Why Myst STILL needs another remake - Episode 1: The Current Vision
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 พ.ค. 2024
- What is Myst? A game made in 1993, of course.
No, I mean - what are we looking at? What is the intrinsic nature of the worlds within?
It may seem this question would have a straightforward answer, but as I'll argue here, the community may have been split into two schools of thought on this since the very beginning.
Meanwhile, Cyan has periodically updated the game with new remakes as technology progresses. You’d figure at some point Cyan would seize the opportunity to give us an amplified version of what the original Myst wanted to be. But that hasn't actually happened. Instead, their remakes have consistently shifted toward a new vision, further away from the original one each time.
Why is this? Is it really necessary? What have we lost because of this?
This is the first of a three-part deep dive into the subject. Here I focus on the recent changes and why I call them into question.
This is not a review of the recent edition, although I do offer some thoughts on it. My main take is that as long as it claims to be ONE vision of Myst, then I can appreciate the changes. But once it claims to be THE vision, we start to have a problem.
This is because, as I said, multiple visions have existed from the beginning. So I don’t think any vision (or version) can ever claim to be the definitive or authoritative one. That includes my vision as well as any other. Rather, the paradigm of multiple remakes offers the opportunity to satisfy different factions of the fanbase each time.
0:00 - 01. The Many Remakes of Myst
2:47 - 02. Myst VR
9:19 - 03. The Rationalist Vision
17:19 - 04. Is Realism Always Better?
21:58 - 05. Realism in Riven
26:51 - 06. Myst's Split Personality
31:37 - 07. A Conflict of Visions
39:00 - 08. Not the Same
Deforestation of Myst: • The Deforestation of Myst
ABOUT ME
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Is part 2 still coming?
Yes.
Believe it or not, I hate my slow production rate more than anyone. But this is a complicated topic that involves multiple philosophies that pertain to the basic mechanics of the universe, and I also want to make sure all the concepts are presented as clearly as possible with a smooth flow between them. On top of that, this might be the only opportunity I have at making any serious case for correcting the trajectory of what Myst has become, so I need to make sure no stone is left unturned.
There are millions of videos out there that are edited far more professionally than mine, so I'm grateful that anyone bothers to watch what I spit out. But in a funny way, my style is also oddly difficult to produce, since I'm trying to create a distinct viewing experience with footage and music from various games that add to the experience but don't distract from the points I'm making.
Anyway, long story short, three months after the release of Episode 1, I'm still writing the script for Episode 2, which means production hasn't even started yet. That's a scary proposition, so all I can say is that I want to get it out some time in 2024. I already had other video projects I wanted to make that I've now set aside because this is more important, and the episode that directly explains the alternate philosophy is the most critical in the series. So I'm treating this as the most important video I've ever made. I really wish I could get it out quickly, but I also want to get it right.
So I appreciate your patience as I continue to work on it. Truthfully, I actually first started drafting out this series in late 2022, so... I guess it is what it is.
This really opened my eyes. I remember playing Myst VR and enjoying it a TON, but after a few days I thought back on it and couldn't hep but feel something was missing from the original; this video completely solidified that feeling. I seriously can't wait for the next episode! Thanks Shady
So you're saying this video ruined your enjoyment of a video game you previously loved . . . . great. I'm sure @shadyparadox is happy about that. I'm glad I stopped watching a few minutes in.
@@joshuaoehler5796 not my point at all. I've replayed Myst 2021 many times and have enjoyed every playthrough - playing in VR with randomized puzzles has revitalized Myst in a way I didn't expect. Shady is simply providing a secondary point of view on why a lot of people weren't as thrilled with the remake as they expected.
Thanks Shady. Some really great points here. I appreciate the side-by-side walkthroughs of different versions in near perfect synchronicity. That must have been challenging to orchestrate
Achenar's mouth video on Channelwood is a prime example of why I'd prefer real actors, even if the performance is cheesy or odd, it's full of life, expression, and detail.
Brad Dourif will always be better than AI, even AI Brad Dourif.
Don't even mention it..........just the though we are finally getting a remake of my fav Myst game by far......with Richard Vander Wende back in the team!.............and then to hear they are not gonna use live action acting, or even re-using John Keston's performance...............haas me dead :(
@@jeanjacqueslundi3502 yeah, but it seems like they're doing their best to improve the quality of their CG characters, and it's the only way to future-proof the game
@@tjsase If it comes at the cost of the best character/performance in the whole series........why can't they just use the original recording from John Keston and put it on the new game? Even if they lost the recording, you can still edit what is in the retail version. It's not like he has scenes in several places.....it's just the cage dialogue.
@@jeanjacqueslundi3502 To do that would look very out of place compared to remaking the characters. In VR, or even on desktop, it would be distractedly obvious that you're viewing a low quality recording, awkwardly placed into the photo-real environment.
Rand has said in an interview that he is still able to go into the original version of myst and tweak things so I hope he does something with that
I always get excited whenever I see a new SP video - always so well done, SP presentation style is so eloquent and erudite.
