a brilliant title, but the inclusion of FMV in a way that rewarded the player but didn't sacrifice to much content at the expense of their inclusion. FMV, at the time, was quite popular, but was often an 'all or nothing' affair. On top of this, video codecs were in their infancy, meaning a minute of data ate up a considerable chunk of a disc. So for RTZ to offer hours upon hours of gameplay in addition to FMV, all on a single disc, was simply remarkable.
So what was Myst's legacy? Beats me. It did nothing that hadn't been done already.
Myst was great on the Atari Jaguar, with 24-bit color graphics and no extra RAM to buy. DOOM had 24-bit gfx on the Jag also (thanks Carmack), but no in-game music. Too bad there was no hardware texture-mapping (just hardware Gouraud shading) and a crippling data-transfer bug in the chipset which forced special workarounds. Ahh well.
Yep; the graphics were pretty but single solution set-piece puzzles are not all that fun. Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
It sounds pretty strange to me to hear that Myst brought "open ended" gameplay, since I remember the era rather clearly and it was not exactly like that. For example, 9 years before, players of Elite had been treated with real open ended gameplay. And the same year as Myst, Frontier: Elite II came out with the entire galaxy fitting on a diskette and adding even more freedom. I remember me and my friends were awestruck by the sheer size and possibilities that Elite II gave you, while Myst did not seem that revolutionary and certainly not "open ended" when compared to other game playing experiences.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Grunt.
"I never quite got into myst"
You weren't the only one. I got Myst as a hand me down from seven other owners in the late nineties and I never got past the front room. Neither did those other owners when I asked several of them about it which is why I got it for nothing. I was playing Wolfenstein, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Pinball Dreams around when Myst came out. Myst, for the time was beautiful but like HHG if you couldn't figure out the puzzles it was pointless. I don't mind exploration games but forget the puzzles. I got tired of trying to figure out the creators context with infocom games.
its a crappy FMG game with a simplistic adventure game engine tacked on with puzzles
It's still alive today, now as a pseudo community-run affair.
And it was less killed and more seen as an unprofitable endeavor by Ubisoft, who'd already blown a couple of single player releases with their fugged up DRM.
It took over the Internet for about six months in the '90s, then it vanished. And unlike MySpace, it wasn't knocked off by a competitor.
But remember, before Myst there was Fool's Errand and 3 in Three. Both of which were major game changers as well. But alas, forgotten by all but we geekiest. :(
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
+1 to this, I have played both Myst and Riven and really liked the puzzles because they were proper puzzles here it was clear how whatever you were interacting with worked but wasn't clear exactly what you needed to do to it to make it work and required you to use your head (and information you find in the game world) to figure it all out.
Anyone who thinks modern games are all dumb shooters should take a stroll through some of the independent games on Steam. We're in the middle of a great period in video games. If you're not having fun, wake up and smell the Kirbal Space Program.
This would have earned an "insightful" had I not already posted in this thread.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
This. I like puzzle games, and remember playing Myst shortly after it came out - And I really just didn't find it all that entertaining, aside from the novelty of the level of eye candy. And eye candy wears off way too quickly to base a whole game, much less a whole genre, on it.
And today? Hell, we have casual "nuisance" puzzles in games consisting of columns of rippling water that more-or-less accurately refract light as the player moves around them.
Put bluntly, Myst didn't fall off the map after wild success - It simply failed in general, despite enjoying a level of commercial success.
Doom was released on December 10th, 1993.
Doom is what happened.
I've been a gamer for a long time. I also started as a PC gamer before most everyone I know did and I played a variety of games, most of which I liked so I'm not genre specific. Myst however was not a game I cared for in the least for a bunch of different reasons (some listed below) though I do understand and appreciate what it did for gaming today.
