Comments on: Myst Offline II: The Offlinening

By: Al3xand3r

Al3xand3r — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:38:16 +0000

Myst was good for its time, Riven was brilliant, Myst III pretty great also. The games have some pretty immersive atmosphere and dare I say storyline. I knew Uru would suck since it was announced though. Still, the Myst games remained faithful to their origins when other adventure franschises tried things like incorporating “ACTION” game elements. Then it went all MMO on us and lost us…

By: Beau Turkey

Beau Turkey — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:06:19 +0000

“You know, I lasted nearly 45 seconds in URU before..”

That’s right, we are supposed to believe that in 45 seconds you got a feel for the entire game. Seriously?
So tell me you actually were just being silly right? You actually played for longer? So then you lied?
I hear this SO Much in games now a days. “Yeh man, the screenshots are lame, looks like something some pussy carebears will love! Yeh man let’s go kill stuff YAH!!”
C’mon, tell me you played it for longer?

By: Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Still Hoping For That Post-Apocalyptic Robot Versus Monkey Immersive Sim » Blog Archive » RPS Omnibus: Feb 3rd-8th

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:22:02 +0000

[...] Myst Online axed. Again. [...]

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:41:19 +0000

Cyan is really great at building beautiful, interesting, otherworldly feeling settings and not too shabby at story. I expect that if you enjoy deciphering how alien machinery works and so forth (usually with little in the way of feedback) they’re probably not too bad at puzzles either, but that’s exactly the wrong sort of gameplay for me. I went through Riven with a walkthrough practically glued in front of my face. I never would have gotten off the first island otherwise.

By: Dean

Dean — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:26:26 +0000

I’ve been meaning to get around to writing something about the Myst series, it really is a series of ups and downs. The Amateria age in 3 was a piece of pure brilliant puzzling but the rest of the game was so turgid. Likewise Riven is probably the most elegantly designed puzzle in any game ever. The whole game is one puzzle, different bits feed in to it and you slowly put together all the bits and pieces until the entire system is in your head and you get how the world works. But the interface was AWFUL for presenting said puzzle: figuring how everything links together is bloody hard if you can’t look around properly and see well…how everything physically links together.

I maintain that were Riven re-made with the Myst 5 real-time engine it would be a brilliant game. As would Myst 4, to a lesser degree.

By: nimble

nimble — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:04:56 +0000

Looking through the thread of URU players angry at the hosts for refusing to continue paying server & bandwidth bills for an unsuccessful game, I’m surprised by one thing: they keep calling Myst & sequels “adventure” games. Is Myst really considered to be an adventure game by the world at large? I never really played it, but I always thought of it as a series of puzzles in a slideshow. I mean, my definition of an adventure game requires you to at least have to carry a banana around between puzzles.

By: rob

rob — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:12:55 +0000

It’s gone but will it be Myst?

By: Cycle

Cycle — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:56:47 +0000

You can find collections of the first few games pretty easily, LSNDuck. I think a new collection was released recently? I’m not sure. Also, the DS port is a bit rubbish. Avoid!

Adam, I’m a bit confused… each new “episode” usually added a new age, or some kind of new content that could be explored at any pace you wished, no matter when you joined. While some things were “right place, right time”, it was mostly just “actors” making apperances and fleshing out the story in those cases, so you didn’t really miss much. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you’re trying to say?

By: LSNDuck

LSNDuck — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:54:52 +0000

Never having played a Myst game, I rather joined in with the Myst bashing as a ‘serious’ gamer. Now, I am somewhat intrigued by what I missed. Is it still possible to buy the original games? I know there is a DS version kicking around somewhere, but the original PC ones?

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:44:37 +0000

I really think that the shame here is that the ability for the company, Cyan, to explore the universe they have created here is all but gone. If you think about it the premise of Myst, and all of the books and game is as follows:

“An ancient dead civilization came up with the means to create any type of fantastic world they could think up and then travel instantly to that place to explore it- And you can too”

How do you go wrong with that? I remember looking forward to this game because of the above, not the community aspect, which boiled down to an oversize chatroom. Want to explore with your friends? Fine, keep the instanced ages, but they should have made an episodic game that could be played at any pace. They could have churned out a series of fantastic puzzle worlds (and they always had the best in the genre) in installments like half-life and expanded the story through journals like Bioshock did. Instead they tried to go all out and do an interactive story with no interaction. They should have realized that they weren’t meant to be in the same market as Warcraft.

I speak as someone who was/is a real fan of the series, and waited for the game to come out for three years. I felt bitterly let down when the game shut down after just a month or so, mainly because I wanted nothing more than to shell out a fee and explore. After Cyan’s struggle to make Mudpie/URU/Myst Online work, I am saddened to think that I’ll likely never see a new addition to the amazing world they took so long to craft.

By: Cycle

Cycle — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:52:12 +0000

Oops, my mistake. I don’t know how I got that mixed up!

I didn’t really dig the third game. It just didn’t feel like a Myst game… so I guess that’s why you and other people may have enjoyed it the most, eh.

Then again, the games released later weren’t much of an improvement. Again, none were really that terrible in my opinion, but just seemed to lack that magic the first two games had.

Oh, I just noticed that the fourth one wasn’t made by Cyan too, I think I must have thought that was a Presto one. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal. The final one was made by Cyan/Cyan Worlds, as with Uru though I don’t really see that as part of the series.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:44:33 +0000

Er, Presto Studios only made Myst III. Everything before and after that has been Cyan. Perhaps not coincidentally, Myst III has been the only one not to bash my brain against sharp rocks repeatedly in the name of “puzzles”.