The original Myst is the way it is partly because they didn't know what they are doing, and I think that's why I like the original realMyst the best of all the 3D remakes. It is true to the original Myst, and adds a whole new layer of not-knowing-what-they-are-doing as they get to grips with a 3D engine.
realmyst ruins several puzzles by making things plainly visible that were supposed to be hard to see
Yep, I absolutely get what you're saying. This otherworldly feeling that seeped through the screenshots is what made me try the original Myst in the first place when I wasn't even aware how culturally significant it was, and in later games it just... Wasn't there. Looking forward to you putting more of it into words!
I think "liminal" is a good word to describe the quality of the original Myst's graphical atmosphere which the remakes increasingly lack. There's a "Liminal space (aesthetic)" article on Wikipedia about the concept; also Google image search for "liminal space".
There's also a certain Alice in Wonderland -esque intrigue in being transported to a world that operates in a dreamlike fashion. Dreams are pre-articulate states of knowledge where fuller understanding is still under the process of being formed. Rationalising everything, locking them down with "this is why this is here and this is how this works", is delivering premade knowledge and taking away that dreamlike essence of free association. Instead of making the player go "Oh, what is this?! What is that!?" in a more profound way, the game becomes just another fictional world.
On a similar note, The Atlantic has an article, "One of the Best Fantasy Novels Ever Is Nothing Like The Lord of the Rings" (non-paywalled version available via the Wayback Machine), about the novel The Last Unicorn, touching upon how its lack of rigorous worldbuilding works in its favour.
There was really only 2 from the ground up remakes for myst, with realmyst2000 and Myst for the Quest1. The rest are enhanced ports (the iPad version of realmyst was ported by Cyan themselves and the frame-rate and lighting is actually better than on PC) . I agree with everything you said. The remakes look more earth-like and less surreal. Eric also exposed in that same livestream that he thinks that Atrus wrote the age of Myst, but it was written by Catherine and Tiana, the first Myst novel explains that Catherine’s ages are surrealistic and don’t obey the normal laws of physics and nature. But in the remake they changed the acidic looking green water that looked like it was still and vibrating, to normal blue water with normal earthly properties. And they changed the strange clay like substance to normal rocks. And the turf like grass to normal overgrown ugly grass and foliage. And added normal looking blue sky and normal clouds. Robyn Miller is known for hating Realmyst. I wish Cyan never stopped making pre-rendered games because they were the absolute best studio for making those games and they haven’t been nearly as successful since their move to real-time 3d. Eric Anderson has said that there is no desire to go back to pre-rendered games because ‘nobody is asking for that’ and that if a pre-rendered game was released today it would be doomed to fail. But I disagree with that statement. Nobody was begging for a game like Myst when it came out, but it caught everyone by surprise and was a huge success. I think the real reason why they won’t do it is because the same people aren’t there anymore and they are now all familiar with developing real-time graphics with Unreal Engine, and it would be inconvenient to them to not utilize what they know and learn how to make a pre-rendered game. I also think that they shouldn’t go against the fans on the hand cursor and real actors. But they keep pushing the circle cursor on us. It’s just way more satisfying when you see your hand open up when it’s hovering over something that is interactive.
I agree with everything you say, except I'm optimistic we don't have to go back to pre-rendered graphics to get an amazing experience of Myst with modern graphics standards. But hopefully we'll see!
Fantanstic video Shady! Great messaging, editing and delivery. 👍 And noticed the credit at the end for the Live Tree in memory of Colton Alan Ross in San Gabriel Park. Nice touch.
I find it strange that the developers are trying to remove the supposed "magic" of the Myst games.
So how do you explain books that teleport you to tiny worlds that can be built or altered by just writing on a page?
Also, explain the Star Fissure while you're at it, Cyan. Clearly, there's a rational explanation for it, right? Just put a bunch of interlocking gears in it in the next remake.
The tablet is what makes the books work. And I believe the star fissure was created by the bahro
@@trapez77 The Bahro are basically magical aliens, though. They created an entire pocket dimension of stars that can teleport to other worlds? That doesn't sound scientific to me; it sounds more like god-like whimsy.
There's a difference between types of magic though... i don't think that Cyan wants to remove all magic from the Myst universe, i think they mostly want to keep it "Credible".
Here's the thing about magic in fiction... in general, a magic system is credible, if it has rules and consistency... as opposed to random Deus Ex Machina. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter all have magic in it, but the magic operates consistently within a set of rules inherent to the universe from which it comes. This helps make magic tangible and prevents the viewer (or player) from feeling cheated, while also helping create a unique universe that makes sense all while being completely different from ours.
Linking Books and the Star Fissure fit within the realm of possibilities of the rules dictated by the overarching lore of the Myst universe. There's consistency to how they work, and ways to operate them. For example, you can't link to a different spot in the same Age to teleport around, you can't travel through time, you can't modify an existing Age at a fundamental level, of you'll just link to another one altogether and lose your link to the previous iteration. Also, the Star Fissure appears in Riven because the Age is collapsing, it is the void between the ages, and falling from it in Riven leads to Earth (D'ni's surface), hence why you found the Myst linking book in the first place, and how it allows you to go back home at the end of Riven.
