Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

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I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty well. I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope of arbitrarily obtuse solutions to some puzzles. I ended up needing about 2 or 3 vague hints to point me to certain areas to advance the plot (luckily, though, IIRC no puzzle solutions), usually revolving around not understanding navigation options (like not knowing you could move through a certain part of a screen). I'm not sure how much of that was developer's being tricky or the low resolution of the game making it difficult to discern details, or the general shortcomings of the cursor-based UI.

If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).

Myst and Riven are fond memories for me. Riven was a real masterpiece, though; after the success of Myst they went to town on it. I never paid much attention to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and they weren't made by the Miller brothers. In my own personal mind-canon Riven is the end of the series.

Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.

This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with.

There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example.

What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.

I also think Riven killed adventure games for a bit - regardless of what you think of it from a gameplay perspective, it's really pretty graphically, and the slideshow-style presentation honestly doesn't hamper what you can allow the player to do if you aren't twitch-reacting to enemies that the computer is throwing at you.

It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.

Myst 5 also suffered from the fact that it was a "third season" excised at the last minute from Uru Live (on strange experiment network GameTap).

The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru: Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.

All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor" compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with "Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).

(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)

[1] https://mystonline.com/en/

Well, you are correct - there's a lot of reasons - but I still think art is one of the primary ones. If you'll allow me to drop into a specific example: during Riven's development, Cyan hired a guy named Richard Vander Wende, who had previously worked on Aladdin at Disney. Much like Aladdin, he made color grading a focus of Riven - most images tend to be unusually warm or cool, dark or light, etc. in ways that communicate a mood or something about the world you are interacting with (even if it's not something you yet know about the world you are interacting with). Stuff like this is, IMHO, unusually effective in a game like Riven - the player is often too busy looking for a switch or button or whatever to consciously absorb little details like that, but there's a way that I feel like that communicates the mood of a location in a way that's very emotional and brilliant. The effect may work better on me than other people, but it's one of the reasons why Riven is the highlight of the series for me.

There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven.

(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)

I think that there was still a lot of things that could have been done in real-time graphics even at the time of Myst 5's release that weren't done simply due to the business economics that the Uru engine (Plasma) didn't support them, in large part due to the compromises Plasma made to support real-time multiplayer physics.

> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted

I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.

You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be pedantic in that way - more like I'm just gleefully geeking out about Cyan being in the news a bit. Your overall point above was completely correct.

No worries. Yeah, I could probably talk about Uru for days, given the chance. Might be about time to plan a fresh trip down to the cavern. :)

Did you try search for "Riven hints"? Some people have set up some nice hints websites for most of the games, which give you hints in small steps. I have used the ones on The Universal Hint System. See for Riven: http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/riven.php

Universal Hint System was great, I used it for some adventure games waay back :) . Glad to see it's still alive!

I think the difficulty of Riven is definitely cranked up a couple of notches too high. Myst seems to hit the sweet spot perfectly.

I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....

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