My Review of Myst End of Ages

Overall I have very mixed feelings about this game. There was a lot to like and a lot to dislike. I did not enjoy this game nearly as much as Myst Revelation and looking back I think Revelation is perhaps the best game of this type ever made. Overall I can only give End of Ages only a rating of 5/10.

To sum it up I would guess this game would have required at least 2 more years of development to be great. Too bad considering that the talent and skill to make a great game was obviously there. Now the great game that could have been will never be made.

First I will say the game certainly had great aspects. The game started well and at first I thought End of Ages would be a truly great game. The initial story was engaging both emotionally and intellectually. The voice acting and writing were also extremely well done. Noloben and especially Toldelmer were works of art and atmosphere and they were fabulous. The puzzles in these ages were interesting and worked well into the plot.

After Noloben the game just fell apart. The story went nowhere and the game became a tedious series of hoops to jump through that had little to do with the story. The end came at what should have been the halfway point in the story. How it ended was fine but the way it ended was weak and anticlimactic. All three stories should have continued for another 20hrs of game play. Basically it was “do a few puzzles to get a slate and give it away”. Even though I knew that the slate needed to go back to the Bahro at the endgame I gave it first to Yeesha and then to Esher because I never even dreamed the game was ready to end.

Esher’s endgame was amusing but oh so cheap, old and cliché. Sad for a game that showed such intellectual promise. Esher didn’t need to be mad and it really played against the balance between reason and emotion so carefully set up earlier in the game. I seems like a different person wrote the game after Noloben.

Besides the extremely rushed endgame, game design problems seriously reduced enjoyment of the game. The slate was a great idea but by the end of the game I dreaded writing on it because of the bad pattern recognition and errors made in Yeesha’s journal. Bad pattern recognition caused me to skip to the end of both Toldelmer and Noloben without completing any of the puzzles. On Taghira I had to enter the final symbol 20-30 times, exit the game and try again a number of times before it worked. On Laki’ahn there is a very clear error in the sing symbol in Yeesha’s journal that resulted in me re-entering the sing symbol at least 50x before I accidentally left out the bottom line and got it right. The fear symbol also should have worked but didn’t. As a gamer I find this completely unacceptable. There was no freedom in writing on the slate as you could only enter in a few symbols without screwing up the game. The game would have been better without it.

Lack of appropriate play testing really hampered this game. There is nothing more frustrating than figuring the exact solution to a puzzle and then spending the next 2 hours trying to get it to work. Two hours of second-guessing yourself, trial and error and finally checking on-line to find out why things weren’t working. This happened numerous times in End of Ages

Speaking of freedom, the game really had none and was linear. You couldn’t even pick anything up. In both the arena scale/rising platform puzzle and the fighter maze elevator, I should have been able to step off the platform even though it was moving, but I couldn’t because then I wouldn’t be solving the puzzle the way intended.

The answer to the arena scale/rising platform puzzle (again Laki’ahn) was very poorly thought out and even the hint book said “I guessed the weight of the pedestal…” That is not a way to design a game. The correct solution was to enter the weight to exactly balance so that the platform was at the proper level and then add your weight and the tablet. ….. which of course didn’t work.

The “End of Ages” really was an End of Ages for me. I have realized that I am no longer the target audience of game makers so it seems very unlikely that any developer will invest the time and money to make a great game I find both engaging and intellectually stimulating. It is just too much investment when most gamers just want to kill stuff.

Sirandar

Great review, even though (in my opinion) you've been a bit harsh. The only error I find is:

Lack of appropriate play testing really hampered this game. There is nothing more frustrating than figuring the exact solution to a puzzle and then spending the next 2 hours trying to get it to work. Two hours of second-guessing yourself, trial and error and finally checking on-line to find out why things weren’t working. This happened numerous times in End of Ages

This happened twice in Revelation too (which is the best game of this type, in your opinion). Remember the spider chair in Spire? Or the Mangrees in Haven? While they weren't buggy (to my knowledge anyways), they were kind of unfair and required an outrageous ammount of dexterity with a mouse.

Good observations ivanxuereb. Some of us would add to your list the colored spheres in one of the dream puzzles and what about the medailon colors not matching the round door's colors. The blame was put on graphic cards but I should point out that the same card was used in one's game. Could it be that two different group did work on this puzzle. I would also add the snakes "petting" puzzles....