The thing with OG Myst's magic is that it is a lot more random, or like Rand would say, "eclectic"'. There are no reasons or logic behind a book materializing out of a wooden table when you touch it, or how a TV screen would allow you to link to Selenitic without the book. Those are small things but which creates inconsistencies within the rules of the universe, and those are problematic if you look at the series as a whole.
Tone deaf combined with a new team that is 100% clueless to the old works and finds these "rational" paths to be OK, partly because they're from a different age of computing, partly because they were CHOSEN for it.
For shame that Cyan cannot see what they're doing to their own legacy. But i guess it's typical for creators in that timeline. Lucas, Ridley Scott, and a whole score of other creators that cannot stop themselves from destroying what they've made.
For me, this dissonance was twice worse because i tried playing Firmament and saw all the bad things. I'm extremely disappointed in Cyan's new approach and the slap that comes with it. VR is nothing more than a passing fad, much like AI.
THERE's a reason why, within a sole year, you could buy dev kits for VR headsets from fleabay. And the reason is because it's not what it says on the box. If you're willing to accept that, it's ok, but most people that have tried VR and from which i could discuss VR and their experience to gather exactly what they're thinking about it, were not impressed. Cyan bought entirely too much into the VR flag and decided it's a good hatchet for their work. I suppose it's the same thing that happened on the Easter island, where the group hate and religious aspects extincted the population and made devoid the island of trees, leaving behind giant statues of men (complete with dinguses) and large "coin" wheels. I'm expecting to be disappointed in their newest remake too. Because their idea of "remake" is to disregard everything that made the game work.
It's like going to a franchise restaurant in a different country. You expect to find the same burger you like from your home place and instead you find a different, blander version that doesn't really have anything of the taste and feel you got home.
I'm happy with my OG myst games on my OG PC that still works. I fire it up every few years to play these games (and others) and honestly, if the new remake makes the same mistakes, i'll wash my hands of Cyan, because Cyan washed their hands of us. They have giant statues of VR headsets on a large bald island with rusty gears that won't turn for anyone.
to me, it's a difference of in-game focus points. in the original, you couldn't look behind a rock you were not meant to look behind, you saw just certain views. the newer versions each gave you more freedom, and that in turn blurred the picture.
I would love to see Myst VR with actual actors, even if it's not Rand and Robyn. The inclusion of real people in this magical world grounds it more than making it function like our world does.
Shady! How amazing to see you on my YT feed again :) This is a fine MYST review. I always found it amusing that Cyan keeps remastering the game, but I feel like at this point it's a game in the sandbox, they get better buckets to build a better castle haha. I usually dislike it when studios remake games that don't need remaking, but I'd give Cyan a pass because MYST is their baby and I don't feel like they're trying to moneygrab from their fans, just kinda playing around. Looking forward to the next video!
Just wanted to add more on my comment as I keep watching the video. The question of realism in games, especially Myst games, is such a good one. I agree with you, that realism doesn't have to mean... 'realism', you know. I like games that are realistic in that they make sense, but they have that... dreamy sense to it. Believable, but alien and new and so beautiful. I think that's why Myst iii also appealed to me SO much. Just that sweet sweet spot in-between.
Also, new MYST 3d models for actors are so cursed haha. I've always liked Cyan's real actors much more, no matter the acting.
Great video Shady. Thank you for the video and all the effort you put in it, it shows. I await to see the next instalment of this series.
That part tree is funny, especially with you going out and touching the tree. Save the trees ;) . #BringBackTheTreesInMyst.
I always like the magical and mysterious perspective of the Myst series and the different beautiful worlds.
I didn’t even consider Rive more realistic than Myst, I found it as magical and mysterious as Myst, but even more beautiful than Myst. I loved exploring the world, seeing the different elements and creatures, the lore/story. Same for Myst 3 and Myst 4.
I think I like immersion more than realism, as I love different settings, like Sci-fi(Star wars games, Dr.Brain thinking games: IQ adventure, etc.), fantasy(the elder scrolls, etc.) and more.
I love the music choice, especially the Sam and Max one, Sybil’s office.
Anyway, thanks again for the video. May you and everybody, plus your family and friends, have a good day and week-end. Cheers and bless you all.
Robyn confirmed member of the underground More Trees faction
Honestly, I don't think FMVs were replaced because of a blanket belief that it was more realistic for characters to have depth at the expense of detail in a 3D environment. I tend to agree that FMVs do enhance realism and believability, and especially the way they were handled in Obduction made that game feel very realistic and grounded relative to other modern releases. I think it's specifically realism *in VR* that drove their decision on this one.
realMyst/ME had no problem using FMVs all over the place because they could lock the player's view when need be. Atrus could deliver his speech in K'veer at the same head-on angle as he did in the original game and it would look perfectly fine. Certainly it would look better than using the 3D modelled Atruses (Atri?) that they'd put into those games to deliver the speech, since you're getting a literally photorealistic human talking to a camera.
In VR, you don't get that luxury. Unlike in Obduction, the environments are already defined, so you can't just have characters talk through holograms or behind perfectly sized windows the entire time. Instead, you would either have a Doom-style always facing forward billboard-like character that disorients the player, or you have a *literal* billboard that looks like an infinitely thin screen when looked at off-axis instead of a character.
