Myst V Irritations & Disapointments | Forums

[digitalshaman]

Hi, first off i have the largest respect for what cyan do, i just want to make that clear.

After playing the demo on my pc i'm not left satisfied in comparison to the tremendously polished games cyan have produced before (excluding uru).

Here are some things I hope cyan will fix before they release the game:

- Considering this is a realtime 3d engine, which have been around for many years, I am not sure why cyan have produced such a crude version. For example using the mouse to move around 360 degrees like any other fps game is not at all correct in myst V. The Y axis is a lot faster then the X axis, creating a very clumsy interface for the user.

- Whilst its nice to move around the world as if it was Myst III, Myst V moves WAY too fast and too far.

- There are also graphical inconsistancies that make me think cyan are just being careless.. The wave loop on Noloban is clunky and often twitches, the character who you meet at the start is floating and his clothes flapping inside him. And i must say, the character design of the Bahro is strangely poor.

Now, I wouldn't usually be so picky with a game, but it is cyan and i've come to expect so much from them.

This is just some constructive critism of the demo i hope cyan will take note of.

Thanks for reading.

[digitalshaman]

Hi, first off i have the largest respect for what cyan do, i just want to make that clear.

After playing the demo on my pc i'm not left satisfied in comparison to the tremendously polished games cyan have produced before (excluding uru).

Here are some things I hope cyan will fix before they release the game:

- Considering this is a realtime 3d engine, which have been around for many years, I am not sure why cyan have produced such a crude version. For example using the mouse to move around 360 degrees like any other fps game is not at all correct in myst V. The Y axis is a lot faster then the X axis, creating a very clumsy interface for the user.

- Whilst its nice to move around the world as if it was Myst III, Myst V moves WAY too fast and too far.

- There are also graphical inconsistancies that make me think cyan are just being careless.. The wave loop on Noloban is clunky and often twitches, the character who you meet at the start is floating and his clothes flapping inside him. And i must say, the character design of the Bahro is strangely poor.

Now, I wouldn't usually be so picky with a game, but it is cyan and i've come to expect so much from them.

This is just some constructive critism of the demo i hope cyan will take note of.

Thanks for reading.

[Eat_My_Shortz]

U are being a bit picky

1. I didn't notice that at all...
2. I like the fast movement, its nice to be able to jump around. But I agree, I think it needs a speed slider for classic and classic+ modes. (Err.. can we just call it C and C++ and be done with it ) (That's a programmers joke for anyone who has no idea what I'm on about).
Every game from Myst 1 to 4 let you pick the transition speed... why not M5?
3. Wave loop is pretty good, a little repetitive but who cares. Esher's clothes, yes I did notice them go inside him a bit, but its very good cloth sim for the most part.

I was MUCH more concerned with the extremely visible problem when he's walking in Direbo - he's walking on a flat plane while the ground is curved. When he comes closer to you, his shadow shows that he's clearly FLOATING above the ground lol.

[digitalshaman]

also does anyone know why theres no 5.1 audio? is it just because otherwise the demo size would be too big?

when ur in the game move the mouse up and down, then side to side, theres such a huge difference... maybe theres a config file to change it?

[JustBrett]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by digitalshaman:
when ur in the game move the mouse up and down, then side to side, theres such a huge difference... maybe theres a config file to change it? </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
I noticed the same thing when navigating with the arrow keys. Forward/backward movement is fine, but trying to turn with the left/right arrows is painfully slow. In fact, the mouse is much faster for steering when using the arrow keys.

[Mowog]

I was also surprised that the Bahro figures look so crude. You never get all that close to them in the demo, but it's pretty obvious that they are really low-res. Frankly I hadn't noticed the other stuff you mentioned. I was largely pretty impressed with Esher, but I was basing my observations on the Uru avatars, and not with characters from other realtime games.

[digitalshaman]

Apart from the cloth simulation messing up abit, The model of Esher is better then most realtime game characters... the face isn's as expressive as half-life 2 but is better then anything else.

But the Bahro look like just a general bad character design to me, i'm sure its nothing to do with the engine or polygon amount.