1. Many of the puzzles made no logical sense. When I compare this game to other games that weren't 'first person adventure' style games, I found a distinct lack of cause and effect in the puzzles as welI as no clarity as to what was actually usable. It was sensory overload as well as it was near impossible to determine what was part of the scenery and what wasn't, let alone what objects mattered and what didn't. In comparison, I remember Zork very well. I remember the game giving me just enough info to know which questions to ask and what was actually usable without bombarding me with a bunch if useless drivel. Freedom is one thing, but when you give me a screenshot of a thousand objects and ask me to find a way to go to the next screen by figuring out how three of these objects works together, I'm going to get bored. I'm probably among the few who considers uru to be a much better game overall as the direction in the game provided just enough to navigate the world even if the world itself was merely half baked.
2. Visually, the game was very impressive, though I knew it was only screenshots strung together with invisible fields that moved between other screens. I never truly lost myself in the game because of this. around the same time, I discovered Zelda and the early metal gear games (pre-solid) and while they looked terrible in comparison and were console based (loosely using that for msx), they provided infinitely more fun because they had focus and I lost myself in them, especially metal gear 1 and 2. To this day, very few games truly accomplish this in my eyes and it's a sign that someone truly sunk their heart and soul into something when i experience this. Sadly it seems like this is getting fewer and further between as it becomes more commercialized.
While I dislike Myst and Riven, I do understand what they did for gaming. In my eyes, we wouldn't have many of the early innovators in the first person genre; ones that took a first person game beyond just shooting. That is what I consider to be its legacy.
The 3D0 touted this game and unlikely as it was, the game did not save the console. From memory.
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Myst was truly one of the first games that most people could not solve without cheat books or walk throughs... And, yes, I realize that walk throughs were kicking around before Myst, but Myst was freaking hard to solve. At least, that's my opinion.
My sig thanks you for mentioning the 7th Guest
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
6 million over 20 years,hardly a massive seller realy, myst has no legacy, it was crud then and is still crud. you can have everything that myst promised, if you dont mind paying £/$ hundreds to buy a game, but how many folk will/can pay $ 200/250 for a GAME. if you want all these abilities, expect to pay for them.
As much as everyone may like Myst, it's not technically special. The only thing going for it would be the use of multimedia/FMV. Even if FMV appeared in other games, it doesn't mean those games are any good.
Gameplay-wise, Myst takes an Alpine Encounter approach to the puzzles - you can bypass most of the game if you already know what to do.
The puzzles themselves are mostly control-room puzzles - click on something, and something happens some distance away. The back and forth travelling, although a good way to examine the landscape, isn't good for those who want to get along with the plot.
This seems to come up every once in a while. I vaguely remember trying mist and thinking 'ehh' when it was new. I see articles about it every once in a while and wonder if there was something I missed. Just youtub'ed it and realized I was right to begin with.
ehh
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Seriously hated that game more than any other. Graphics made it impossible to tell what to click so it was just a random click fest.
Basically, Myst was an adventure game -- wander around and solve puzzles. Only it had a much less satisfying user interface, and was terribly slow. Result -- boring game play. As I recall, and I didn't play it much (girlfriend was in love with it), the puzzles were rarely particularly visual, either. And the puzzles were often boring. It also had the problem of needing to spend endless boring hours clicking on everything to see what responded.
So -- kind of a pretty art gallery, could hold my attention for several minutes that way. Boring as a game.
Go to Big Fish if you think that Myst-type games are dead.
Try the demos for anything in the Dream Chronicles, Azada, Drawn, or Awakening series and tell me that isn't Myst influenced. Pretty rendered graphics, weird scenes with devices you need to figure out, it's all there. Sure, the actual find-the-object parts are new and there's WAY too many implementations of Simon and the Towers of Hanoi, but the basics of exploration and solving puzzles remains. Also, in what sense was Myst open-ended? Sure, you could freely walk between scenes, but it was still pretty much on rails.