If this was their line of thinking, it would also explain why the FMVs cease to exist in the final sequences. Obviously Atrus is supposed to be physically in the room with you, so that one makes sense. The endings with the brothers reverting back makes a bit less sense, but it likely has to do with a combination of those original videos just not feeling as though they're at the right scale in VR, and the videos not mapping well to the sort of dome effect they had going on. It also would've probably looked weird to have the new fog effect and the old VHS static effect blend together but that's sort of its own concern.
Small sidebar: I should also note one quirk you may not have realized if you've never played the remake in VR: the 3D-modelled brothers are *not* flat videos. You can see them inset within the book, and if you move the book or your head around, you can see at different angles into the book. The endings have a similar perspective trick going on in the other direction, as though the brothers are giants peeking into a dome/box that you are at the bottom of. I imagine this was probably something they decided on after the fact, just to make the best of the situation. If we have to use 3D models, we might as well take advantage of them.
Personally, I'm largely behind the realism approach. It's not so much because I think a more "magical" environment as they call it is uninteresting or non-immersive, nor even because I think it's an invalid interpretation of the original game, but because it feels as though a more mechanical world fits more in line with the universe they built up after this first entry. A surreal Myst doesn't feel foreign to or unacceptable within that universe - especially not if Serenia exists within that universe - but a mechanical Myst feels more at home to me. With that said, even a hyper-detailed 3D model isn't quite going to match the grounded realism of the FMVs for me, even if I do think just making more detailed models is the correct solution for a company dead-set on VR games.
Amusingly, though I should be very happy with the most recent remake as someone in the "realism" camp, I find myself similarly annoyed by it. It's those VR changes you mention early in the video that drive me so crazy that I simply can't bring myself to recommend this newest version of the game to people, even despite the many changes that I ended up really appreciating. The irony is that despite chasing after realism, the insistence on raising everything to chest height, eliminating chairs, and sliding/mechanical doors everywhere make this the least believable version of the game to date, at least for me (seriously, who builds a vault that's only capable of holding single pages?). And if other VR games have taught me anything, it's that this lack of believability was almost completely avoidable. These are not design decisions that you will find in other VR games. Combine that with the failure of those new interfaces when put onto a flatscreen where most people will play the game (the rose/skull toy has been reduced to nothing) and the outright bugginess of some of those interfaces (fun fact, it's very easy to fail to trigger the pump in Stoneship because you didn't lower the lever completely) and the whole experience falls apart.
Wow, I've just said a lot of words. My apologies, I'm just similarly disappointed to you that "Myst" as they decided to call it has been labelled as a sort of definitive edition when in my eyes (and clearly in yours, for different reasons) it's anything but. It's interesting to hear someone invested in the more "magical" aspects of the world, even if I'm not personally too concerned one way or the other.
I have particularly felt this way about the crystal towers in the Selenitic Age. In the original MYST, they had a distinctive colored appearance. None of the remakes have that aesthetic.
Interesting video. I agree in a lot of ways and maybe disagree in others, though I'm intrigued to see your follow up.
I think you're definitely right about the myst remakes losing something by trying to apply the later myst games' rationalist/realist vision to the first game. Myst wasn't designed for that vision full stop, which makes the result feel kind of fractured and confused. Like, lots of Myst, completely setting aside magical elements, is designed to be surreal and visually interesting, not rationally contextualized. Things like the space ship with an organ in it to store a linking book, or the bizarre tree elevator for example. These things don't hold up to rational scrutiny through a lens of narrative and logic, and within Myst that's fine. Unlike its sequels, it's not interested in rationalizing everything. So when the remakes, especially the most recent one, try to apply rationalism in the details of things like the magic paintings, they're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. You'd need to completely redesign the game around a rationalist approach, throwing out much of the original ideas, to really make that work and feel stylistically cohesive. It would be interesting, and I'd love to see what that would look like, but it definitely wouldn't be a "remake" in the normal sense.
I will say, part of this is just the fundamental question of what purpose a remake should serve. Should it replace the original, as the "definitive" version of the experience, or be a companion piece to the original, branching off in different creative directions? I'd say I am typically more interested in the latter. Even when a more divergent remake fails to spark the same magic as the original, I tend to respect it more than rote copying.
Shady - there is no Myst series without hearing your voice, diehard supporter here!
Perfect video editing Shady.👍
I played the first version and it took me a long, delicious time to complete the game. I loved slowly exploring the worlds and figuring out how to solve things when, fiyr example, i have no ear for musuc
(I put post it notes on the monitor)
I had sn entire composition book where i took elaborate notes. Drew clues, contents of books, mazes, etc. Ut was faster than running back to find the clue
.to watch people solve it quickly now makes me so mad. Where's the enjoyment in that?
Ah, I remember mapping out the entire selenetic underground, I'm sure there was another way to do it but this one was mine.
