And just like that someone’s fantasy of having virtual sex with Atrus in the library is dashed for another generation.
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Ah, the pre-rendered video games of the early '90s that I did play are coming back to me. The smart ones would pre-render full-screen (still) images that seamlessly connected to the bit of the screen that had the actual video, to create a more immersive feel.
I had no idea they had so many Myst games, nor so many licensed games. I think I actually ended up with a copy of Obduction, somehow, somewhere, which I have yet to play… I was vaguely aware they had failed to maintain the runaway success of Myst (it’s almost impossible to do so), but it looks like they perhaps are more successful than I realized, all things considered. Given the resources they’ve thrown at previous games, the lack for the remake (it really is quite underwhelming) suggests this wasn’t a high priority (or that they were even involved in its development, necessarily).
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me too!
Think I got it at 80% off through GOG.
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My 980ti did OK in VR… the biggest issue was the grass popping in almost literally at my feet. But I can’t do VR for very long so I ended up playing the entire game on the monitor anyway.
My biggest disappointment was the realization of just how small a game it is… second was that it becomes a very short game with even only half-remembered impressions of how to solve the puzzles - in my case from the last time I played in 2008… except for the hour I wasted looking for the other half of the torn instructions for the marker switch vault (as if I needed them) >.> Which is another thing… it’s got a few bugs that they’re working on fixing.
Well, I have fonder memories of URU and Riven anyway. And the three novels.
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Please please PLEASE Cyan, do the same with Riven. The visuals and general design were so much better and could be absolutely sumptuous in 3D.
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I didn’t play the original, but I bought it when it came out on GBA. When the cashier was ringing it up he muttered “I hope you like being bored”.
That was perhaps unfair, but I wasn’t blown away, and I feel like it’s one of those things where you have to have been there at the time to really get the appeal.
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A brief history?
I watched the entire 45 minutes it was very interesting. Thanks.
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This makes me nostalgic for the hours, DAYS, spent playing “The Journeyman Project,” as my Mac IIci chugged along reading images off the CD-ROMs. Sigh… good times.
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I think GOG ended up giving it to me. Hopefully that means the studio did well out of it.
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I tried realmyst back when it came out. But I couldn’t get myself to really play it except for a brief nostalgia tour over the readily available parts of the island.
I really liked Myst when it came out (“wow, this is peak realism for computer graphics!”) and Riven even more. After that it went downhill imo.
But the story is not really gripping enough and the puzzles are too arcane to really enjoy it now. I guess I’m spoiled.
Realmyst also really gave me motion sickness, so I don’t really fancy a VR version 
Obduction was really nice though. That did give me the same exploratory feeling as Myst games of old. Highly recommended (though it did take me some time to get into it).
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it feels like they still could have used the original video, or a video at least. do the grainy film render game side so you can keep a nice clear small video as the source
id guess someone put them on the path of 3d heads, and once they realized quest performance - like you say - cut them way back
i only played a few minutes of the original, and realmyst passed me by. id like to play this one. im just a little torn between checking out the vr version just to see how it plays… and buying a non-vr version so i can actually be comfortable playing it 
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This remake works both with and without a VR headset, though at least as of this weekend if you had a VR headset plugged in you had to manually add a startup option to prevent it from launching the headset automatically so you could play it on the monitor.
I suspect their original videos were far too small to be really usable, even with visual tricks (the original size of the edited videos must have been absolutely tiny, as they were “postage stamp” videos even on a 640x480 screen…), and finding the videos (edited or original tapes) would have required a lot of work, assuming they still exist and assuming the developers were even in a position to ask for or access them. They probably would have had to re-film the videos, so going 3D was significantly easier. Apparently it has a huge install size on the Quest (which is weird for a game with non-cutting edge graphics and such a small environment), which suggests they generally didn’t spend a lot of effort, neither on building the 3D heads nor optimizing in general.
I suspect some third-party developer was given a tiny budget and tasked with doing the remake, and they did it in the way that required the least time and labor (and it shows).
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I’m confused: apart from the ability to play in VR, what exactly is the difference between this and realMyst, especially considering realMyst already had its own Masterpiece Edition? Is it just the reworked FMVs?
(I confess that I still haven’t gotten around to playing it, so I can’t say there can’t possibly be a market for it.)
If you missed the news, Pegasus Prime has been available on GOG for a while now, and it plays everywhere in ScummVM.
ScummVM is also making rapid progress lately on Macromedia Director support, which should make a lot of older games of that sort more readily playable. (Director games are hugely lacking in compatibility with modern systems.)
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I mean, I suppose the two credits for Outer Edge Interactive could have done all the work and the 17 Cyan employees under Programming and Art are just for show… But perhaps you are just under the impression that Cyan Worlds is a bigger studio than they are?
Huh, apparently I’ve played 10 minues of realMYST Masterpiece Edition… Probably saw that it was no different from realMYST and quit. Anyway. just looking around Myst island I can see that the new version is a complete remake. New models, textures, how you interact with objects is different (mostly to give VR users something to grab), etc.
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I still haven’t seen a credit list anywhere, but yeah, sometimes developers associated with the publisher who did little to no actual work on the game also get full credit. (I’ve personally seen this happen on games I’ve worked on - the studio where I was working did all the development work, but the credits also included the names of every person in the publisher’s in-house dev team, as some of them had been providing feedback.)
In this case, it does look like a game that two people could have made, and there’s absolutely no way 19 people worked on that game in any significant capacity, unless they cranked out the game in a couple months. Looking at Outer Edge Interactive’s website, it very much appears that Cyan provided the design (and art direction) and Outer Edge did most of the actual work (and probably bought some assets). If Cyan had actually been making the game with a 17 person team, they would have had absolutely no reason to outsource any work to a two person team at Outer Edge, much less to have them do “a large amount of the World Art.”
So no, the credits aren’t just there “for show” - Cyan came up with the original game, they came up with the design, they probably modernized the visual direction even, but they clearly weren’t full-time developers on this project.
'k, so it’s just a hunch you have. Here’s a partial set of credits; I didn’t bother with the industry partners, special thanks, dedications, etc…
It is killing me that it is Oculus.
I bought a Samsung Odyssey+ because I don’t trust Facebook. There’s very few native WMR games, and the compatibility layer can be hinky.
I should have known better, really, to pick the Microsoft platform. So many times in the past they’ve had superior hardware, and then could never attract the critical mass of developers to have a really thriving platform. Looking at you Zune.
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