I think it's more an issue of these games not being marketed to the "real gamer" market so they are invisible to people in that scene. Which makes sense, Myst wasn't targeted at that segment either. But there are lots and lots of them if you actually try looking. Big Fish claims that 2 billion games have been downloaded, so it's lot exactly a small market either. (Although, to be fair, I couldn't find much on conversion rates)
Don't forget about games like Zork: Grand Inquisitor or Zork: Nemesis. Those were awesome games - challenging puzzles and funny to boot.
Myst was ok, but I enjoyed Riven and 7th Guest more.
Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
I'd say that it was more an exercise in finding the clues spread around the world about how to solve the puzzles, making the connections, and getting it done. The information was all there, you just had to pay attention to find it. You've got a point that each of the games is (on the whole) only really good for one play-through, though. I can't argue with that.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Some players love that game play. I like it too. Not all the time but it's fascinating to explore a world and uncover a mystery in a way that doesn't involve shooting everything. The original Myst puzzles weren't so great but I think Riven and Exile were much better.
I'd put The Journeyman Project series into the same category as Myst, very similar play style, but with a time travel cop storyline. Actually doing a web search on myst-like turns up a lot of games.
I got the Myst book but I really disliked it...
I did get 7th Guest but I never really liked it like I did the other games. The puzzles in Myst and Riven, while a bit annoying, at least made sense in that they were intended as locks to some door or other. Whereas figuring out the puzzles in 7th Guest seemed arbitrary and unconnected to the world they were in or the doors they unlocked. Ie, the mansion was owned by an eccentric and spooky maker of games, and yet instead of tricky mechanical toys to figure out we're left with traditional puzzles like flipping pennies in sequence on a table in order to unlock a door or box.
"So, imagine a world where there is no quick, easy way to look up game solutions" i lived thru that world, and it SUCKED royally. If you did not find a solution because you missed a damn pixel , you could get stuck in a game foreever never finishing it. I never finished KQ4 for example. At least today if you are completely stuck, you can look it up. And if you have no will and ook for solution immediately, then you probably are not into adventure or search-the-pixel clicker.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What I find sad is that so many people raving about Myst/Riven forget the classics that did "multimedia" gaming right - Under a Killing Moon, Pandora Directive, Tex Murphy: Overseer. In my opinion these remain the pinnacle of that era's gaming.
I think you're responding to a criticism other than the one I made. And radically so, given that I am pretty much on the opposite end of the game-playing spectrum from the straw man you're arguing with.
My complaint has nothing to do with the logic of the puzzles. The puzzles aren't even remotely, in any way, a factor in what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the interface.
Your mouse pointer is over an object -- say, a box, or a book. If you click on it, will you:
1. Open it.
2. Pick it up.
3. Throw it.
You don't know. You can't tell. There is only one action for each object, but there are many different actions, so when you click on a particular object, you have no idea what instruction you are giving the game.
Imagine that you were to take something like Zork, and replace all the verbs with "click".
> CLICK TROLL
You attack the troll, dealing it a lethal blow. It dissipates into greasy smoke, leaving behind a dagger, a book, and a coin.
> CLICK COIN
You take the coin and stuff it in your pocket.
> CLICK BOOK
You open the book, find a magical spell which appears to summon a hostile demon, and incant the spell. A hostile demon appears.
> CLICK DAGGER
Realizing that you have no control over what your avatar does, you lunge for the dagger, then plunge it into your own chest.
And then someone on the Internet tells you it's your fault for not paying enough attention; you should have known what the dagger would do.
No. The problem is that you have no way of guessing what your interactions will be. If I click on a thing, am I taking it, pushing it, pulling it, or doing something else with it? I have no way of knowing. There's nothing I can look at, or study, or do, that will let me answer the question "what action will my implied avatar attempt to take if I click on this object". Sure, once I know that my avatar is going to try to pick a thing up, or try to turn it, or push it, or whatever, then we have puzzles which are by and large decent puzzles. But that's much later in the gameplay process than my criticism.