@@doltBmB if I didn't map it out, I would have been wandering aimlessly still
To me, in spite of all the remakes, Myst has never truly moved toward realism, in the sense that it's never felt truly lived-in. Fairly early on, it was acknowledged that the "real" Myst Island was significantly larger than what we see in-game, yet the island has stayed the same size, and there aren't any living quarters or unused places of protection as there should be. In the inhabited Ages, there's also a lack of details needed to make the Ages habitable. Where are the fruiting vines, nuts, water plants, or birds and insects that the Tree-Dwellers in Channelwood would have needed for food, and where did they get fresh water in any of the Ages? Riven had an ecosystem that, while alien, was believable, and there were signs (ex. the animals on the Moiety stones) that even that was a mere shadow of what once was.
Another thing that bothers me is Cyan's tendency to conflate realism with a ramshackle appearance. A particular gripe of mine is the floors in Hunrath or Achenar's room in Channelwood: The floorboards are placed very irregularly and with massive gaps in the floor. Real people don't build floors like that, and it's evident from other locations within those worlds that the people were easily capable of building to a higher standard. It feels as though Cyan is trying to recapture something from Riven, but they themselves don't fully know what that "something" really is.
Very intriguing and insightful. I definitely prefer the atmosphere of Myst over the 21 version's. The colour palette, the use of lighting, contrast and dynamic range, I find both things more engaging even with the crude '93 graphics. The red trees and green seas of Myst, the considerably darker wood in channelwood... colours engage an automatic associative response when you see them, and I think aren't given enough consideration.
The 3D characters for Myst '21 were a considerably sub-par experiment and shouldn't really be taken as an indicator for the limitations of CG. (More so the limitations of Cyan's budget and hired talent at the time) It's borderline programmer art, competing directly with a real life recording. The mouths are weight painted weirdly with poor topology (look how the mouths open, with those strange sharp corners.) and anatomy isn't great, so the animation is inexpressive. Atrus looks constantly pissed off. It seems like high effort but lack of experience. By now 3D characters are a refined art form. (Look at the characters in the new God Of War games. They aren't even based on real people, they're purely digital sculptures brought to life.) There is also no subsurface scattering, which is where the light scatters through the translucent skin and illuminates the blood inside. It's not a hard thing to implement in modern game engines.
Luckily, Cyan now has character specialists, and they've got access to some of the easiest and most advanced tools for human characters ever made. Riven's humans are going to be incomparable to those in Myst. (And I think the new Atrus might get backported to Myst.)
th-cam.com/video/pnaKyc3mQVk/w-d-xo.html
Also a rant about lighting
When I see the bright overcast sky through the dark pines out the window of a bedroom in channelwood, it feels like a real place in Myst. The remake lost this feeling entirely for me, especially with its bizarre use of overbright lanterns everywhere that made things look washed out and don't really make sense for an abandoned place. Artificial lights should also be hugely overpowered by natural light, as well. Lamplight is like 120lux. Overcast daylight is around 2000lux. Sunlight is 50,000lux. Obviously Myst 1 was just eyeballed but the lack of global illumination (resulting in dark shadows) and darker texturework resulted in something that felt more instinctively natural to my eye.
Thanks for all the feedback. But the main thing I really tried to make clear in that chapter regarding the character portrayal is that _the technology is not the central part of the issue._
One side insists that it is, so if we just got better models, if we just upgraded what they looked like, if we just had more "artful" portrayals of what technology can offer these days or whatever, then everyone would be happy.
But I don't think the other side would agree. The phenomenon of "real people in unreal worlds" was such an integral part of the original experience that any attempt to diverge from that in order to conform to modern gaming expectations will always miss the mark. It may look more appealing than what we currently have, but it won't be any closer to recapturing the original spirit.
I never intended to undermine the core point of the video; rather, just throw in some of my knowledge and feelings. You helped me reconsider how realism can be used as a device rather than a creative oppressor. However: Ultimately FMVs aren't "real" either. They're an interpretation of a human performances through a pipeline of tech. More dynamic styles of performance capture and rendering have always been drastically less true to life, while these compressed camera recordings require very little suspension of disbelief. I appreciate there are psychological elements to knowing something was filmed with a camera with real clothes and props, and seeing these elements contrasted with a surreal world. Plus associative feelings, like nostalgia. With the quality of tech being irrelevant, I imagine this feeling is key. However, to say that drastically more natural looking people (driven by real acting and scanned by real cameras) wouldn't bring things closer to the original vision versus play-doh animatronics seems an odd thought.
The fact that real-time performance rendering is only just on the verge of photorealism means we can only speculate how tech will really make things feel for everyone. I mean, if it really truly just looked like real people.
There's another angle that goes beyond Realism VS Magic, and it's the vision i adhere to... Consistency. You see, i like the new version of Myst the best, but i like the old FMVs better, because i like to think of all the Myst games as being part of the same multiverse, with the same mythos and the same rules. FMVs serve that purpose, since we see Atrus literally age with us and it feels like we really see the same person at different times and different places.
The problem i have with old Myst, is that from all of the series games, it's the one that feels the less like it's part of that same universe. Even Uru feels more like that world than OG Myst... specifically because of that alternate vision, which goes against the lore from the universe, especially what's in the Books and Uru.
