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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
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.
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."
I blame Doom for unintentionally being the spark responsible for the stagnation of the entire video game industry for many years, spawning an ever-increasing multitude of insipid, uninspiring, mindless FPS where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
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.
Yes, exactly!
I worked at a software store when Myst came out, and we sold MOUNTAINS of it. That at the 7th Guest (and Encarta, LOL) were the go-tos when people added a CD-ROM to their system and wanted something to do with it. But the feedback was universal - after a couple hours in Myst and the visual excitement wore off, it turned out there wasn't much game. It wasn't much more than a graphic Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Doom came out shortly later, and everyone forgot entirely about Myst. We sold mountains of Doom, and then we sold mountains of those *terrible* compilation CDs that had bazillions of maps downloaded off the internet. And then Doom2, and then more add-on maps (and not long after we started selling NICs and 10Base2 terminators ;). Being able to go anywhere and engage anything was what Myst didn't do, a step we had *expected* Riven to take... but it didn't.
Under a Killing Moon was also a big seller - and there were other games in the vein, too. All very interesting to play, but like the LucasFilm-style games they got murdered by FPSs and RTSs. I never quite understood why - Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island were great games with broad appeal. Strange they didn't survive longer.
heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to space combat, and the X-Wing & Wing Commander promises of good games!
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.
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.
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.