My complaint isn't about the process of figuring out how something works once you know what clicking on it does. It's that for each object, there is exactly one verb, and the player can't know what it is in advance. If Myst had been an RPG, the only indication of whether another player were a hostile monster or a friendly ally would be that, when you clicked on them, either you attacked them or you talked to them. But there would be no indication whatsoever, before you attack or talk, of which was going to happen...
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To understand the impact of Myst and the sequels and why there is so few successors, I think we need to understand what kind of game it was.
It had great graphics (for 1993).
It had good and relaxing music, almost hypnotic.
It had simple controls.
It had a whole new world to explore, strange, beautyful and harmless.
It had some good level puzzles, originals and did not take the player for a dumb one.
It had a big good story, with a coherent universe and good characters, to discover, step by step, including the player into it.
It was a calm, slow game, with no time limit or stress pressure.
And most of all, it was poetic.
Poetic games are a rarity. I can think of games like "the longest journey", "Fez" or "Journey", with stories which kidnapped me until I reached the end... and even after.
In my opinion, this is the true legacy of Myst : a little touch of poetry.
This is something I agree with. It did feel like a "graphic adventure" game, but the puzzles were made somewhat frustrating. I might have enjoyed the puzzles if they were something I could have played with outside of the game.
Right!
I remember back when Maniac Mansion was all the rage! We solved 80% of that game outside the actual game during breaks at school, mostly by discussing the individual progress we made the evening before. That was fun I never had again until later at university, the whole dorm joined "Planetarion". Most of the game didn't take place in our browsers, but on the kitchen table and in the local pub where we would discuss strategy. I still remember the pub owner taking that one phone call... A message for the "galactic commander"... :-)
bickerdyke
Myst was one of those early games taking 'advantage' of the fact that PC now could have CD-ROM drives. I put 'advantage' between quotes, because if you look on any platform (CDI, SegaCD, ...) , CD-ROM was actually a bad game medium, it wasn't until later when you have masive storage and 3D combined that really great cames came out of it. The only good use of CD-ROM with games was that it provided some amazing soundtracks over what would be the same as the floppy version of the game (Day of the tentacle is a prime example for me as well as all CD32 games).
What myst brought was hi-res pre-rendered gfx just like '7th Guest' had, which was an equally bad game. Just compare myst to whatever you have from that time and it just fails to impres.
The biggest puzzle to 7th Guest was actually getting it to run on your machine back in 1993-94. That blue setup program was certainly part of the "experience".
Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.
In other words, instead of fighting the parser to figure out the word it wants, you're fighting the less-than-helpful user interface, having to "scrub" the screen and watch where the cursor changes. Everything is pre-rendered, so you don't even get the usual visual cues around the edges of objects against the background. Until today I don't think I've ever thought of Myst as making a game out of excessively skeuomorphic interfaces.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...honestly, it didn't have much impact because only a small subset of people actually liked it. It was loved in a few small circles, but in the bigger community it was merely a curiosity to be discarded as it wasn't fun.
The only people I knew who played Myst were suckered into it because it was 'cool', nobody actually played/won it.
Seriously? I don't remember getting stuck on any puzzles in Myst; it was all very intuitive. Even the actual maze has sound effects to tell you which way to go.
lifelessplanet.com
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
It let companies realize they could release 15 versions of the same exact thing and consumers will always buy them. Apple, Microsoft, and EA Sports have become prolific at continuing the legacy that was started by Myst.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Go look up the 'adventure' section on Steam for tons of examples! If you're looking for major titles, then you might only find passing nods to it here and there (aside from something like Portal 2).. but there are countless independent games that focus on rich atmospherics combined with puzzles. On iOS The Room is a short but fantastic example of this that anyone who loves Myst should really check out. Kairo (multiplatform) is kinda interesting too, how about Braid, shall we go on and on?
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
If and only if you consider that, regardless of anything you did, you still wind up trapped alone in a room of books for your perusal (which you can't read or interact with) "open ended".
Absolutely the worst result in a game ever.
