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The shift from Myst to Riven and the following sequels is really interesting. Myst really clicked with me, while I was never able to get into the later titles,
by coldpie 7y ago
The shift from Myst to Riven and the following sequels is really interesting. Myst really clicked with me, while I was never able to get into the later titles, Riven included. I know the dev team had major changes between every title, so I suppose it's not surprising that they don't gel together very well. I wonder if anyone's done a deep dive comparing the first two titles' gameplay philosophies and technical and development differences.
Certainly the 5 CD release was itself a stumbling block. It penalized exploring the island freely, which has some bad gameplay effects. When you're stuck on a puzzle in a Disc 2 area, should you keep exploring that area, or is it possible the clue you need is on some other disc? Which one? Are you willing to put up with the hassle? It wouldn't be so bad if each area was obviously self-contained, as they were in Myst, but in Riven they tried to change from a collection of puzzle boxes into a real world where the "puzzles" were diegetic. So there aren't really discrete "areas" anymore, or even puzzle themes restricted to an area. The clue you need may well be anywhere, which in combination with the disc swapping, makes finding clues into a huge chore instead of a delightful exploration.
And the biggest shame is it was built on very crappy technology (Quicktime) that even back in the day was held together with spit and string. For the better part of two decades, it was basically unplayable on any modern PC without major effort. So I haven't gone back to replay it since the original 5-disc release in the 90s. They did a re-release a year or two ago, which I guess is probably worth a shot, but my memories of Riven are just so soured by my experience. Meanwhile Myst holds a special place as a fun, quick little puzzle game.
- Rounin 7y agoI remember working around Riven's disk swapping problem by mounting all of the disks at once in five virtual CD-ROMs. To prevent audio and video crashes, the entire game had to run on one single CPU core. Finally, there was a part when some buttons had to be clicked, but the game only occasionally captured the mouse presses. So I made a button mashing script to work around that. Nowadays, though, the game runs fine in ScummVM. It's amazing how many games they've saved over the years. Myst III runs in a similar project called ResidualVM.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI wasn’t aware you could play Myst and Riven today in a VM! Would you happen to have a link you’d recommend?
- Operyl 7y agohttps://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Myst_series https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Myst_series https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=User_Manual/Quick_Start#2.2_Installing_ScummVM https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=User_Manual/Quick_S...
- WorldMaker 7y agoAlso, I believe if your copies of Myst or Riven are up-to-date from Steam or GOG (or the recent collector's edition that was the referenced Kickstarter upthread), they'll use the ScummVM engine under the hood rather than the original engine today.
- sjm-lbm 7y agoCyan (the original devs) actually helped get ScummVM/ResdiualVM updated to support their games via a Kickstarter a couple of years ago. FWIW, if tech issues stopped you from playing Riven in the 90s, I really can't suggest giving it another try enough. If you get the ScummVM version, it's very likely going to work better on modern hardware (and, for that matter, doesn't require any discs). It's similar to Myst, but a much more artistically ambitious project.
- maxsilver 7y ago> I know the dev team had major changes between every title Which is kind of funny, because the dev team between Myst to Riven was one of the transitions where they kept the team+tools the most similar between releases. (Myst 3 and Myst 4 had entirely different studios, with entirely different teams, tooling, and engines) The next closest similar transition would probably be the Uru series to Myst 5 (but for wildly different reasons)
- anon_cow1111 7y agoI could have sworn there was a full-install option that let you avoid disc swapping... assuming you had 2-3 gigs of free hard drive space in that era. maybe I'm thinking of Exile(the 3rd one)?
- JackRabbitSlim 7y agoFrom what I remember, each disk was roughly a single "island". I think they tried to keep it semi-logical but I doubt it was as effective as they would have liked.