Before anyone say i'm too young to know what Myst is really about... i'm 37 and my first game in the series was OG Myst, so i've seen it all grow up, but if Cyan makes more remakes, i'm happy that they try to make them fit all together under a larger cohesive vision rather than have the first chapter feel so out of touch with the rest.
My ultimate dream would be to have a supreme remake called "Ages of Myst", which encapsulates all the Ages from every game under a same creative vision and then, weave the story from the whole saga seamlessly between them in one big adventure.... and as a Post-game, the ability to travel to all the Ages from each game freely from your own Relto Age. But, yeah... that won't happen :D
"Consistency" is a good word for describing the exact opposite of the original Myst, the word chosen by Rand being "eclectic".
My argument is that if Myst is going to be given half a dozen remakes, why can't we get at least one where we see the original vision without all the technical limitations?
Besides, Myst is what begat all the later games and books and stuff, not the other way around. The new direction was influenced by Riven and people who came after, who now all put the cart before the horse.
This was already set as my opening argument in the next episode, so I guess I just spoiled it a little bit.
@@shadyparadox To be clear, i'm not saying that you're wrong for wanting a remake more akin to the original version, but without technical limitation.
All i'm saying is that there's more to the question than Realism VS Magic. I don't think Cyan is trying to remove magic from their work, i mean, there are Books that teleports you through different worlds.... and i, for one, definitely don't want or crave "Realism" in games or fiction, realism is boring, like you said, if i want realism, i'll go play outside. What i want, and what i think Cyan wants is for all their work to follow the same rules, regardless of if it's magic or not and feel like it's part of a sole multiverse.
When they made Myst, there were, of course, technical limitations, but the lore of their universe was not yet fully developed and they had no idea how it would develop. Now that they have the bigger picture, they want to make it more homogenous.
All that being said it would be cool if they made a traditional version or mode that reflects more the original, then it only becomes a question of budget. Cyan is a small indie team, without the huge budget of AAA games, and their games don't sell like they use to, so if they want to stay alive, they probably, and unfortunately can't afford to make 2 versions of the same game to please everyone. They have to chose the one they believe is the best according to their current vision.... and it's still Rand's vision, it's not like if it was developed by another studio and that the original devs had nothing to do with it.
I will say, what Myst needs is the same as what any true classic game needs. Not another remake or remaster, but a proper honest to god port to modern systems. Make the original hypercard code run on modern windows and linux, that is all that is really needed, true preservation.
13:38 I'm team old Myst but the iridescent shine on the water there is a neat touch.
Would love to see part 2!
13:51 The picture on the wall on the left (as seen from this angle) is an actual rendition of a famous painting in the Louvre of Paris by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1806, of Napoleon in a fancy coat holding a sceptre except it has the face of Sirrus. However, you did know this from your Art Appreciation class in high school days, right?
I enjoy the realism, but I also liked the magic/mystery of it all. I don’t need to understand why something moves. I know I’m not in the real world playing those games and that’s why I enjoy them.
I actually find the newer graphics to be less realistic looking, there is something about the soft painterly lighting of unreal engine that just doesn't really capture how real light and materials work, it looks like clay or dough. And despite the primitive models and textures and the low resolution of the original images, the way they are lit gives a sense of something real and tangible on the other side of the camera, a sense that these objects are solid. And it's when you combine that solid realism with the slightly off-kilter, somewhat alien way that things tend to work, you get something hyper-real, something beyond ordinary reality. None of the remakes except for masterpiece edition have captured that feeling.
I think redoing Myst with new technological ability is absolutely the right thing to do. Gives them an excuse to add some new stuff and reason to go through Myst again!
I don't see this conflict of vision. I've always thought that Myst(Myst and Riven) combined both realism and fantasy. As the computer technology has advance, the realistic element has come a bit more into play; but, I don't think they've taken away the fantasy. The Boat still comes up out of the water; we still go from world to world through a book.
One thing about the last 2 remakes that has always bothered me is the lack of gloom. The original myst has a somewhat cold look with dull colors, a cool pallet, howling wind and heavy fog. Everything's all clear, saturated and sunny now. When I want to experience Myst, the original is usually my choice. The newer remakes are high quality and good in their own right, but when I want to experience Myst the way I remember it, there's only one option. The new one I basically just use for VR, which is awesome. I wish they'd introduce a "gloomy" mode or something.
So, as an avid fan of the original MYST (v. 1.1, that is), AND someone with penchant for all things "magic(al)" - in fact I'd say READING Andersen's tales would give a kid way greater experience comparing with watching movies - the reason is, a narrative stimulates one's imagination, as it tosses CONCEPTS at the reader, who then has to work them out in his or her imagination, rather than presenting ready-made "finite and fixed" pictures that happened to tickle producer's fancy (and YES, as a five-six yrs old kid I war reading Andersen's tales myself), so "as such individual" I have a mixed feelings about realism taking first seat in remake producers' minds.