Four factors made Myst groundbreaking. An immersive environment with beautifully rendered scenes, realistically-animated graphics and sound (something not done before). No violence, sex or profanity, which meant that anyone could explore it, whether that's 7 year old Timmy or Grandma. The puzzles themselves were engaging and beautiful. And it was made for Mac & PC. Certainly it inherited aspects from text adventures like Zork, but primarily due to the limitations of the technology and interface at the time. I see all modern immersive MMORPGs as descendants of CYAN's early work. It's even more amazing when you consider that they did it 20 years ago and people still play the game on PCs, consoles and even phones.
I never played the original Myst but I did play Riven. Also 7th Guest (which I think came free with a CD-ROM drive).
Riven struck me to be more of a technology demonstrator than a game, a sort of "My, look how much stuff we can get onto a DVD-ROM!" demonstrator.
Now I know the kind of game it was is fondly liked by some people, but to me it just seemed like how to fill a DVD-ROM first and a game second.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm with you on 7th Guest... it was way more playable to me, and the games since then resemble it much more than Myst, IMO. I really just didn't enjoy Myst... it was eye candy at the time, but very static -- there were far more engrossing and compelling games even at the time. I wouldn't even call it very "open"... If you got stuck on a puzzle you'd eventually have to solve it to move on, just like in any game... it just let you wander around a lot looking for clues in the mean time. It owed a lot of that style of gameplay to Sierra's adventure games (and others) that came well before it.
But calling the graphics brilliant... they were pretty certainly, but the animation lacked significantly compared to 7th guest which came out almost exactly the same time and looked fantastic as well as animated.
As to why it didn't influence more games... the shortcuts they used on CD-Roms back then are no longer necessary. They'd pre-animate and pre-render everything then just call it up from disk. More Power has allowed us to animate and render on the fly which means that, no matter how open Myst seemed, it's almost trivial to make something more open and fluid now and in a much better way. Myst's and 7th Guests's technology was breakthrough at the time, but it was a stop gap while more real-time technologies could take over.
"Inigo Gets Out", a Hypercard Stack game back on the original Mac, by an amateur, where a kitten goes exploring, and crudely but cutely drawn.
Pronounced "eye NEE go", shoot me I hate my brain.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Your anecdotal experience of having dimwitted hipster friends is yours and yours alone.
Me and my friend had a blast solving those puzzles and we were all of 11 years old.
Ah, I follow. I incorrectly thought that was a part of a larger criticism, rather than the core of your criticism, hence why I more or less dismissed it up front. If that's your main criticism, then I do agree that it is, in fact, just as you described. It's something I acknowledged in my last post, and I'll stand by that.
That said, I'm not sure it's actually a problem, since unlike many other games of its time, there were no downsides in Myst to not knowing what the interactions would be in advance. Lots of other games allow you to reach unwinnable states, suffer a game over, or otherwise punish you for just mucking about, but Myst rewarded you for doing so with (sometimes admittedly unexpected) reactions from the puzzles that could lead you to a better understanding of how they function. It actively encouraged you to click about in an exploratory manner, just as it actively encouraged you to wander around and take in the scenery. Basically, it put the player in a safe environment, and in so doing, the player became free to click about just for the wonder for things, without worry that they would be punished for doing so.
So, while I do agree that some (perhaps even most) of the interactions were unclear until you actually engaged in them (and I can think of several off the top of my head that were like that for me), it came with none of the downsides that we would typically associate with an interface confusion of that sort. Moreover, the confusion was a temporary one, since clicking on objects was always a safe thing to do and would always clear up the confusion immediately.
After our family got together and played Myst over winter holidays, there was much discussion that we could do better. My dad, uncle, aunt, cousin and others worked for 4 years to make Morpheus which was released in 1998 by Piranha interactive. Piranha very shortly went broke and paid little of what we owed. We all went back to our lives, but there are still background attempts at rebooting the game.
That's not what I meant.
If you look at the gameplay, it just isn't very exciting.
