Well, you are correct - there's a lot of reasons - but I still think art is one of the primary ones. If you'll allow me to drop into a specific example: during

Well, you are correct - there's a lot of reasons - but I still think art is one of the primary ones. If you'll allow me to drop into a specific example: during Riven's development, Cyan hired a guy named Richard Vander Wende, who had previously worked on Aladdin at Disney. Much like Aladdin, he made color grading a focus of Riven - most images tend to be unusually warm or cool, dark or light, etc. in ways that communicate a mood or something about the world you are interacting with (even if it's not something you yet know about the world you are interacting with). Stuff like this is, IMHO, unusually effective in a game like Riven - the player is often too busy looking for a switch or button or whatever to consciously absorb little details like that, but there's a way that I feel like that communicates the mood of a location in a way that's very emotional and brilliant. The effect may work better on me than other people, but it's one of the reasons why Riven is the highlight of the series for me. There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven. (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)