I mean, it has its benefits, but then "immersion in a story" is more about the STORY itself, not fancy graphics - look no further than Grim Fandango game - with its crude (if not laughable) "3D renderings" and silly flaws (like when Glottis have opened his mouth - or "snout" and you could actually get a glimpse of things behind his head), YET the game was immensely immersive. On the other hand, "point and click" Starship Titanic, while fun to play (bar for more than a few maddeningly illogical and/or obscure puzzles - so much so than latter issues came with bundled guidebook), was, well, "just that". Ditto for "3D" Mephisto or REAH - intriguing, with well done (by the standard of their times) graphics, still you could just "take a break" from them at virtually any moment without that nagging desire to get back at them ASAP.
Gatting back at "MYST genre" - when Myst III Exile came out I grabbed it, installed on my G5 Mac (which required some tweaking, AFAIR, since G5 introduced some new "hardware architecture" that wasn't 100% compatible with the installer, but I digress here), and...
"Well, not bad, actually... I mean, quite nice, but... GIMME THE RIVEN FEEL BACK! RIGHT NOW, OR ELSE!"
;-)
OK, 'nuff of this whining and complaining - but the fact is that "improved reality", while having its merits and benefits (looking at the "cogs" in MYST was for me, a mechanically inclined individual, really hard thing to, and "no, reely? srsly, does it have to be THAT dumb?" feeling never actually went away), the "loss of magic", if you will, was a sad thing - and tad too high a price to pay for all that "realism".
BUT! - the newest iteration (2020?) of it brings some of that back, thanks to... I guess that "unreal" tint does the trick - although I have to admit that the first moment I saw it was like "WHAAA?! Who came up with this pinkish nonsense?" - but when I watched the gameplay (on YT) for a moment I though "actually, wait a minute - that DOES make sense after all..."
So, here's my twopence on it. And as they say, "de gustibus non disputandum est (aka "beauty is in the eye of beholder"), so anyone can have his or her opinion - including myself ;-)
...and on this positive note... : )
I am so glad I bought the original realMYST...it's a shame it got delisted. The new Riven looks like it's STILL gonna have sliding doors...how unfortunate. The good news is, that it looks more believable in the trailer, so here's hoping they all do.
Also, just read your comment about you taking a long time on Episode 2. I too have to make a part 2 for what I'm working on and I have learned I won't be doing parts ever again, or else the v1d30 won't get done. I either make it all, or I don't make it. Good luck to you one the other 2 episodes.
You have to remember that the same people that worked on the older version of something are no longer working at the company...take Left for Dead and Back 4 Blood for instance. One was made by a top notch team and the other was using the notoriety of that company to masquerade, pretending to be that same group, when they weren't... it happens all the time. Just look at FF7R, and Last of Us 2...Look at all the movies and games being made by these people, injecting themselves into one of the characters...it's gross. These people delusionally believe that they can make something better than what was originally made, however, they don't have enough creativity to make their own ideas. They have to pathetically, leech from older IPs...they're losers.
Magic works just fine in Myst because magic is just science not yet understood...
I really hope they keep everything as is with Riven and don't try to "enhance" it. Since Riven is completely different to Myst, I'm sure there won't be too much issue with the Riven remake, but I guess we'll see, when it releases.
I've never been a Myst fan per se. I've played Riven first and then played the rest of the series.....what really grabbed me was Riven, not Myst. But I enjoyed Myst, enjoyed realMyst when I bought it..........but they are insisting too much on the first game for sure. I haven't tried Obduction or Firmament yet, but Obduction in particular, does FEEL like it has a cohesive vibe I might enjoy.
13:52 rationalist indeed, because it robs everything magical about the original. Myst in the new vision wouldn't have sold 5 million copies. Proof being other games with "realism" "rationalized" into the mix, contemporary to Myst. For shame that Cyan can't see the forest for the trees, despite deforesting the island so badly, it will soon turn into an easter island, complete with moai stones.
*Thank you SO much Shady for mentioning the same thing thats been bothering me. I hate seeing the world of Myst being fucked with and changed. The ultimate remake for me would be one where the world looks and functions identically to the original but is just 3D and has higher def textures. That's it, is that so hard?? Make an alternate VR version if you have to have VR play so badly!*
"We have this idea, buy it for us please" seems to not have as much push as "we have this idea, here's our proposal, our budget, and our timeline".
If cyan were to sell a add on to the missed 2021 game for 499 some people would buy it and some people would be upset but if cyan advertised it as the Aaron guinevere exclusive customized node mode by Aaron guinevere creator of NEYEH then it would be less corporate less greedy and more getting money to the people that love the product like us.
7:15 no, no you're not. I genuinely don't care about the VR changes in Cyan games. New or old. Every time there's something bad, that breaks the flow, i later found out it was changed for... VR. It genuinely wants me to never play this game in VR or the new variants.
Having just played through RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, I think it's still best (unpopular opinion though that may be). They ruined some of the best art in Myst VR (the brothers rooms in the Mechanical Age in particular comes to mind as an early example).