Not enough credit given to Bungie, not for HALO, which was derivative, though not as some might expect, but for the Marathon Trilogy, first installment released in 1994. Innovative FPS, interesting story-lines and cool sounds, music & graphics. Even more fun as a network game. It sported editors for levels & physics and was clearly the origination for HALO. I was in the audience at MacWorld when the first HALO gameplay video was aired. My first thought was that it was basically Marathon Infinity on steroids. I also gritted my teeth when Microsoft bought Bungie and canceled development for everything but the XBOX, but that's another story.
I've played through Myst 1 & 2 as a kid and despite how amazing they were I knew very few people who even tried to play into it. The game was too quiet, required too much thinking, and wasn't laid out for easy consumption. As a good example in Myst 2 you had to deduce the number system by learning it from the kids toy in one of the early areas. Most people wouldn't waste the time playing anything like that and would immediately switch to something more violent and fast paced.
If you look at some of the later releases (the last I played was Myst 3) they made some OK updates but the ability to look around was all goofed up and it lacked the smoothness you need for taking in a whole world. I'm sure if they made a new one it would look amazing and do ok but I really think the amount of thought that has to be put into playing it would be a show stopper for most people.
For the Nintendo 3DS (released October 2012) is still being sold today in retail locations.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
I was in my early 20s when Myst came out. The visual design turned me off, it looked like someone's coked-out New Age fantasy come to life. Like a wine bar on steroids, all brass rail and ferns and bubbling water. No thanks.
Now, "The Neverhood", on the other hand... that was like being dropped into the middle of a Gumby adventure. That game rocked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverhood
I know, off-topic since not an open world game. But it was puzzle-solving and on CD-ROM, so...
There was no death, talking, or fighting in the game, though. And it wasn't an RPG.. nor were there monsters or allies. Seems you've constructed your own strawman.
I've played Myst 1-3, just beating the 3rd a week ago, and am not stopping there. I've also, read two of the books (really fascinating). I was around to play it when the 1st came out, and it was amazing, but the prerendered perspectives seemed like a gimmick that worked well for just this game's purpose. While the graphics were great, it was really the challenge, immersive atmosphere, and 'cleverness' they cultivated that fascinated me. It was a great story, with great puzzles, and imaginative environments that made it wonderful to me, not the rendering gimmicks, (though I could see how prerendered scenes allowed them to better create the worlds they wanted to portray) Further, I think they took the series as far as they could, it had a good run. But you know, I still really hope the series picks up again.
If you ever played Zork - or it's predecessor Advent...this mode of puzzle solution would be recognizable. I would argue Myst is a text based adventure with pretty pictures overlayed for each 'room' in the dungeon.
A million times this. I still remember the exact moment in Myst that I threw up my hands in frustration and gave up on the game. I was stuck and had no idea how to proceed. The "puzzle" in question was a cabin with a button. When you push the button, a "chunking" sound could be heard over the next minute or so. Yet it didn't appear to do anything in the cabin, nor were there any clues as to what it _should_ do. Lo and behold, when I checked a walkthrough later, it apparently caused a tree BEHIND the cabin to go down into the ground. If you happened to go to the tree during the appropriate time period and happened to notice the tree moving (which wasn't easy with the graphics of the day) and also were patient enough to watch the moving tree for several seconds, a door would appear. How the hell were you supposed to put two and two together on that one?
Explain to me the clues that would have led a person to know that a button pushed in a cabin would make a door appear at a given time in a tree some 10 screens away from the original button? Hell, explain to me the logic that would even connect the button to said tree (or point to the mechanical nature of the tree).
I figured it out without help. Just like a lot of the puzzles, the key was in the sound. There was a repeated banging noise that changed volume depending on how close to the tree you were. So, once I discovered it was the tree, then it was trying to figure out the tree secret. I then had the tree sink all the way down and then had it raise, I hopped in and went all the way to the top, but nothing changed. So I hit the button to go back down. I turned off the steam and heard the bang so I went back to the tree and saw the door sink in the ground. So I raised the tree again and then turned it off. I hopped in and sank down and found the book. No help, no hints, just a half an hour. All using the sound provided and a little exploration.
