Myst 25th Anniversary Collection

[PowerGod]

Finally everything arrived !!

DAMN !! This thing is PERFECT !! It is so well made that I am soooo SAD I didn't choose the one with LCD !!!
Really, I never regretted so much a choice !!
Even static like this, the measures are precise, and CDs stays exactly in their space, everything firmly closes and opens, and, because I just started playing the first game, the book is really identical to the one in the game... or at least it could have been totally identical if it had the LCD...

EDIT:
And already are starting to appear on eBay LCD Books at 400% the kickstarter price...

 

[Nintendo]

Omg, fucking awesome, you should have purchased 2 of them

 

[PowerGod]

Guess what ? MYST will be remade.

I lost the count of all the remakes of that game, but at least, every time, they tried to add more to the immersion, from a better graphic to a real 3D engine, to a better graphic for a better 3D engine...

...but VR was still missing, so why not remake the entire game again !!




If every software house did the same for their games, by now we could had things like "Dune 2" in 4K with a full 3D engine, so while playing you can zoom in to see the eyes of the troops !!
Or an "UFO: Enemy Unknown" with VR missions, so you can feel your heart beating like hell while trying to see from where that plasma shoot came from... just to find out, after you spent your last move point, that you are next to one of "them".

But reality suck... remakes over remakes the games are always different things from the originals... except for MYST !

 

[levi]

Well technically at least, myst doesn't have any gameplay, therefore remakes can't really break it now can they?

 

[PowerGod]

Well technically at least, myst doesn't have any gameplay, therefore remakes can't really break it now can they?

MYST is a puzzle with an immersive story, the gameplay is to solve it. (And if you don't know, it has actually different endings.)

They can break it in many ways actually, and I can do a lot of examples for every genre, but in this case, the game's important components are immersion and puzzles.
With few perfect static images of a forest, you'll create with your mind the missing pieces of that zone, so to remember it complete, like you were there... but if instead the environment becomes free roaming in 3D, and you go looking behind that last almost hidden corner, maybe you'll see a hole with missing textures between two polygons... it could happen, and you'll lose the immersion, that will never be a complete forest in your mind anymore, but just a game with a glitch.
Sounds/music are very delicate stuff, they can do wonders, and remains stuck deep in our head, even if we don't know about that... a simple volume or tonality difference can change entirely the perception of an action or picture we see, or what we imagine just by listening.
About the gameplay, many things can change too when the way of interacting with the world changes... if you have a static image, and you interact with an object that became animated, you are obviously in front of it, seeing exactly what you are meant to see, but if you are 3D free roaming, maybe you could interact with that object from the wrong angle, and then what ? You could lose what you had to see, or the game could force you to see it from the right spot moving you in front of the object, or the screen could be suddenly substituted by the cinematic of that you'll have to see, just to return in the previous camera view after that... or the worse of all, the game could permit an action only when you are in the right angle to perform it...
Every time you lose control over your character and your movements could easily become an immersion breaking, even on a simple game like this.

 

[ElPoco]

There's always the risk you'll realize you only like it because it was the only video game you could play on your Mac.

 

[Bosbeetle]

When done right the VR experience can be more emersive than the screen experience.

I don't have any experience gaming, but I know I loose a lot of time looking at 3D microscopy images and movies in VR, so much that we asked the developer of the software to put up a clock in the room

 

[PowerGod]

There's always the risk you'll realize you only like it because it was the only video game you could play on your Mac.

I played the game for the first time ever last year, but I was enchanted by it since the first time I have seen static pictures in a magazine at the time it was released.
For some reasons I never had the chance to even play a demo, but every time I heard something about it or the sequels my head was ringing...
One day, don't remember how, I received (or found) an invite to join the beta of "Myst Online: URU Live", so I jumped in... it was great, but I didn't know most of the "basic" stuff of the serie, I didn't even know what a "Linking Book" was at the time, and also the background story... but still it was enchanting.
There were a lot of games in the past that were able to give to me those sensations, the exploration of the unknown... with most of the recent games, even if with a superb graphic I just feel to explore because loot...

 

[PowerGod]

Seems like people are complaining about Myst VR, because it has things remade in the wrong way, and others are missing...

-Day/night cycles have been removed
-Rime is missing
-The character models are disastrous (they substituted the FMV scenes that had real actors with CGI models with not so many polygons)

They also added some stuff, like some kind of randomization for puzzles, and sounds/music were improved.

 

[levi]

Well, unless they filmed the FMV with a dual camera system, they wouldn't have the two shots for each eye. Perhaps for that reason they decided to reflim them with CGI characters. Also, just because you've filmed a film in 3D doesn't mean it's easy for a computer to calculate different viewpoints within the scene, which I assume you'd be allowed to do that in VR.

 

[DrasticNerd]

One day, don't remember how, I received (or found) an invite to join the beta of "Myst Online: URU Live", so I jumped in... it was great, but I didn't know most of the "basic" stuff of the serie, I didn't even know what a "Linking Book" was at the time, and also the background story... but still it was enchanting.

The background story is what I like most about the Myst games. Unfortunately you can only get scattered fragments of the story in the games themselves (through means of reading ingame letters & journals).

The only way to get the rest of the background story is to read the Myst novels (or at least the first two books - The Book of Atrus & The Book of Ti'ana). Reading these will clear up all the loose threads from Myst & Riven.