I dont understand why everyone is so harsh about Revelation. In my opinion, it was simply a miracle of a game. The gameplay totalled about 150 hours(for me) or about 4 months. End of Ages took me 4 days. Although i had to look up hints for Revlation(as i have for most adventure games) i didnt find any puzzles beyond my understanding. In fact, i found the puzzle nanoukmetal mentioned to be one of my favorites. We had not seen one of these types of puzzles before in Myst games. Especially coming out after the failure-of-a-game Uru, i felt like Revelation was totally amazing,, even more so than Riven. The three ages were magnificently built and the graphics were outstanding for one dvd. i really cant say much more than it was amazing. Riven was a more simple game in my opninon. All the puzzles more or less seemed pretty obvious ot me, while revelation had mroe thought to it. I also found the extensive sotryline to be very well done(although slightly melodramatic). In my opinion, it was 10 times better than EOA.

Ok, let's not turn this into a 'which is the worst/best Myst' thread. However, I thank you nanoukmetal for agreeing with me. But the issues you mentioned were not of the 'same type' i.e. they did not require mouse dexterity.
And about the graphic differences between Myst 4 and Myst 5. There is a thread where I explained the why to another person here. Feel free to contribute to it.

Revelation had its problems too but overall it held me start to finish and none of the issues were really a big problem. I would admit two parts on Haven were a little tedious but Revelation had a built in help system. For EofAges I think is was the combination of the slate problems and the puzzle problems that really frustrated me.

quote:

Originally posted by ivanxuereb:
Great review, even though (in my opinion) you've been a bit harsh. The only error I find is:

Lack of appropriate play testing really hampered this game. There is nothing more frustrating than figuring the exact solution to a puzzle and then spending the next 2 hours trying to get it to work. Two hours of second-guessing yourself, trial and error and finally checking on-line to find out why things weren’t working. This happened numerous times in End of Ages

This happened twice in Revelation too (which is the best game of this type, in your opinion). Remember the spider chair in Spire? Or the Mangrees in Haven? While they weren't buggy (to my knowledge anyways), they were kind of unfair and required an outrageous ammount of dexterity with a mouse.

I just finished Myst V, and overall.... I hate to say it, but its a disapointment.

There were lots of things I didn't like (the digital charecters, the lack of detail in the graphics, etc. etc.) but my biggest problem was none of the puzzles made real sense. If the snake symbol kept the bahro out of Esher's Noloben lab, why did he "lock" it? And Laki'ahn, I still don't get it. So these barbarians go hunt these creatures, get these jewels, and then its a quick hop back to the pier, through a door, through uhhhh a maze, and then out into an arena, (pardon me, 'scuse me barbarian coming through here) into the trade house where they worked on them? Linear, illogical, and hackneyed. Its almost as if cyan didn't care about making these worlds make sense, they just stuffed them full of puzzles (and I used the term "stuffed" very loosely since I finished Tahgira in about 20 minutes)

If this truly is the end of Myst, the series went out with more of whimper than a bang.

In Cyan's defense, you cannot possibly simulate every environment a game is going to be run in or the sequence that so many individuals may play it in. There will always be bugs. More features, more technology, more opportunities for something to go wrong. As game players, we drive the market. Cyan gives us what we ask for.

I too have been disappointed with Myst IV and V, but not for the reasons most here complain of. Oh, the graphics of both have been outstanding, the worlds are beautiful, but I do not play Myst games for complicated mouse dexterity or timed puzzles. That is very "unMyst" like to me. But I have learned to just get some help here and move on.

In my opinion, Riven still ROCKS!!! And Uru and Uru Live were awesome too.

Riven did rock! And to me its because everything there made sense. The puzzles were not arbitrary; they weren't even "puzzles" persay. They were just the things you had to learn explore the age. Vastly complex, stunningly logical, much much better than Myst V.

And the graphics were better! I don't care if they were still shots, those still shots were full of the most vivid detail. The 3D evniroment just takes away from that kind of detail. The grass is all the same color, the brick is all the same color, there are few if any real world textures. ugh. there I go again.

I can't believe I used to think of Revelation as a so-so game. Its several notches above EoA.

sirandar, I couldn't agree with you more. I have played and enjoyed the Myst series since 1993, and just started Myst 5. I am truly disappointed as I am not about spending hours doing and redoing a puzzle which simply will not work. I gave up on the game, wasn't going to waste any more time after this happened several times. I also do not think the so called improvements in Myst 5, were improvements at all, the game did not run nearly as well and nothing was as good as the previous games. They probably should have ended the series with Revelation.

I hadn't done any games since myst V and Riven, was Revelation part of this series - did I miss something.

I agree with those who say that the Myst V puzzles seem to be arbitrary and simply don't work the way they are supposed to. Even when I got a complete spoiler on one after becoming extremely frustrated with it - the exact instruction for the platform puzzle in the arena still didn't work.

Thumb down for Myst V. (And to think I was so excited to find it after 2+ years of no significant gaming.)