Just to clear up a few factual issues, it's actually a wheel that you turn right next to a boiler in the cabin (which is important), rather than being a button that you press, and the tree is only about three moves away from where you are, not ten (i.e. exit the cabin, advance to the left, advance to the tree). Also, the opening didn't just "appear", though I'll address that in more detail.
As for the clues, there aren't any that tell you that an opening will appear in the tree, but there are plenty pointing you to the tree, and the opening is easy to find once you're looking at the tree:
1) Right from the start, you can tell that the tree is going to be a part of a puzzle, given that it is by FAR the tallest tree on the island (and I believe that there are also references to it in some of the in-game texts). Also, unlike all other trees, it's surrounded by a wall and has stairs leading up to it. Clearly, something is up.
2) The tree is located literally right next to the cabin, not halfway across the island as you seem to imply. Nothing else of note is located in their immediate vicinity, which gives the player a pretty good indication that they may be related to each other.
3) Inside the cabin, right next to the boiler, is a painting of the tree, which further reinforces the fact that the boiler and its wheel are somehow linked to the tree.
4) When you turn the wheel after igniting the light for the boiler, you can hear what sounds like pneumatic activity coming from outside. Again, the tree is right next to the cabin, so it's a fairly obvious place to start your search, not to mention that the sound gets louder as you approach the tree and quieter as you move away. After awhile, the sound stops, but turning the wheel back the other way leads to a sound like a pneumatic release, which also stops after a bit, after which you can restart the whole process.
5) By now, most people have figured out that the tree is where stuff is happening, but even if you hadn't, looking at it would tell you that it was the thing responsible for the sound, since you can see it rising and falling, depending on which way you've turned the wheel. If you're staring straight at the tree, it'll seem as if the opening "appears" in front of you suddenly, but if you had looked up after seeing that something was up with the tree, you'd have seen the opening above ground level and realized that you needed to bring it down by lowering the pressure so that the tree fell to a point where the opening was at a level you could reach.
The problem you're describing is what happens when someone doesn't catch the clues linking the cabin and the boiler to the tree, and then doesn't realize both that the tree is rising out of the ground as a result of the boiler's pressure buildup and that the tree has an opening carved into it. Admittedly, you had good reason for not catching onto what was happening, since the tree is one of the few places in the game where you actually can look up, and if you're staring straight at it, the only indication it's rising/falling (other than the opening "appearing" in front of you) is that, if I recall correctly, the bark's texture changes each time you hear the pneumatic sounds. It definitely could have been clearer.
Even so, there were clues linking the cabin with the tree, indications that the tree was moving with the sounds, and ways to find the opening and realize what was going on with it before it "appeared" in front of the player at ground level.
I got this on CD for my Amiga, and loved it. I think it had the best graphics out of all the original versions (the pre-rendered ones), as I remember reading something about the number of colours being better than the PC and Mac versions, because of the later release. It did struggle a bit with the Quicktime videos, but overall it was excellent. I got Riven on the Playstation and got a PS mouse just to play that one game.
The books were brilliant, too.
Ahh, I see!
I found "and then a long thing happens and I can't do anything and just have to wait while my character does something totally unlike anything I would have intended or tried" to be a significant deterrent. Effectively, a really long delay during which I could do nothing but wait for things to happen, triggered by my character doing something totally unlike what I intended, acted like "punishment" -- it was an unpleasant experience in response to an action that I could not predict would produce that unpleasant experience.
Even just something as simple as, say, a cursor showing what verb would be applied if I clicked on a thing would probably have saved it for me.
I think the distinction here is one of how important agency is to you. It's important to me that I am making decisions for my avatars in games. I don't like it when a game makes a decision for me, especially if it's not a decision I want, or there's no way for me to guess what the decision will be in advance. So, basically, what you experienced as "Myst rewarded you for doing so...", I experienced sometimes as a reward, and sometimes as a punishment.
