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?"

Comments

Probably because it was a sort of mediocre game...

[seebs]

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.

This isn't the history I remember.

[Derec01]

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.

Multimedia upgrade kits

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:Better games came along right after?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

And me without mod points... dammit. If I never see another FPS game it'll be too soon. It seems sometimes they're *all* the industry produces.

Re:Probably because it was a sort of mediocre game

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:The graphics were simply brilliant

[hairyfeet]

But the the reason why nobody makes those anymore and why very few "Myst style" games came out is really simple and its the same reason why FMV "games" also died, and its the simple fact that graphics caught up.

The reason why Myst was so amazing back in the day was....it was 1993. Remember what PCs were like back in 93? You average game back then was a side scroller, Wolfenstein was less than a year old and you had to have a pretty beefy PC to run it. Now look at Myst...it was simply amazing to look at, much more like a movie than a game as far as graphical quality goes and in an era of levels that looked like paper cut outs? Its really not surprising it blew so many away.

But then something truly amazing happened,..the rise of the graphics card, or as many called it back in the day the "graphical accelerator". Suddenly games went from cut outs to crude 3D shapes to incredible depth...just compare No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 to see how far games came in just a few years, hell I still play a few games from a decade ago online and stuff like Freelancer still can immerse me in this galaxy hopping universe. But Myst just didn't translate well to the fully realized 3D world, like Dragon's Lair and the whole FMV craze what once wowed us just didn't really work in a fully 3D world.

So I would say the legacy of Myst was to give us back in 93 a brief taste of what the future would be like, a world where these fully fleshed out worlds are taken for granted...I mean how many of us here have fired up a recent game and just marveled at how fricking HUGE and fleshed out these worlds really are? I mean when I fire up Just Cause II with islands large enough that it would take the better part of an hour to drive across it, or fire up Borderlands II and look at how many hours I have sunk in and haven't even got to see all the game has to offer? Its pretty fricking amazing, just as Myst made our collective jaws drop back in the day. If you asked me to list the biggest jaw dropper moments of early gaming it would have to be Myst, the first time I played Quake, and that opening with the castle on Unreal.

Re:The graphics were simply brilliant

[drinkypoo]

It's really too bad that Grand Theft Auto doesn't have a pure sandbox mode, where you could diddle some sliders to make it only, say, as violent as the real world. And where you had access to everything from the get-go. Because there are probably people who would buy the game solely to get access to its sandbox. I personally eagerly awaited a new story in the GTA universe, so beating the game to get access to everything isn't an arduous task for me. I understand not wanting to play a violent game, sometimes I don't want to have to mug people just to street race too. Or whatever.