Not 4 , but 8 as in EIGHT remakes ...Myst on CD, Myst ME on DVD with VOB movies, Real Myst with new Age, Real Myst ME rebuild on UNITY , Myst Remake for Tablets and Phones , Myst rebuild on Unreal sponsored by Facebook Meta for Oculus VR that became a Double Remake since it had a non VR mode ... heck if you count versions made for the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Atari Jaguar CD, PSP , AmigaOS, CD-i ,3DO consoles ... its not 8 but 15 ! versions all with differences ... or 19 if you count the Atari 2600 demake ...
No , Myst does not needs YET ANOTHER REMAKE REMASTER it was MILKED TO DEATH ! ... you know what needs a Remake on UE5.2 URU and Myst V ...
The version from 2000 looks fine to me
New screenshots of riven remake are up on steam . You should do a comparison
I wosh you would go back and do a playthrough of riven, myst iv, uru and v i love ur playthrough and knowledge on the series
MAN you sound so much like the youtuber ThinkBeforeYouSleep
wait, if there were a linear relationship between the age of the target demographic and realism, a perfectly realistic game would only be played by immortals hundreds of years old?
Trying to figure out twitch ...
So I have a job and I have income and I am happy to buy subscriptions to TH-cam twitch and discord for shady paradox and I go into the chat and there is he is by himself in his own twitch chat maybe one or two other people from the TH-cam chat follow through and happen to have memberships or maybe he has some members some subscribers that show up in the chat and I get to tell everyone hey I I really think that Aaron guinier deserves the fandom to advocate for him to be hired by cyan to go into the missed 2021 engine and to go into the development of ribbon and to customize nodular movement. And then the friendly community of miss fans say something really friendly constructive and encouraging like Oh yeah why is that and I say well because out of all of the recent wannabe missed games from the fandom Aaron guinevere has definitely displayed his ability to make the best one out of all of them and his investment of developing nodular point and click movement in a modern Unreal Engine game deserves the fandom to reward him if not by buying his game then by retweeting and tweeting at cyan to hire him to put nodular movement the same way that missed and riven had nodular movement the same way that NEYEH has nodular movement into the mist VR engine!
I respectfully disagree - I love to realism and making it feel like I am there. They're is a part of Myst that you don't actually see. Other senses are involved. The music for one thing - Myst wouldn't be the same without the music just like Star Wars wouldn't be the same without William's score. Their is third aspect that you didn't quite touch on and one that has always drawn me not only to Myst, Riven and the other games but Cyan themselves and that is their playfulness to play other "non-computer" type games with us as fan. One subtle aspect of both Myst and Riven was the unsettling "feel" you got playing the games - not an evil creepiness per se but just a mysterious and unsettling one - In the games no mater which version I have felt I was being watched or stalked - Riven actually added to this with some literal elements like the little girl in the dark jungle area and the guy in the warning tower or the feeling Gehn was nearby but just a few steps ahead of you. I have also loved Cyan's playfulness over the years from the Spyder easter egg/slow drip reveal of Uru elements, Achenars mutterings on the imager or the creepy items in different ages like trapsm drugs, creepy toys, etc. Also before Uru they had a wonderful - real life game that enhanced the aspect of Uru being something real in this world.
"I love to realism and making it feel like I am there."
Perhaps you misunderstood my thesis. I too love the sensation that I'm physically present inside the worlds of Myst. My point was that rationalism is not necessary to accomplish this. The original Myst gave us that immersion - that sense that we are physically present - despite the fact its rules did NOT conform to the same rules of our world. But ever since then, Cyan has changed its philosophy as if the worlds DO have to behave like our world in order for us to feel physically present.
In fact, it was precisely this deviation from reality while still being immersive that made the original Myst so captivating. A "realistic" Myst by comparison I find rather boring.
I did not like this video. Didn't like the cadence in your voice and the downplaying it carried for this digital media treasure.
I think your point as a whole is irrelevant because these versions of Myst are all separate games with different experiences that at one point all looked "realistic" for the time. If you want that magic not entirely explainable feel then why not only ever just play the original? Why bother with the latest iteration? The latest myst in vr only looks "real" now, but it won't in 10 years. There were still reductions from the most high def experience that had to be taken to put it on a vr gaming device. The textures were not maxed out. At some point it will be more real, sure. But it's a different type of game than the original Myst. Myst was immersive but also magical, myst VR is believable but also fascinating because you can't experience that place in real life. I'm not sure why that isn't good enough for you that you have to make an obnoxiously boring video about how you'd prefer cyans work to appeal to you. Gross. Smug. Thumbs down.
I'm sure this is a great video but for some reason the way you speak sounds... overly scripted? It's like an old TV commercial voice.
I prefer the real actors. Every Myst game after Riven was atrocious. Absolutely horrid. The property was handed off to the people who made The Journeyman Project. Myst and Riven were good because they told stories through the environmental display. It was always meant to look real - especially when you understand how Linking Books worked, and what Age's where. While some alien concepts and structures would exist, they would still be grounded in realism - as the entire universe is related heavily to earth... and Myst is intrinsically linked to Riven (Gehn capped off the Star Fissure in Riven...)
No games don't always need to look real, but Myst benefits from this because it helps the world have some grounding. It's obviously going to appear magical to a degree... but it was always meant to have some basis in realism.
i thought life is strange didn't actually have a realism-based art style