So it came with, for me, the largest downside of such confusion, which is "it is flatly and totally impossible for me to decide what my next action will be".
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It was an analogy, which means the parallels don't have to be exact, it's just there to communicate a concept.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Totally makes sense, and that's a really good point, not to mention something that I didn't consider.
I can see why they didn't change the cursor to match the verb, since doing so can have the effect of breaking immersion (or, in your case, it may aid in it), though even they didn't follow that rule, since I seem to recall there being a few objects that displayed cursors other than the default hand cursor when you interacted with them.
On the topic of agency, that's an interesting distinction. I'm with you in not liking it when games make decisions on my behalf (it's a big part of why I loved Master of Orion II, which was big on micromanagement, but hated Master of Orion III, since III, among other issues, established AI governors that would make decisions on your behalf throughout your empire), but I for some reason don't have problems with my avatar taking an action that I'm triggering without fully understanding what will happen. If the avatar went and punched in the complicated sequence of buttons for me, I'd hate it, but knowing that that thing I'm clicking on is a button and pressing it, when I, as the player, may not recognize it as a button, is okay with me. I don't like the "one button does everything" (a.k.a. "press B to win") variety of games that have cropped up in recent years, but I am okay with one cursor doing everything in a puzzle game, for some reason. Hmm...
Anyway, in all sincerity, thanks for taking the time to respond and clarify your position, since it's definitely a valid one, and I was much too dismissive of it at the start of this thread. Now I'm going to want to go and think through all of this some more, since I'd love to suss out my own thoughts on this topic more fully.
Apparently no-one who reads /. has ever played machinarium. That's sad.
I didn't even really understand entirely what was bugging me at the time, it wasn't until a friend pointed it out that it became more clear. She's more alert to the details of agency questions.
In FF14, I had a thing where I had a quest to "go tell some guy in a crowded bar that you did a thing", and it had the visual effects for "warning, you're about to be in a huge fight". Of course, what happens is I tell the guy, who is happy, and nothing at all happens, and then there is a disturbance outside and my character automatically runs out, witnesses a confrontation between some people, and ends up taking a side in their battle. Then there's a fight where I am automatically placed on one side of that fight. After that, my character goes back to whatever was previously going on.
I don't get the option of not joining this random unrelated fight.
I don't get the option of, say, interacting further with the poor girl I just defended against thugs, either.
And that's sort of frustrating, because it's great storytelling for the story of a specific character that may not be the one I wanted to create...
Myst's issues were more subtle, but more totally pervasive. I very rarely knew what would happen when I clicked on something.
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First played Myst in University. There was 3 of us that played it together. It was around exam time. We had to make a pact to stop playing it as we would fail exams, we had someone hide it. Year laters I think I found out that one of the guys had made the person who hid it tell them where it was so they could get their fix.
The best things about it was that it was very non-linear. The puzzles could be anything. It also had a good story that tied everything together. You could also die, is many different ways, pretty unexpectedly. It was quite hard to figure out in some places. The graphics at the time were very good, and the theme (very steampunkesque) was well done. It required a lot of thought, and experimentation. I remember having to recreate a song using levers that I heard in another area that was linked to the room thematically. To me most of these kind of games were, find a key, find a door where that key worked. Using music, sound (particularly at a point in PC gaming that was not so advanced), and a host of other methods to solve puzzles was like a game in 4D. Specifically it had more dimension than any previous game.
The only thing I can think of recently that is even remotely like it was Portal. However Portal as good as that was, was basically a set of given physical properties, the ability to manipulate them, and then endless situations/variations of more less the same thing. It was lots of fun, and let you play around with physics, but that is about it.
About the only legacy that it left is that as it turns out, making good video games is hard, and it is easier and more profitable to simply churn out the same dreck each year and add a number to it.