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This was a surprise; I had heard nothing of a new Myst. I knew about Uru, and I knew of its troubles. It has been a long time since I have bought a PC game, however; I just haven't had the computer to run anything made after 1997. Then, since there hasn't been a lot interesting going on with the PC scene since the mid-'90s (unless you're into whack-a-rat or first-person shooters, or you absolutely must have the fastest graphics card and processor, to show off the newest tech demo), I have for some time felt safe to ignore that whole segment of the industry. Yet, it seems like there is still some activity worth tracking. I think.
I stumbled into the Myst IV display when I was trying to find something else. As I walked by, what seemed to be a Booth Guy reached out with his eyes and grabbed me. He asked if I wanted to see a demonstration of the game. There was no one else around. He seemed eager to show the game off to someone, and I happened to be there. It later turned out that, more than a mere Booth Guy, this fellow was lead designer Patrick Fortier. So, he had a few answers to go with my questions. How novel!
The game itself seems kind of reminiscent of Exile, the third game in the series. By this, I mean it retains the ability to rotate the camera within a given 2D location. It also has that slightly "off" rendering style of Exile, clearly inspired by the work in Myst and Riven yet... perhaps not as ambitious? Each of the first two games tried to push the limit of photorealism, under the confines of the available technology. To supply the textures for Riven, the team at Cyan went on a long field trip into the desert, taking reams of photographs of rusty metal and odd stone formations and different kinds of dirt. The creatures in Riven, although strange, are built from the skeleton and muscles up and illustrated as if they are real animals which just don't happen to exist in the outside world. Some of that was lost in Exile, with its more stylized -- even cartoony -- beasts and fantastic, rather than surreal, sense of space and light and detail. Things were no longer quite as worn and grimy and lived-in. One got the impression that much of the game's art direction was focused upon the outside of the objects, rather than the inside. Rather than pushing to capture the surreal and the strange through the realistic and the practical, the game looks like it's trying to look like Myst. I get a bit of the same feeling from Revelation.
This is not necessarily bad, for its own sake. It just feels a bit more calculated. More franchised. You really get the sense that the Millers didn't know what the hell they were doing, when making the first two games in the series -- so they didn't know what was too much, or what was not worth the effort, or what they weren't supposed to be able to do. Thus they innocently plowed forward, pouring everything they had into the games, designing them as if they were designing a whole world for their own benefit, creating far more than you would ever see in the games, not knowing enough to do otherwise. Shades of J.R.R. Tolkien. Exile and Revelation, meanwhile, feel professional. If you can imagine giving the task of writing a sequel to Lord of the Rings to a highly-skilled contemporary fantasy author -- one who would know enough to do all of the research, and to know everything there was to overtly know about Middle Earth before he began, and who was really adept at capturing Tolkien's writing style -- that's kind of what it seems like. The book might be really well-written and interesting, for its own sake -- yet. Hmm.
Anyway. The plot of Revelation, much as with Exile, picks on some loose story threads in the original Myst. You recall Atrus's two sons, locked away in their prison books toward the start of the game. Revelation takes place twenty years after the events in Myst, after -- it seems -- Atrus and Catherine have raised another family, and something newly bad has happened, involving the bad sons. According to Patrick Fortier, the player reprises his or her role as the same nameless, faceless observer from the earlier games in the series. There is a bit more interaction with the environment this time; the player may poke things, with a disembodied finger. Water ripples, animals squeak and hop away. You may knock on panels, to see if any sound wrong. Lots of potential there. The player also has a camera this time, to obviate the need for scuttling back and forth to re-examine earlier clues.
The game seems to have some decent enough enhancements. I asked Patrick Fortier how these might play into puzzle construction, and generally what the puzzle structure was like in comparison to previous games. Myst and Exile tend to contain more overt puzzles, where the player goes into an area and solves some physical riddle laid out for him. Riven has a different approach, whereby Cyan managed to avoid puzzles-as-such almost entirely. There are only two bits, toward the end of the game, which I might go so far as to label puzzles, in the classical sense. Everything else relies more upon situational logic, and reasearch and consideration about the game world, than anything. The more you understand about the way Riven works, environmentally, culturally, linguistically, biologically, historically, the more prepared you are to understand any barriers before you. Understanding the game means becoming involved with the game world. Patrick Fortier was himself a bit puzzled by my question; he replied that the team had gone through and observed what the fans liked from each of the previous games; that they had tried to get a good dose of everything that had worked before, and to enhance that with some new ideas. All right. Fair enough. More or less the Presto approach, then.
Presto was the team behind Exile. At the time, Ubi picked them to make the next Myst because of their experience with that style of game and because of the technology that Presto had to show (which resulted in the rotation feature I mentioned a moment ago). It wasn't a bad match, really. Despite the similar appearance, Revelation is by a wholly new team, apparently internal to Ubisoft. The problem here is that, as Patrick Fortier admits, it was, at first, something of a ragtag group. Some members were big fans of the earlier Myst games, and knew everything there was to know. Others had never even played Myst. (Some probably loathed Myst until they began to understand it.) Aside from general approval over the direction of the game, the Millers were scarcely involved beyond their on-screen roles. (Rand, at least, reprises his dual role as Atrus and... one of his sons. Achenar, I think.) Out of necessity, writer Mary deMarle, from Exile, the one returning presence, became the team's unofficial navigator. At first, she was supposed to spend maybe a few months with the production. As development went on, however, and as the team began to rely upon deMarle's intimacy with the Myst world and mythology, her stay was extended and she took on the role of advisor. I believe Patrick Fortier says that deMarle ended up staying with the game to the last.
Myst was one of the two "killer apps" which got everyone buying CD-ROM drives, back in the early '90s. Although a bit rushed and contrived, it was a decent enough adventure game for its time -- and it had a great atmosphere. Riven, released in 1998, just as its style of design and gameplay was beginning to seem outdated, is one of the most wondrous worlds ever depicted in a videogame. Since its release, I have used it as my standard for atmospheric, intellectual, and emotional immersiveness in a game environment. If I describe a game world, such as that of Metroid Prime, as Riven-like, this is one of the greatest compliments I can give. Exile is a harmless, interesting little aside within the Myst mythology. Revelation looks like it should be no worse an episode than Exile -- and perhaps a little more relevent, even.
Again, that's not bad. Not world-shattering, yet pleasant enough. And it will be amusing to see IGN's review of the game. I guess you can't ask for much more, under the circumstances. I'm looking forward to it. That should say something, I guess.
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
creates worlds with his own writing, sometimes.
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