[ZeusmeisterX007]

Normal mapping would have really brought End of Ages to life. Too bad they didn't use it.

That cloth simulation is nothing special, as I have seen it in a number of action games. And I think it looked better in them as well.

[Alahmnat]

The problem Cyan faces is that to get the game to look as good as they can on as many configurations as possible, Cyan can't use a lot of high-end tricks... they just aren't willing to limit the number of people who can see the game at its best to the relatively small number of players who actually do keep up with system upgrades every few months. End of Ages only implements 1.0 pixel shaders and equivalent technologies; 2.0 and 3.0 shaders were left off the table completely because not enough Myst players have systems capable of actually making use of them, so it would have been something of a waste of development time to implement (and as Cyan apparently only has 2 programmers now, there isn't a lot f manpower to make massive engine upgrades which PS2.0/3.0 would require).

Myst, frankly, doesn't sell as well as it used to (and the reasons can be argued, but I'd rather that not be done in this thread...), nor do adventure games in general, so the audience for this game is already very limited. On top of that, Myst players have, over the past 6+ years, moved from being "early adopters" of new technology (like the CD-ROM drive for Myst or the Pentium Processor for Riven) to being very much behind the times on system configurations (beause Myst will play on a 386, so anybody and their grandmother can play it on the family's aging $299 Dell). This, obviously, makes creating new games which implement the latest technology difficult if not impossible because the market of people who would actually buy the game can't run it if the specs are too high, and with an already diminishing market for the games in the first place, further restricting the market to the small portion of cross-over players from the FPS/RTS genres is a bad idea, simply from a financial standpoint (which is, like it or not, a huge factor for Cyan after the failure of Uru, which drained all of the company's reserve funds).

That said, and speaking as someone who is much more an aspiring developer than an actual gamer, I think End of Ages is beautiful. I also don't think it's necessary for it to aspire to a realistic aesthetic, partly because - Riven aside - Cyan's games have always had a very surrealistic bent to them (and I really think Riven is both an anomaly of gaming development and a huge obstacle for everything Cyan will ever do from now on, because nothing will ever match it ever again... the era of those kind of games is simply no more), but also because, speaking as a CG artist, realism is over-rated, and trying to dupliate it, rather than caricature it, is the wrong approach. Computer simply won't ever be able to completely duplicate reality (and Riven has plenty of its own problems in that area, so don't put it on a pedestal ), and the closer they get to being able to, the easier it is for the slightest inaccuracy to knock you out of the believability of the world (my favorite comparison is The Incredibles versus The Polar Express... which one is more realistic, and which is more believable?). I don't think the latest pixel shaders and mapping technologies are necessary for Cyan to make a visually stunning, quality Myst game (which is, for me, more about the characters and story than the photo-realistic visuals it has been increasingly typified for since Riven). Yeah, it may not be as much of a visual assault as Exile and Revelation are, but I don't think visual overload is what makes a great Myst game. It looks way better than Myst (and if you beg to differ, I invite you to actually go re-play it before doing so ), and it's much more alive and dynamic than Riven or Exile... I'd put it on par with Revelation in that area, personally. I also enjoy the new types of puzzles that a realtime engine affords... and interaction with the Bahro, is, to me, a lot of fun. I got a kick out of the fact that there is actually an animation for the Bahro returning the Slate to the pedestal, even though not many people are likely to ever see it. There is still a lot of attention to detail going on, most of it is just unseen (because it's in the details ).

Of course, I may just not be as picky about things. Yes, it's a Cyan game, but I don't put their work on trial to be compared to their last outing, I simply enjoy it for what it is, and I've greatly enjoyed the demo.

[Boyue65]

Myst isn't supposed to be a graphical explosion. That's not ultimately what sells a Myst game, although it's much appreciated when it appears. Myst is supposed to be a subtle game, where the story is presented in a manner that fits with that theme of subtley and even peace. Should the developers create a game with bright and flashy colors all the time, they would be abandoning the very thematic core of Myst.

I'm tired so that may not have made a lot of sense. To simplify: if I had to choose between Myst as graphically intense and Myst as subtle storytelling personified, I'd pick storytelling.